One Flew East, One Flew West

Abstract

The intention of this thesis is to investigate space as the relationship between architecture, the body and consciousness. With the advent of anti-psychotic medication and General Hospital mental wards constructed in the 1960’s, prison-inspired mental hospitals were deinstitutionalized based upon the belief that the mentally ill could now be cared for within the confines of their communities. According to the American Psychiatric Association, this shift in loci continued through much of the remaining century, with the expansion of health care coverage and improved doctor to patient ratios. However, with the emergence of private hospitalization “chains” in the 1990’s, there has been demand for personalized mental health care and premium facilities. Advanced behavioral and communal psychological research has also led to new paradigms in the design of mental institutions as well as its facilitation. The myriad questions raised by this shift in axiom afford us the opportunity to ask foundational questions about the relationship between architecture and its occupants through the design of a psychiatric facility. The skewed perceptions and increased environmental sensitivity of mental hospital patients, as documented in Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, demand a critical rethinking of the way in which architectural space is conceived and understood. This thesis will rest upon the underlining assumption made by Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari in Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anit-Oedupis and a Thousand Plateaus, that mental illness and irrationality are another way of looking at our world, with equal validity to what we may deem as “normal”.