The Challenge of the Asylum Mortuary in Central Europe, 18981908

Complexity and Coherence: The Challenge of the Asylum Mortuary in Central Europe, 1898–1908 Author(s): Leslie Topp Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 71, No. 1 (March 2012), pp. 8- 41 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jsah.2012.71.1.8 . Accessed: 12/03/2013 11:19 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of California Press and Society of Architectural Historians are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded on Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:19:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Figure 1 Carlo von Boog and Erich Gschöpf (?), Emperor Franz Josef Crown Land Asylum at Mauer-Öhling, Lower Austria, 1902, mortuary (Der Architekt 9 [1903], 39) Figure 2 Asylum at Mauer-Öhling, site plan, with mortuary at 20 (Die Kaiser Franz Joseph-Landes- Heil- und Pflege-Anstalt in Mauer-Öhling: Festschrift [Vienna: N.-Ö. Landesausschuss, 1902] Lower Austrian Provincial Library, St. Pölten) This content downloaded on Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:19:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Complexity and Coherence The Challenge of the Asylum Mortuary in Central Europe, 1898–1908 leslie topp Birkbeck College, University of London n 1903 the progressive Vienna-based journal Der Archi- preparation, laundry, and farming, in addition to structures tekt published an illustrated article on the buildings of for housing and treating patients. At Mauer-Öhling we see the Lower Austrian Crown Land Lunatic Asylum at for the first time the association of modern asylum planning I 1 Mauer-Öhling, which had been opened the previous year. with an openness to a new, progressive architectural and The text described all forty buildings in the asylum complex urbanistic language, an association repeated, with varying as being executed in “the modern style.”2 The images pro- inflections, in the asylums at Steinhof in Vienna, and at vided of the administration building, a patient pavilion, and Krom íž in Moravia.3 the combined chapel and social center showed a combination Asylums were long-term residential institutions, and a of flat roofs, compact volumes, and abstracted classical orna- significant percentage of their patients died while confined ment loosely based on the formal approach developed at the there, requiring that a space be set aside for dealing with the time in Vienna by Otto Wagner and his students. One build- dead. In the previous generation of asylum buildings, the ing stood out as more seriously and self-consciously modeled so-called corridor asylums, in which most functions were on Wagner-school designs: the asylum mortuary (Figure 1). housed under one roof, spaces for the handling of dead bod- The Mauer-Öhling asylum established a pattern that ies were either tacked on to the end of service wings, or was repeated across the Habsburg Empire in the years lead- housed in small isolated structures in the grounds. With the ing up to the First World War. Like all new asylums in Ger- disintegration of the spaces and functions of the asylum into many and Austria-Hungary at the time, it corresponded to a complex of pavilions, or villas, the asylum mortuary the villa system, meaning that in place of a single rambling emerged as a distinct architectural entity. It served as a com- building, a complex of free-standing structures serving dif- bined workspace and stage for the various processes and ferent purposes was spread out across the asylum grounds rituals undertaken on the dead body of the patient. Most (Figure 2). Resembling small suburban villa colonies or even asylum mortuaries housed a morgue for the cool storage of towns, the new asylums contained separate buildings for corpses, a well-lit theater for autopsies, and a chapel in which common functions such as administration, worship, food the body was laid out and viewed by mourners and funeral rites were performed. Mortuaries were also invariably Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 71, no. 1 (March 2012), 8–41. ISSN located on the edge of the asylum complex, with direct access 0037-9808, electronic ISSN 2150-5926. © 2012 by the Society of Architectural Historians. for mourners from a public road, and as such had the addi- All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, tional, paradoxical role of serving as one of the buildings that http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jsah.2012.71.1.8. represented the public face of the asylum. This content downloaded on Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:19:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Asylum mortuary buildings thus had multilayered pro- option.4 This article posits that the transformation of insti- grams that required intricate coordination of site, access, and tutions and the resulting proliferation of new and increas- circulation. Each element of the program was connected ingly complex programs and requirements—often combined with thorny, emotionally charged and ideologically loaded with the early modernist orientation toward purpose—put issues, with their own spatial and building-related dimen- extra pressure on architectural communication and, impor- sions. The practice of pathological anatomy (via autopsies of tantly, on architectural coherence. Architects were pushed dead patients) was implicated in debates about the causes of to articulate the specifics of a brief (including practical and mental illness and the role of the asylum (as opposed to the ideological requirements) while creating buildings that university) as a site for research. The multiple identities of made sense. The abrupt juxtapositions of madness and the patient as research resource, member of the asylum com- death, science and religion, and institutional and “outside” munity, and individual with connections to the world beyond realms in the program for the asylum mortuary threatened the asylum were played out in the cramped spaces of the potential meaninglessness, and put particular pressure mortuary, as was the anxiety about patients dying within the therefore on architects to create meaning, in an era before asylum rather than leaving it cured. And the mortuary had to overt and visible incoherence of expression was an accept- play its part in the presentation of a modern, humane public able architectural solution. face for the asylum, while keeping the mourning public at a distance. Behind the self-conscious simplicity of the building The Mortuary Becomes Visible illustrated in Der Architekt was an unstable compound of In the early twentieth century, when a patient died in a public death, mental illness, scientific research, publicity, and iden- hospital or asylum in the Habsburg Empire, the body was tity. The aim of this article is to interrogate the relationship dealt with according to an established protocol. It was moved between that architectural simplicity and the program’s com- rapidly from the hospital ward or place of death to a cool plexity. It will also present an alternative to the traditional space set aside for the storage of corpses. Almost always, an narrative tracing the establishment of new building types in autopsy was then performed. The heavy demands on facili- modernity; two subsequent asylum mortuary commissions, ties for autopsies in these mortuaries stem from what medical at the Steinhof asylum in Vienna and the Moravian asylum historian Tatjana Buklijas has referred to as an “idiosyn- at Krom íž, both of which were undertaken in full aware- cratic” set of assumptions and practices regarding death and ness of the Mauer-Öhling solution, resulted in sharply dissection in the empire. Whereas in other parts of Europe, contrasting designs. All three buildings were designed especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, there was a history of in the sphere of progressive influence, and specifically public anxiety and protest surrounding post-mortem dissec- Wagner-school ideas, but each offered a fundamentally dif- tion for research purposes, in Austrian lands there was a tra- ferent interpretation of largely similar requirements. The dition of tolerant attitude to autopsy, a product, as Buklijas relationship between program and envelope subverts expec- explains, of religious and political forces. Corpses of people tations: the purest Wagner-school example, at Mauer- who had died in a hospital as wards of the state were dissected Öhling, is the least expressive, indeed most suppressive, of as a matter of course right through the nineteenth century.5 purpose; the mortuary at Steinhof, part of a complex in The central importance of pathological anatomy to the inter- which Wagner himself played the dominant design role, is nationally renowned Vienna medical school was supported the least coherent; and the Krom íž example, the only one by the ready supply of corpses from hospitals in Vienna and designed by a Wagner-Schüler, stretches that language until beyond. By the early twentieth century, the influence of it can cope with contradiction. pathological anatomy on a wide range of medical disciplines, The early modernist aspiration to reaffirm purpose as including psychiatry, was well established, and the demand the starting point for all designs was radically challenged for corpses continued to grow.6 when faced with a program containing abrupt juxtapositions While the legal framework around autopsies on people and unresolved contradictions.

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