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Home > Journal > Issue Ten > On an Asylum On an Asylum - Ryan Kennihan Once the fa�ade of humanitarianism was created, cloaking the desire for social control in the twin tenets of morality and reason, that fa�ade itself had to be protected and upheld on those same grounds, even if the actions and enforcement that took place behind it were returning to their former state. But the question of 'why?' still remains. While the institutions, once built, did quickly degrade due to over population, under funding, and mismanagement, at the time they were built, they were the cutting edge of contemporary medical and architectural theory. Why did the architects and the associated building committees turn this extraordinary opportunity into an architectural fallacy? The section goes to such lengths to deceive, would it not have been easier to simply provide the ordinary window called for by popular opinion, expert reformists, stylistic conventions and in fact their very own building? Murray, Johnston, and the Committee for the Construction of Lunatic Asylums knew very well that the plan and elevation would be the sole representatives to the public, opening up the entire vertical depth to exploration unencumbered by public opinion. Like the constructed fa�ade imposed on the patients of the asylum, in order to prove their sanity, the Bourgeois had constructed a similar fa�ade, that of 'humanitarianism' to protect their societal standing and to comfort their deepest fears. What this section reveals is that there was another layer of fa�adism that allowed the reformists to believe their own rhetoric. It allowed them to keep building iconic lunatic asylums that prove that their revolutionary doctrines were working. This is a tautology in granite. In this case, the panoptic elements and, in fact, the panopticon itself may be seen in a different light. The all seeing, unequivocally iconic eye of the panopticon may simply function to comfort the minds of the ruling class just by virtue of its being there to watch over the unruly hoards, as much or more so than it actually functions within the machine of the building itself. As perceived by the ruling class, "Asylums were now seen as an essential guarantor of the social order." And it was of utmost importance that the buildings maintained this fiction and all of its ideological trappings and paradoxes, for anyone who was watching. For them, madness only existed if seen. The plan, as instrument of moral reincarnation, and the elevation as its honourable messenger, were all that was ever published, promoted, or seen by the general public. All the while, the simple section held the secret truth.
As exceptional buildings in themselves, the Asylums of Johnston and Murray are interesting in their design and operation as apparatus intended to elicit a specific response from their inhabitants. They are an intriguing architectural experiment in sociology and psychology, testing the extents to which architecture can affect the way we think and act. The asylums probe the limits of architecture's influence on its inhabitants and on its observers. Yet it is the buildings' disingenuous section, which betrays the secret desires of its architects, and provides an outline of the unconscious fears of an entire society- all within the thickness of a single masonry wall.
Architectural Association of Ireland |