Modern Architectures of North America

Architecture as social control

The spatial arrangement of the hospital reflects a Foucauldian view of clinical interventions as being, in many cases, “neither therapeutic nor even medical in the strictest sense,” but rather “concerned with modes of life, food, dwelling and environment” (Elden 242). Awareness of the wider political scope of hospitals helps to account for why certain forms of architectural, hence interpersonal, isolation persisted, even with evolving medical knowledge about the nature and progression of leprosy. The seclusion of the hospital campus and the siloing of patients within discrete residential units represent the extent of medicine’s reach into fundamentally non-clinical spheres of activity (e.g., social interactions, hobbies). Insofar as Carville patients’ lives are dominated by medicine, disease becomes the entirety of their existence.

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