İTÜ Architectural Design Computing Program Lecture Series: The Modern Medical Institution and Its Role within The City

15 Nisan'da İTÜ Mimarlık Fakültesi bünyesinde Türk-Alman Bilim Yılı etkinlikleri kapsamında Tübitak desteği ile Bergischen Universität Wuppertal Mimarlık Fakültesi öğretim üyelerinden Eva Eylers seminer verecek.

Developments in medical thinking, changing ideas and ideals of health and disease, have a long history of familiar exchanges with architecture and the thinking of the city and have often had immediate impact on the built environment and on the ways in which buildings were conceived. Discussing medieval concepts of quarantine will allow us to frame the broader question of thethreshold, the borderline between the “healthy and the diseased” and its spatial configurations. In order to further exemplify the mechanism of inclusion and exclusion which Michel Foucault framed in relation to the city and its unwanted elements[1], and to investigate the spatial manifestations employed to answer to a specific isolationist policy, I will introduce the Leper Colonies which still played a role in the second half of the 20th Century, for example under Getúlio Vargas in Brazil.[2] Blandine Barret-Kriegel’s L’hôpital comme équipement [3] will help us to trace the common ground but also the fundamental difference between the Leper Colony and the modern medical institution. Both Barret-Kriegel and Nikolaus Pevsner in A History of Building Types have traced the history of the general hospital of Paris, the Hôtel-Dieu, and the investigation by the Health Commissioners of the Académie des Sciences which followed the great fire in 1772. But while Pevsner focussed on the development of the building type of the hospital and Barret-Kriegel on the “birth of the modern health institution”, I will particularly focus on the changes which the investigation and the debate following the fire had for the understanding of the relationship between the hospital and the city. The modern institution came to be a space of common interest – at the same time a servicing space, at least temporarily ridding or purifying the city and its population of dangerous elements but also a therapeutic environment, a refuge, for the individual.

[1] For example in A History of Madness or The birth of social medicine .
[2] The practice to exclude lepers – I use the historical term – today correct is Hansen’s disease patients – has of course a long tradition, but was used still in the last century and in some parts of the world still exists today. Under Brasil’s President Vargas for example, a truly parallel society – a permanent space of
exclusion of the Hansen Disease patients – was established that was only abandoned in the 1960s.
[3] In: Mardaga, Pierre (Ed.): Les machines à guérir (aux origines de l’hopital moderne), Architecture + Archives, Bruxelles, Liège, 1979 (pp19-30)