Constructing curative instruments: psychiatric architecture in Norway, 1820-1920

Abstract

famously termed the asylum for the insane un instrument de gug?ison, a curative instrument. Some decades later Esquirol's colleague, Jean-Baptiste-Maximien Parchappe (at the time inspecteur ggngrale du service des aligngs), called the asylum for the insane the fruit of 'the association of medical science with architectural art and administrative science'.' Thus the alienists constructed a particular medico-architectural problematique. My aim in this paper is to give an overview of the historical development of the association of architecture and mental medicine in nineteenth-century Norway. In what sense was the asylum conceived as a curative instrument? What was the psychiatric meaning of architecture? The discussion will focus on four different asylum projects, each representative for its particular period. These four asylum projects represent, in turn, four different models for asylums for the insane: the radial system, the pavilion system, the one-block system and the colony system. Each of these models represents different aspects of contemporary psychiatry; the instrument reflects certain aspects of the instrumentalist. But first, I will start with a few words on the architectural-historical backdrop from which the plans for a modem asylum emerged. Incarceration: dollhusThe madhouses (dollhus) were built from the 1770s until well into the nineteenth century, for sheltering the mad. But this intended use had no

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