The Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America 9780822945734, 0822945738

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Creation of Community Hospitals as Interfaces with the Public
2. Better Living through Psychobureacracy? Community Mental Health Centers
3. Open Prisons Dematerialization of the Building but Not the Architect
4. In Defense of Space Housing and Crime Prevention through Environmental Design
5. Psyche into System Psychological Functionalism in Architecture Research Institutions
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Architecture of Good Behavior

Culture, Politics, and the Built Environment Dianne Harris, Editor Also in the series

Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present Edited by Kenny Cupers, Helena Mattsson, and Catharina Gabrielsson Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style Charles L. Davis II Improvised Cities: Architecture, Urbanization, and Innovation in Peru Helen Gyger Of Greater Dignity Than Riches: Austerity and Housing Design in India Farhan Karim Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris Sun-Young Park Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany Itohan Osayimwese Modern Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital Kathryn E. O’Rourke Building Modern Turkey: State, Space, and Ideology in the Early Republic Zeynep Kezer Re-Collecting Black Hawk: Landscape, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest Nicholas A. Brown and Sarah E. Kanouse Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade Brigitte Le Normand Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin Emily Pugh Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century Edited by Daniel M. Abramson, Arindam Dutta, Timothy Hyde, and Jonathan Massey for Aggregate Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania Edited by Dianne Harris

Architecture Good Behavior the

of

Psychology & Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America Joy knoblauch

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2020, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4573-4 ISBN 10: 0-8229-4573-8 Cover art: Proposal by architect Wilmont Vickrey and psychiatrist Joseph J. Downing for a new typology known as the community mental health center (CMHC). CMHCs were to be more open and include more community functions, as evidenced by the children seen playing here among the articulated components of the central building and beneath the massive, suspended volume of another component. Coryl La Rue Jones, ed., The Community Mental Health Center, Vol. 2, Architecture for the Community Mental Health Center (New York: Mental Health Materials Center, 1967), 83. Cover design: Alex Wolfe

To Sara, the best friend a scholar and mother could have. To June and Eleanor, who remind me that nothing is more important than being human.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction

1 2 3 4 5

ix 3

Creation of Community Hospitals as Interfaces with the Public 21





Better Living through Psychobureacracy?

Community Mental Health Centers

57

Open Prisons Dematerialization of the Building but Not the Architect 97 In Defense of Space Housing and Crime Prevention through Environmental Design

131

Psyche into System Psychological Functionalism in Architecture Research Institutions

171

Conclusion

203

Notes

211

Bibliography

235

Index

243

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It  has  truly  taken  an army of people of all talents to produce this

book; it is daunting even to contemplate the amount of assistance I have received. I owe a particular debt to Robert Gutman, who fostered my interest in the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from his role as an alumnus of the Space Cadets. My advisor, Christine Boyer, believed in my project from the start and knew when to tell me to take my time with an idea and when to hurry it up. Sarah Whiting, Graham Burnett, and Catherine Ingraham, the rest of the committee, were invaluable in their support and humor. Thanks to many who combined historical insight and valuable advice: Robert Geddes, Mario Gandelsonas, Kopper Newman, and Constantine Karalis. So many Princetonians informed my thinking that naming them all is impossible, but to name a few, I want to thank Beatriz Colomina, Edward Eigen, Carrie Eisert, Benjamin Gross, Kevin Kruse, Spyros Papapetros, and Suzanne Podhurst. A minor battalion helped me find the many different kinds of documents that inform this book, not least of whom were those on my home turf: the late Frances Chen, Shabeha Baig-Gyan, Hannah Bennet, Christine Shungu, Ellen Bonin, and Daniel Claro. Thanks also to Janet Parks, Jennifer L. Gray, Shelley Hayreh, and Katherine M. Prater at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University; Renata Guttman and Caroline Dagbert at the Centre Canadien d’Architecture; and Douglas Di Carlo at the New York City Housing Authority Archives. Thanks go to Constantine Karalis, the late Roni McCarty, and MaryJane McCarty for sharing Clyde Dorsett’s papers and to Friedner Wittman for sharing his papers and answering questions about NIMH-related acronyms. Thanks to George Rand for sending me valuable documents, and to Kopper Newman for her hospitality and a long and enjoyable correspondence. I had the benefit of many forms of support from Fulbright Canada, allowing for the writing of an additional chapter, a grant and generous subvention funding from the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, along with the University of Michigan and its ADVANCE program. I received two years of support from the Fellowship of

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Woodrow Wilson Scholars, which gave me the time and space to research and write. The fellowship also gave me a chance to experience an interdisciplinary mix similar to the one I study, providing food for thought as well as an interest in explaining myself and my field to a larger audience. I also enjoyed a study grant from the Centre Canadien d’Architecture that gave me a wonderful month in Montreal, where I benefited from the “archi-nerd summer camp” feel and many good discussions on the lawn over lunch. I am grateful to the National Science Foundation for its support and for a grant application process that came at a key time in the development of my research. The process yielded a much improved theorization of the project. My pride in having the support of the NSF dates back to a childhood spent accidentally causing trouble in a plant science lab and wondering when we might be able to go home. Thanks to Ed Eigen for responding to my request for his help in finding NSF grants from the 1960s by encouraging me to apply for my own NSF grant. I never failed to leave Ed’s office feeling grounded and excited to work due to his cocktail napkin sketches of my topic. My thanks also to Jeffrey Petsis for his help getting the grant and to Angela Petsis, former program administrator at the Princeton University School of Architecture whose friendship made navigation of our own school of architecture red tape more palatable. The support and good humor of Cynthia Nelson, Fran Corcione, Rena Rigos, Linda Greiner, Angela Petsis, and Camn Castens kept the lights on, bills paid, lecturers housed, and mail delivered as I worked on. Thank you to the “green room” and my fellow PhD students Anthony Acciavatti, Joseph Bedford, Britt Eversole, Gina Greene, Margo Handwerker, Lisa Hsieh, Alicia Imperiale, Diana Kurkovsky West, Anna-Maria Meister, Yetunde Olaiya, Enrique Ramirez, Molly Steenson, Sara Stevens, Irene Sunwoo, and Federica Vannucchi. To my writing group, Sara Stevens, Dael Norwood, and Ben Schmidt, I owe a debt of gratitude for the laughs, deadlines, excellent feedback, and even better support. Thank you to Sarah C. Smith and Magdalen Powers for good-humored copy editing. Any errors herein are my own. Thanks to my excellent developmental editor, Jenny Gavacs, who got the project moving again after years of slumber, and to Abby Collier for understanding the book from the start and for her patience. I owe Sara Stevens for aid too various and too critical to enumerate. Her unfailing insight and good judgment kept me on the road to the very end, providing me with the best collaboration anyone could ever have. And lastly, in memory of Ronald Torrella, for whom we will wage hope that the situation can improve.

The Architecture of Good Behavior

I.1. The glass pavilions of Gruzen and Partners’ Leesburg Medium Security Prison was, paradoxically, seen as a model able to prevent prison riots, not through hardening the architecture with more locks and bars but through insight from psychology. Frederic Moyer, Correctional Environments (Urbana, IL: National Clearinghouse for Correctional Programming and Architecture, 1971), 21.

INTRODUCTION An Opportunity for Architects, Psychology, and Institutional Architecture after World War II

In  1971  architecture  critic  Ada Louise Huxtable published

a column in the New York Times in response to the prison riots at Attica two weeks earlier. The riot began over conditions at the prison and ended after thirty-two inmates and ten hostages were killed as the authorities retook control of the prison from a thousand inmates. Huxtable blamed the inhumane design of the buildings and declared that architects needed to pay closer attention to psychology and social science, suggesting that architecture might prevent such violence. 1 In contrast to the fortress-like architecture of Attica, Huxtable endorsed recent shifts in prison design that made use of new plastic materials to make security “less visually and psychologically disturbing.” She offered examples of what these prisons might look like, pointing to the glass pavilions and soft furnishings at Leesberg, New Jersey, as a model of the future. Wolf Von Eckardt, another critic, also applauded architectural solutions, a “new creative prison architecture without bars, designed to aid treatment and make the traumatic aspects of confinement as inconspicuous as possible.” This exemplary prison was itself prompted by prison riots in New Jersey in 1952, but it was only built thirteen years later due to both political and financial complications. The 504-bed prison was subdivided into six pavilions, each of which had a courtyard at the center. The courtyards were enclosed on all sides by a breezeway and a single-loaded corridor connecting the individual cells. Thus, each cell had a view onto the courtyard instead of another cell across the hall. Each pavilion also had a glass-walled day room that opened to the courtyard. Such architecture attempted to break down the large monoliths of the old institutions and replace them with more open facilities to distract prisoners, the

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I.2. Gruzen and Partners’ Leesburg Medium Security Prison. Frederic Moyer, Correctional Environments (Urbana, IL: National Clearinghouse for Correctional Programming and Architecture, 1971), 41.

public, and government from the traumatic experience of incarceration. Von Eckardt ended his column declaring that he felt reassured at hearing “a high official of the Federal Bureau of Prisons speak of ‘beds’ rather than cells.” 2 Reading these responses to the prison riot today, it seems that Huxtable and Von Eckardt vastly oversimplified the complex relationship between prisoners, power, and the designed environment, avoiding social and political explanations for the riots. They projected a faith in environmental psychology that scholars have yet to adequately explain. Why did architects and critics call for behavioral science as the right tool to solve problems such as prison riots? Why was the designed environment an important subject of study for institutions, and why did the design of the architecture seem to be a place to intervene? In the 1960s and 1970s, an era of anti-institutional sentiment, could architecture make these places not “institutional” using psychology?

Architecture in an Expanded Field In the postwar period, a growing number of managers and experts were interested in learning from the social sciences; sociologists studied group formation and social problems, and psychology looked through quasi-scientific means at

INTRODUCTION

I.3. Soft materials and dormitory-like day bed at Leesburg Medium Security Prison, combined with a toilet paper holder less typical of a dormitory. Frederic Moyer, Correctional Environments (Urbana, IL: National Clearinghouse for Correctional Programming and Architecture, 1971), 21.

questions previously considered to be the terrain of philosophy. During the years between 1946 and 1974, the subfield of environmental psychology was formed to focus on empirical methods to study the way one’s environment impacts one’s mind and behavior. Robert Sommer, a leading environmental psychologist, observed in 1969 that institutions became a key site of exploration for the connection of aesthetics and psyche: “The clearest realization of the connection between environmental form and human behavior is taking place in the institutional field. People trained in hospital administration, education, and business management are aware of the important contributions research and development have made in most aspects of their work. They are surprised to find that decisions regarding the physical plant amounting to tens of millions of dollars are made without adequate information about user behavior.” 3 Sommer and other social scientists and administrators were studying concepts of user behavior and began to wonder why architects were not. Those designing and running institutions looked for diagrams, theories, and forms that would demonstrate the way architecture responds to and shapes user behavior in order to carry out the institution’s work. These administrators and scholars believed

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that architectural form should be shaped to fit the psyche of a patient or prisoner and that form could make it easier to heal patients, reform prisoners, or house residents. As historian Adrian Forty and others have explained, architects of the modern movement pursued several types of functional design, where form was an expression of material, of organic part to whole relationships, or a reflection of the activities of “users” within.4 Sommer and other psychologists and architects explored the idea that form follows psyche, or what this book will call psychological functionalism. The behavioral research that Huxtable and Von Eckardt examined has its roots in much older theories of modern design, applied in the United States by architects and psychologists in collaboration. The idea of psychological functionalism, the use of form for its alleged emotional and behavioral impacts on occupants, was studied and implemented by a nation in search of new institutional forms to solve larger social problems of health, mental health, justice, and security of the population. Such psychological functionalism uses emotional and behavioral responses to an environment and then proposes design features that will soothe those emotions and alter behavior so that the institution can operate more smoothly. This book looks at four case studies of institutional typologies that received federal funding, becoming places where architects could experiment with influencing psyche through form. These typologies are arranged roughly chronologically, though the long reform efforts of each typology’s adherents do overlap in time, and the typologies do not directly cause changes in each other, though some of the same people worked on more than one typology and some ideas were shared between the typologies. Each chapter focuses on one typology: community hospitals, community mental health centers, therapeutic prisons, and public housing. The final chapter takes the idea of psychological functionalism more theoretically, though still with federal funding, ending with a conversation between applied psychological functionalism and a theoretical or disciplinary psychological functionalism in a new era of architectural theory in the 1970s. The examination of psychological functionalism in reshaping institutions contributes to an ongoing postwar conversation on politics and aesthetics, including such contributions as Joseph Masco’s discussion of the theatricality of the cold war, Jeffrey Lieber’s Flintstone Modernism on the reconciliation of primal and modern aesthetics, and Avigail Sachs’s examination of the role of science policy in shifting the field toward an ostensibly more rational environmental design. In considering the entwining of aesthetics and psychology, this book contributes to the history of two large federal construction programs that are well known but whose architectural component is under-discussed. The postwar Hill-Burton hospital construction program appears in most secondary hospital histories, but few scholars have looked at the buildings. Jeanne

INTRODUCTION

Kisacky’s recent book is an exception; a discussion of the architecture’s public relations message adds to her assessment that the buildings were not a medical advancement. Similarly, many have looked at the history of the deinstitutionalization program launched by the 1963 Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act, but the architectural vision that accompanied the program has not been considered. Open prisons and crime prevention through environmental design, the subjects of chapters 3 and 4, have also been well examined, but the role of architects and engagement with architectural discourse are rarely brought in. In work like Sachs’s, Daniel Barber’s on the history of the solar house, John Harwood’s history of IBM, or Kenny Cupers’s study on housing in France, scholars have sought detailed histories of the way architects were able to contribute to larger changes, avoiding the language of complicity while remaining critical of their purported good intentions. Sitting at the intersection of large federal construction programs, psychological concepts, and postwar design, the history of the institutional reform in this book recounts the entanglement of architects with the large forces of funded research, social change, and the institutional logic of creating national networks of buildings. Recent work in the interaction of architecture with such large forces includes Jesse LeCavalier’s examination of Wal-Mart, Sara Stevens’s research on architects who worked with real estate developers, and Daniel Barber’s placement of postwar solar houses within the geopolitics of the era. With the history of crime prevention through environmental design and the final chapter on psychological functionalism and the rise of architectural theory, this book shares the current interest in describing controversial ideas without labeling them entirely sinister or innocent but, following Keller Easterling, looking at the innocence of architecture itself as a tool. The thousands of buildings covered by the legislation in this book show that the federal construction programs for institutional reform and expansion gave architects an opportunity to clarify and strengthen an expertise in the way form influences psychology.

Psychology, and Interest in It, Grows The implementation of psychological functionalism in the postwar era relied on the growing influence of the field of psychology itself. Experts in psychology rapidly gained status in the United States after World War II, as did the number of psychologists practicing. Membership in the American Psychological Association grew from 2,739 in 1940 to 30,839 in 1970, with a similar gain in American Psychiatric Association membership from 2,423 in 1940 to 18,407.5 The field was young, certainly compared with architecture, growing in the nineteenth century as a hybrid of philosophy and physiology. Many of the first American psychologists had trained in Germany under Wilhelm Wundt, learning from his empirical methods and, as with institutional design, putting those ideas to

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use in solving modern problems. For example, G. Stanley Hall was Wundt’s first American student, returning to the United States to apply Wundt’s methods to educational psychology at Harvard University. George Miller Beard described the symptoms of neurasthenia caused by urban modernity, and figures such as John Dewey, William James, Hugo Münsterberg, James B. Watson, and B. F. Skinner explored social challenges in industrial and organizational psychology. Psychologists contributed to intelligence testing, propaganda, camouflage, and rehabilitation during both world wars. The concept of using the young—and disputed—science of psychology, or “giving psychology away” was not uncontroversial; proponent of applied psychology George A. Miller declared ambivalence about using intellectual expertise to solve problems of social management.6 Even so, federal government support for psychological research grew after World War II in the midst of a massive international competition to have the most advanced science and technology. Scholars have studied similar applications in the United Kingdom and in Soviet Russia, where experts explored conscious and unconscious perception of the environment with color studies aiming to increase worker energy.7 In France social scientists worked to cultivate residents’ participation in postwar social housing using form as instrument and representation of an ideal society, continuing the visions of modernist architecture.8 In the United States, Cold War–era social science was a blend of academic research, policy, and military research that combined philosophical questions of epistemology with direct applications that were at times overtly military or, as with housing and hospital decentralization, related to theories of civilian defense.9 The Office of Naval Research undertook psychological research until the National Science Foundation was founded in 1950, and through the 1960s the Department of Defense remained a major source of funding.10 This book joins the conversation about the interaction of government-funded science with architecture but takes a more focused look at the involvement of architects in particular efforts to reform institutional typologies. Architects had participated in larger government agendas earlier in the twentieth century, learning new roles within bureaucracy and gaining new skills of persuasion. In the 1930s, architects worked in the Supervising Architect’s Office (the largest architecture office in the nation) as private commissions decreased in the 1930s. 11 Other architects worked within the Public Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, and the Resettlement Administration. Assisting with local housing authorities, architects and other experts drew on concepts of hygiene and learned from the field of public health to improve living conditions. Housing experts such as Elizabeth Wood and Catherine Bauer—who would go on to be inf luential in environmental design at Berkeley—appear as groundbreaking thinkers when viewed from the

INTRODUCTION

postwar period. Similarly, Robert Ezra Park and others of the Chicago School of Sociology prepared foundational studies applying theories from economics to map the “human ecology” of urban neighborhoods. With the outbreak of World War II, architects sought to demonstrate the value of new mixtures of design and psychology. Sachs presents architects’ interest in behaviorism from the 1940s and 1950s onward, depicting a first generation who sought rigorous designs for human-environment interaction and a later generation that engaged with the problems of the urban context of the 1960s. György Kepes and others taught camouflage, while Lazlo Moholy-Nagy adapted his hand sculptures and texture charts to occupational therapy for wounded servicemen and women—as documented by Jean-Louis Cohen.12 After the war, architects and planners created a strategy of “total planning” from the idea of “total warfare,” as described by Andrew Shanken. Through an engagement with business, architects encountered advertising and other tools of persuasion and shifted their role from artists to planners in the guise of the new “Architectural Man.” These histories suggest that architects sought mainly to preserve their livelihoods, operating within historical and governmental forces beyond their control.13 This volume adds to a few excellent histories of the profession, notably Dana Cuff ’s, adding a case of specialized work.14 The designers of new institutional typologies had an opportunity to show what architectural design could contribute to the mixture of psychology and government with the advantage of federal funding. The application of psychological expertise to institutional design was part of comprehensive federal construction and research programs with direct calls to architects and sometimes the employment of architects to help work on problems as with Clyde Dorsett’s role within the NIMH in the 1960s. With the 1946 Hospital Survey and Construction Act, architects, administrators, public health, and public relations experts engaged in comprehensive planning of hospital locations and the design of buildings that would work with the institutions’ messages of affordability, efficiency, and faith in science. Architects and psychologists worked with the National Institute of Mental Health to craft a new image for outpatient mental health care for the era of psychotropic drugs like Miltown and Thorazine. Designs by William Caudill, Kiyoshi Izumi, and Humphrey Osmond explored imaginative forms for outpatient institutions tailored to the local community but coordinated under a federal umbrella. Waves of prison reform considered a theory of therapeutic penology, enacted in a few states but exemplified in forensic psychiatric centers at Butner, North Carolina, and Gainesville, Florida. The facility at Gainesville attempted to recreate life in small-town America to remove the harmful effects of a prison—not to heal but to determine if defendants could plead insanity or if the institution was making them act in aberrant ways.

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New tools of persuasion and influence were available to architects as they engaged with the growing field of psychology and translated ideas about social and spatial components of behavior into drawings, diagrams, and designs. Historians have suggested that overall, architecture refined its search for “total design” in the early twentieth century to “expertise seeking” in the second half. In a history of research at MIT, scholars chronicle the so-called techno-social turn of architects such as Kepes, Kevin Lynch, and Christopher Alexander, who also borrowed psychological expertise. Arindam Dutta describes “an elaborate institutional mechanics of legitimation” through which architects framed their work for other disciplines and administrators of the research economy.15 Shanken also notes the influence of charts and graphs in planning and adapting practices of visual communication for clarity and broad public understanding of complex issues. Building on Otto Neurath’s ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education) diagrams after World War I, institutional designers expanded the use of graphic techniques to all manner of notation of social and behavioral information.16 William Caudill, Oscar Newman, Clyde Dorsett, Sim Van der Ryn, Christopher Alexander, and others used bubble diagrams, charts, and maps to mix the technocratic language of social science with the visual expression of the architect. In the 1970s the fields of environment behavior studies and environmental psychology were formed by hybrid architect-psychologists such as Henry Sanoff, John Zeisel, Clare Cooper Marcus, and others who offered readings of planned buildings in terms of their mental and behavioral components. In the postwar period, architects used this expertise to design new institutional forms, often low-rise forms that aimed to create legible programmatic elements (circulation, bedroom, entry) as a means of social management. With roots in the nineteenth century, the institutional typologies discussed in this book are a mixture of psychology, government, and form that represent an attempt to pacify through environmental incentives. Earlier examples of environmental management abound, but the cases here differ in two ways: 1) they are attached to federal research and construction programs that aim to serve the whole nation, and 2) they rely on empirical data about the whole population for the location of facilities more precisely than did nineteenth-century institutions. The postwar period of institutional design is different from the interwar facilities because of greater use of new psychotropic drugs, a divided welfare state that unraveled in the mid-1960s, and a large federal research economy that shifted from welfare to crime prevention in the early 1970s.17 The book focuses on particular government programs to get a close look at certain building typologies, bureaucratic processes, and specific environmental strategies. Although actors such as Robert Sommer, Christopher Alexander, and E. Todd Wheeler show up across typologies, this structure allows this book to focus on the variety

INTRODUCTION

of discourses aimed at managing patients, mental patients, prisoners, residents and architects.

Is It Science? The term “soft science” is sometimes used as a pejorative by those who champion the “hard sciences” of physics or chemistry, but the boundaries of science are not absolute and unchanging through historical time, and many sciences are “soft.” 18 I use the label intentionally to call to mind the stakes of environmental psychology’s claim to be science as well as the controversy of that claim in the postwar era. Those who researched environment and behavior faced challenges to the idea that social science could pursue basic research or that it was of equal rigor to the other sciences. The formation of the National Science Foundation was delayed for five years while policymakers and scientists discussed whether psychology could be similar enough to the foundation’s basic research aims to merit inclusion in the foundation.19 Eventually, social science gained a limited role, combined with support from agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, and a number of private organizations including the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council—a private nonprofit that often collaborated with government—and the Russell Sage Foundation. Sage and other private foundations had long had an interest in urban problems and housing. Sage, for one, had been funding urban research as part of its mission to improve social and living conditions in the United States.20 The possibility of including architectural research in the NSF was discussed when the professional organization of architects met with the NSF in 1959. That year the American Institute of Architects Committee on Research and its Department of Education and Research organized a conference with the governmental science agency. Participants included Ezra Ehrenkrantz of Berkeley, Robert W. McLaughlin of Princeton, and William Ittelson of Brooklyn College.21 The conference proceedings declared support for research on architecture while also advocating reliance on scientists for knowledge of many basic aspects of the human-environment relationship. The foreword declared: “It was recognized early in the work of the Committee on Research that the fundamentals—knowledge of man, his needs, aspirations, behavior and abilities—knowledge of total environment and how best to help it—were areas outside those of the profession of architecture.” The status of architectural research within the government’s research economy remained undefined; both architecture and psychology struggled to demonstrate that applied knowledge could have the same status as more abstract sciences with less social and political entanglement. Bearing in mind environmental psychology’s status as a “soft science” helps to keep the focus on the always controversial claim that if architects were simply able to be more scientific and used the “truths” from environmental psychology,

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then architecture could solve social problems. Huxtable’s argument about the utility of behavioral science for reforming prisons was common and valuable but far from shared by social scientists who were themselves skeptical about the applicability of their findings. At a 1969 conference organized by Oscar Newman and his institute, Lee Rainwater (a former collaborator of Newman) declared that public housing officials found defensible space appealing because they felt under attack and needed an affordable yet proven way to address their problems.22 Cautioning against looking to social science for that salvation, Erving Goffman, a leading figure in the study of social space and institutions, argued that the field of social science was plagued with failure. He questioned the architects’ and administrators’ faith in the young science: “Look at us poor social scientists who are caught flat-footed with two minor little disruptions, 1) black militancy and 2) university student disquiet. There was very little that social scientists ten years ago predicted in those regards. We were basically caught flat-footed.” He presented his field as severely chastened, and while architects and administrators countered that it was their job to make such choices in light of inadequate information, Goffman argued it was not the role of a social scientist to advocate policy when the facts were still uncertain. An architect might have to make a decision based on limited information, but Goffman lacked faith in the “science” behind those design choices.23 Newman pressed on undeterred, and his brand of crime prevention through environmental design remains profitable forty years later.

Power through Persuasion These institutional designs were intended to be humane or “humanized to exert control in an enlightened way that would be more palatable to the public. The term “soft power”—as a reference to the exercise of power by persuasion—initially referred to American diplomacy after the collapse of the USSR. In 1991 Joseph S. Nye Jr. used the term to characterize the strategy of ideological persuasion; the U.S. State Department employed cultural attractions and international institutions in pursuit of “getting others to want what you want.” 24 Soft power was successful for two reasons, according to Nye: persuasion appeared not to conf lict with the American ideal of freedom, and it was suited to a political context in which exerting force was increasingly expensive. Diplomatic and domestic aims are not identical, but they are not separate either, particularly in the Cold War era of displays of consumer goods at world expos.25 Many of the cases in this book began as federal officials’ efforts to improve major domestic problems, no doubt well aware that the eyes of the world were watching. President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society efforts to fight persistent poverty and urban unrest funded many sociologists and psychologists in pursuit of “poverty knowledge,” including the idea of a “culture of poverty” and the psychopathologies of

INTRODUCTION

race and racism.26 Military funding for psychology had been important during World War II, and historian Ellen Herman explains that the military remained the largest single funding source through the Korean War, producing what one observer called a “not too gentle rain of gold” to enrich the field. 27 The NIMH’s Center for the Study of Metropolitan Problems sponsored research on the psychological effects of federal housing policies, most famously Marc Fried’s study of the experience of grief after eviction due to urban renewal and Lee Rainwater’s study of life in public housing at the Pruitt-Igoe projects in Saint Louis.28 Federal Hill-Burton hospital construction, the Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) were products of federal social priorities. At times these very administrators used skills learned during the New Deal to persuade local populations to accept federal agendas for standardization of the built environment. After his Farm Security Administration work, Frederick Dodge Mott and his colleague Milton Irwin Roemer explained how a theory of “cultural lag” helped them convince communities of federal health care efforts.29 He continued this work with the United Mine Workers hospitals, built to pacify the union after a major labor dispute in 1946. Following Jane Jacobs’s work with America Illustrated, a publication of the U.S. State Department’s Information agency, Jacobs wrote about the hospitals as affordable, understandable architecture in Architectural Forum in 1953 and 1956.30 She applauded Isadore Rosenfield and others concerned with the impact of modern architectural form on fearful rural patients. Geopolitical power via persuasion is not the same as persuasive architectural design, but the two are not distinct either, when writers like Jacobs use the buildings in international publications. Moreover, the administrators and officials were aware of the way architecture could be viewed by adversaries as a manifestation of the nation’s character and affluence. At the opening ceremony for the Mine Memorial Hospitals in 1956, the buildings’ importance for “international understanding” was celebrated: “They will hear about these hospitals all over the world, in South America, in Burma, behind the Curtain, how we feel in a democracy about the man who works.” 31 Nye’s distinction between cultural and behavioral modes of power remains useful in the architectural context, though design often mixes the two. Institutional environments are both a means of communicating ideology and a means of influencing behavior. This dual mode is evident in the design of prototypical community hospitals in the 1950s, where architects focused on the first mode in facade design and on the behavioral mode—or what I call “psychological functionalism”—when designing the interiors. Hospital facades communicated the core values of integrity, openness, efficiency, and science while their interiors considered the physiological and psychological influence of daylight, furniture

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placement, and circulation. Community mental health centers in the 1960s were also tasked with creating an image for the program that would suit the various communities they served. Soft prison cells aimed to pacify prisoners while communicating attention and preserving dignity. Defensible space aimed to trigger a natural and subconscious motive but also to remove the graffiti and other stigmata that made the place appear unsafe. In the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies project too, the aim was to use structuralist theory to understand how to craft an image of place to suit the population. The history of propaganda would suggest that the exertion of power via persuasion is as old as humanity, but the use of the term and the “science” of inf luence took off during World War I and World War II. The name “Cold War” was itself the work of one of the foremost experts in public relations and public opinion, Walter Lippman. Persuasion requires an understanding of the audience, something psychologists sought through rigorous study of the human mind. Lippman argued that various populations react to the pseudoenvironment created in their minds with limited information. To govern softly, via persuasion, public relations experts would help guide public opinion toward desired ends using what they could from the psychologist’s scientific exploration of mind and behavior. The public relations consultants advised hospital administrators and architects on locating and presenting hospitals to rural and urban communities in the 1950s before environmental psychology research broadened its studies from behavior in military barracks and aerospace environments to studies of geriatric and mental health wards. The later period of the governmental and institutional changes described in this book are contemporaneous with Michel Foucault’s analysis of techniques of power through psychology and environment. These were the years in which Foucault began to write about the self-restraint and alienation of inmates, circa 1965, and later to write about the tendency of neoliberal regimes to govern through environment and incentives. Thus, the cases examined here document the phenomena that Foucault notes in his lectures on the birth of biopolitics in Germany and in the United States. He contextualized the trends in terms of a larger governmental project in his lectures on the Birth of Biopolitics from 1978 to 1979, where he analyzed what he saw as a growing American neoliberalism and a tendency to govern through environment. Asylums, hospitals, and prisons were spatial symptoms of social ideas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, places where states sought to manage and attend to their populations in addition to controlling them via spectacle and violence. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault describes institutions as combinations of two sites of government—the individual body and the population.32 These agencements concrets or concrete arrangements create social and architectural technologies to optimize the capacity of a population and to make government more efficient in an increasingly

INTRODUCTION

urbanized age. Self-control is combined with medical and psychiatric authority, while violent, disciplinary modes of power continue as rare threats. In these environments, “action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players”; in these postwar American institutions, the design of the system reflects the vast federal funding poured into environmental psychology and translated into form by architects.33 This particular mode of power was attuned to the character, personality, or type of inmate, patient, or resident. In other words, architects created different power tailored to the folks within each institution, whether a nineteenth-century mental hospital with graded wards or a 1960s prison. In the therapeutic prisons of the 1960s, the aim was not to normalize population differences but to apply ever more elaborate incentives in the environment in what Foucault called the “open secret of social management.” In so-called voluntary or open institutions such as community hospitals, consumer-like subjects were persuaded to enter and treated to spatial and pharmaceutical controls intended to secure their compliance but also their eventual return and money. If that sounds like some religious organizations (and some community hospitals continued to have patronage from religious institutions), consider reading these soft institutions as environments in which human science was in the role of savior. In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann paints a lyrical portrait of life in a modern institution; he describes the chronic passage of regimented time, the intimacy and coldness of periodic medical testing, and the eradication of simple diagnoses like “sick” or “well.” 34 Mann’s account of the management of life in the sanatorium shows the concrete apparatus of biopolitics, the material culture of rooms, hallways, balconies, lunch rooms, paperwork, and x-ray equipment that exert power via knowledge. The environment created by these tools allowed a shift from rule by punishment to the expert administration of life.35 Influence is exerted by knowing the mind and the capacity of the subject and the population rather than by threat or exertion of force. Many bodies of knowledge came together to produce institutions such as Mann’s sanatorium, which he used as a microcosm of modern society. Because of the focus on federal construction, beginning with the modernization of the U.S. hospital network after World War II, to some degree this book presents a uniquely American story. The funding opportunities examined here are often tied to particular presidential agendas or particular government programs, though they also reflect shifts in funding priorities, as with the expansion of science funding during the space race in the 1950s and diversion from urban research necessitated by the expensive war in Vietnam, as President Lyndon B. Johnson left office and President Richard M. Nixon entered. The latter shift was felt by Newman and others who heard about generous NIMH grants and sought them out, only to be directed to the Law Enforcement Assistance

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Administration. The unraveling of the liberal welfare state happened somewhat differently in the United States, the UK, and France, for example, but the larger trends of government support of social science research extended to the UK. Environmental psychology retains an appeal in Australia and elsewhere. Postwar hospital construction programs were also important in the UK, and internationally, the World Health Organization encouraged rural hospital construction and rebuilding after the war. Deinstitutionalization of mental health and anti-psychiatric sentiment were common to the United States, UK, and France, and struggles over postwar housing design were felt internationally. But where the United States may be the least typical is in the prison context; there were far more prisons per capita in the 1960s in the United States than in other countries. The numbers have only risen since. Racial difference and racial injustice in the American context form a loud void in the documents created by administrators and architects. The HillBurton hospital standards have been credited with integrating hospitals after 1965, but most of the hospitals discussed in the book would have been segregated by ward, if not entirely closed to non-whites. Community mental health centers were accused of unequal treatment and of being urban field stations for the therapeutic state, targeting young, urban, minority populations as a means to “stamp out the riots.” 36 With prisons and crime in public housing, the discussion of race is rarely explicit but impossible to ignore. Some reformers may have been trying to avoid a controversial topic or conceal their racial biases, or they may have been motivated by a sentiment that ignoring race was enlightened. Studies of the American welfare state have considered its exceptionalism among other developed countries, have relayed stories of political failure in enacting legislations like national health insurance, and have focused on political successes during the New Deal, the GI Bill, the War on Poverty.37 The United States does not have a consolidated, generous welfare system as some other countries do, and the reality of this divided or franchise state poses challenges in tracking state action. The results can be more diffuse, less visible, and somewhat less controlled by the government. These private-public partnerships are usually more selective and less redistributive, and for those of us studying aesthetics, such programs pose a challenge because they are harder to see, much less characterize. Yet architects and architecture play an important role in these divided state programs, and the architecture of government social programs in the United States has developed an awareness of public relations and environmental incentives that attends to the various segmented and diffuse audiences. Theoretical treatments of the relationship between American architecture and American politics also point to productive connections between architecture and politics in general. Reinhold Martin has argued that Peter Eisenman’s turn to deep structures circa 1973 was related to President Richard M. Nixon’s

INTRODUCTION

fostering of environmental legislation. Martin contends that both actions sought a universal plane able to transcend the deep divisions of the early 1970s Vietnam War era, urban decline, and persistent racial inequality. Similarly, Martin places Nixon’s “governmental speech act”—unhitching the dollar from gold—next to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s critique of Chomskyian disregard for the inextricable ties between pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic elements of language.38 In other words, just as Nixon was able to use his power to shift the referent of the dollar, so too did Deleuze and Guattari point out that relations between signified and signifier are often and largely fixed by pragmatic or power relations. But what I have wanted to ask is how we might go beyond such arguments, which at base simply state that “it was in the air” to probe the mechanisms that link federal priorities and construction programs with the opportunities made available for architectural expertise.

Organization of the Episodes This history of institutions opens in 1946 with the passage of a major postwar hospital construction program aiming to integrate and equalize hospital beds across the United States. The story continues to 1963 with the signing of the Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act by John F. Kennedy, his assassination, and the subsequent inauguration of Lyndon Johnson. Under the banner of the Great Society, social programs grew as Johnson pursued many of the projects started with Kennedy’s New Frontier. These programs aimed to extend the postwar affluence to all Americans, including elevating the nation’s culture to the level of its technological and economic greatness. Along the way, Johnson’s Great Society programs extended governmental influence into more areas of everyday life, largely in the arena of health, education, and welfare. These social programs f loundered, however, as the war in Vietnam sapped funding and as Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection. As Nixon entered office, the focus of reform shifted to a nascent neoliberal perspective more concerned with privatizing programs and fighting crime. The field of architecture followed a similar transformational arc, with ambitious, energetic schemes for housing and urbanism giving way to more specialized, abstract, and even cynical projects. By 1974, when this book closes, the nation had seen the aforementioned abolishment of the gold standard, the construction of Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center, and the Watergate scandal. However, many of the projects funded in the earlier era of optimism were delivered in the Nixon climate. The chapters are arranged as episodes in the larger tale of psychological expertise, moving out of hospitals and laboratories and into everyday life and eventually informing the intellectual discipline of architecture itself. Each chapter addresses a different institutional environment and a different

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collaboration between architecture and the human sciences. The episodes are presented chronologically, though with substantial overlap. The chapters are also arranged from the most medical environment, through psychiatric, and to the housing and urban research as the most everyday. While chronological, the typologies are not meant to be causally linked, in part because they happened somewhat at the same time and the tale is simply too complex to bear such an argument. Rather, the typologies examined here present a range of bureaucratic arrangements that supported collaboration between architecture and psychology: two federal construction programs, a series of state penology programs, local housing authorities, and then the research economy itself. The first chapter introduces the challenges of federal programs to build a national network of modern hospitals in the face of great regional and racial disparity in quality of hospital care between 1946 and 1965. Insights from public health, public relations, and psychology research informed the problem of constructing hospitals in rural, low-density locations where the population had little experience with an adequate hospital or an integrated hospital. This chapter presents a story of modernization and adaptation of techniques for managing what Frederick Mott called the “cultural lag” through steel and glass architecture. The modern hospitals had clear patterns of entry and circulation as well as brochures for patients to explain life in the hospital. The population knowledge and design tools used in the construction of community hospitals set the stage for the chapters that follow with their own tales of architecture as pacification in mental health, prisons, and public housing. The second episode concerns the shift in the place of psychiatric care and the collaboration between architects and psychologists that led to the creation of open psychiatric institutions. The 1963 Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act was signed into law by President Kennedy and implemented by President Johnson during an era of optimism and energy on the part of the American government. The program aimed to build two thousand new, open institutions that would combine outpatient care with other community functions such as childcare, taking advantage of a new era of psychiatry made possible by advances in psychopharmacology. The program was administered by the NIMH, which created an Architectural Consultation Section (ACS) headed by Clyde Dorsett, in order to develop guidelines for the new facilities and to foster design research through collaborations between psychologists and architects. Chapter 3 follows the development of psychologized environments even further from the clinic, into the prison environment. Advocates of reform saw the community mental health centers as a model and the Federal Bureau of Prisons and other agencies funded experimental prison facilities that were open, as at Leesburg, Virginia. Architects engaged behavioral conditioning and

INTRODUCTION

confronted the accusation that buildings themselves were the problem and the best thing to do was not build at all. The progression of psychological expertise into unspecialized, everyday environments continues into the fourth chapter, which covers one of the bestknown architectural theories to use psychology: Oscar Newman’s theory of defensible space. The theory that urban housing could be made safer with minimum expenditures of money and effort by further privatizing and segmenting the grounds struck some as self-evident and others as an offense to the previous generation’s work to create collective, public housing. Yet Newman was in some ways defending the ideals of modern architecture, which he encountered firsthand as he chronicled the final conference of the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne in 1959, bringing those ideas home to a context of violence in the streets and decaying urban culture. Chapter 5 chronicles psychological functionalism as it inhabited research institutions, showing the influence of larger institutional formations on the idea itself as a divergence grew between applied and theoretical architecture. Looking at applied work by Newman and Christopher Alexander in contrast with NIMH-funded research by Peter Eisenman, Mario Gandelsonas, and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, the last chapter shows attempts to influence psyche via form, as the idea had matured and a new phase of thought was opening. With two distinct intended impacts on their viewer’s psyches, these architects sought to create a system of rules that would guide design. These increasingly abstract ideas posed as a kind of “basic research” in architecture that operated within a new research economy. Systematic, social science–inspired techniques sought to explain how to design a better urban environment. Attempting a universal or abstract theory of the communication between user and environment, Eisenman’s complex intellectual constructions continued in the next era of theory and diverged farther from the functional, professional uses. The institutional designs in the book add to Colin Rowe’s definition of modern architecture as an architecture of good intentions, an ambition to use reason to make a better architecture for a better society. The conclusion speculates that reframing architecture’s social project to include the influence of psychology knits together two histories that are more often portrayed as separate. Bringing the history of government programs together with disciplinary and aesthetic studies adds to the move made by Reinhold Martin and others to show the place of architectural theory in an age of biopower, an age of closer and closer attention to the population and greater entanglement of environment and power. Martin’s study of Peter Eisenman’s potential relation to President Nixon asks whether psychological functionalism was a tool of institutional management in service of federal priorities; I ask a similar question. If governing

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requires greater attention to the composition of the governed, ranging from demographics to dreams, then how has architectural theory tackled this amorphous area and produced forms that convey attention to those dreams, desires, and demographics? The knowledge of architecture and its functioning in the minds of the inhabitants is not only useful to or used by those who would govern; after the 1970s business has enthusiastically embraced the temptation to use design to influence psyche. The study of environment and behavior used to pacify prison inmates can now be found applied in retail, entertainment, and home environments.39 To start to answer the question of resistance to this subtle influence over psyche, we must ask, how did we get here?

1 CREATION OF COMMUNITY Hospitals as Interfaces with the Public

In  1957  an  editorial  claimed that “a new type of structure is

changing the skyline of rural America. It’s the hospital.” 1 The simple, singlestory hospital in Laurinburg, North Carolina, whose photo accompanied that declaration was not large enough to have had a literal impact on a skyline by itself. The hospital was made of simple materials without adornment: brick, glass, and metal were arranged such that a visitor could clearly see an entry marked by a single column leading to a lobby enclosed with large glass. Beyond the lobby was a line of semi-domestic windows, the exam rooms and patient rooms. Although the Laurinburg hospital was small, it gained significance by association with another eight hundred hospitals built in the United States with funding from the 1946 Hospital Survey and Construction Act or Hill-Burton Act. These eight hundred hospitals would be joined by another four hundred under construction or on the architects’ drawing boards according to a survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Readers of the Chester Times, a smalltown paper that boasted a circulation of 40,000 near Philadelphia, were told that such hospitals were an unprecedented boon to rural health, considering that farming accidents killed 12,800 farmers and injured 1,050,000 more in 1956. These hospitals would end the “agonizing race over miles of highway” to get a family member to the hospital. A visit from a country doctor was not the same, readers were reminded, because these buildings allowed “intricate laboratory set-ups” and x-ray apparatus to diagnose cancer and tuberculosis. These small hospitals may seem insignificant on their own, but they were part of a massive federal campaign to standardize and spread hospital-based healthcare in the same years as national health insurance experienced a substantive defeat. The unadorned, affordable architecture may also seem insignificant,

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1.1. This small hospital was lauded as changing the skyline of rural America. Scotland County Health Center, Laurinburg, North Carolina. Perry Bennet, “Changes in Hospital Architecture,” Chester (PA) Times, August 31, 1957, 4.

but these designs were a response to the moods of their communities, crafted with an engagement with the young field of psychology. Under the Hill-Burton Act, the local population applied for federal funds and raised money to match the federal grants in what has been called a divided welfare state.2 In contrast to communal action, which was controversial in these postwar years, such structures showed that “farmers can raise money as well as wheat.” The public relations coverage showed that such sentiments could describe federal action as a natural extension of rural life. Government set up a framework, but the community was presented as the hospital’s empowered agent, and the article did not mention any fears of communal action. Beneath a photograph of “Liz and Philip,” the queen of England and her consort, on tour of Africa, a photo of the small hospital contributed to the mood of optimism, progress, and unity in the small-town newspaper. Readers were told that farmers hoped these modern buildings in the rural landscape would also help attract skilled doctors who would otherwise have practiced in the city. The hospital building was of symbolic importance, mixing hope and excitement about the new technologies with worry over the costs, indignity, and frightening diagnoses to be endured within its walls. Many surveys of hospital history jump from the rise of science and technology at the turn of the twentieth century to the challenges of the 1970s and 1980s without examining the rapid expansion of postwar hospitals. Rosemary Stevens, Charles E. Rosenberg, and others describe the rise of hospitals in the late

CREATION OF COMMUNITY

nineteenth century as faced with skepticism if not dread while these institutions transitioned away from a place of resort for those without options, particularly in the case of industrial, maritime, and charity hospitals. Annmarie Adams documents the shift from the pavilion-style hospital intended to prevent the spread of disease, to the vertical hospital, organized to reduce the building’s footprint as well as the distances staff needed to travel within the hospital.3 The post–World War II period has received little attention and is instead typically presented as a peaceful time of federal support and expansion reaching the 1960s where ostensibly Americans had “embraced the hospital as the site of care” without much explanation. Rosenberg begins his account of the rise of hospitals from the nineteenth century to World War I with the statement that hospitals seemed to suddenly become a problem in the late 1960s, without saying much about why.4 Jeanne Kisacky’s history comes to an end with Hill-Burton, mentioning that medical advances were not the key reason for the massive outlay of new hospital construction funding.5 David Sloane and Beverlie Sloane admit that the reasons for the problems of the 1960s “are complicated and not fully understood.” 6 The postwar period saw a shift from hospitalized patients to more ambulatory care, and as David Sloane and Allen Brandt observed, this became as significant as the shift from morality to science.7 Ambulatory patients had a choice of whether to bring themselves and their family for care, and often they had a choice of hospitals. These patients were more like consumers than were the charitable cases, a turn that Sloane and Sloane have called medicine’s move to the mall.

Roots in the Farm Security Administration of the 1930s Federal attention to the moods and challenges of rural health began with the efforts of the Farm Security Administration and the U.S. Public Health Service. These predecessors of the Hill-Burton Act have been called a rehearsal for a national health system.8 Working with the New Deal era programs, sociologists and bureaucrats studied the challenges in adapting specialized urban hospital care to areas where low population density made it difficult to retain and support specialized doctors. A few hundred beds were deemed necessary to keep a pathologist in residence, even if a good doctor could be convinced to leave the higher pay and other attractions of city life. Rural areas were also less likely to have a university or religious institution to sponsor and run a hospital.9 Alongside these federal efforts, private philanthropy had also been exploring the benefits of consolidating a network of hospitals to help rural Americans, including the Kellogg Foundation in Michigan, the Commonwealth Fund in New York, and the Bingham Plan in New England.10 Federal subsidies continued to work in partnership with private efforts in the divided welfare state to create a national network of hospitals under Hill-Burton. Looking back on their experience mapping rural health with the Farm

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1.2. Rural hospitals of the Bingham Plan were celebrated as places to train and disseminate medical and scientific knowledge. Lewiston Central Maine General Hospital. Leonard Engel, “The Bingham Plan,” Scientific American 179 (October 1948): 12.

Security Administration, Frederick Mott and Milton Roemer describe the landscape as it would have appeared to a traveler in the air.11 The vast surface of the country appears only lightly dotted with towns and villages, concealing the invisible connections to cities that provide markets for the goods grown, trapped, logged, and mined by rural Americans of diverse ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. Mott and Roemer explain the effect of increasing industrialization on this landscape as cities have drawn the wealth from the country and left behind a population that, while sick and dying, could find small

CREATION OF COMMUNITY

comfort in knowing that the United States had become one of the wealthiest nations with some of the best medical technology. Thinking about national health from this position, literally aloft, allowed a mixture of such textured, almost poetic commentary coupled with a sociological and numerical type of knowledge. Architecture would come to contribute to this mixture of poetry and data, attending to demographics and aesthetics. Mott and Roemer’s Rural Health and Medical Care presented a progressive, technological, and paternal view of the problems of rural health. Mott and Roemer painted a compassionate view of the troubled landscape of health in rural America and contextualized the challenges in light of the theory of “cultural lag” outlined by sociologist William Fielding Ogburn. In 1940 the truly rural population was in the minority, as it had been since 1920 or so, when the urban migration inverted the proportion of urban and rural Americans. The authors presented the demographics of the rural population, including many nationalities and races and a high proportion of children, given the high birth rate. The health needs of the population of rural “Negros” in the Southeast and “Indians” in the West received special attention in the book. While acknowledging that city dwellers often idealize life on the American farm, Mott and Roemer explained that the reality includes an “excessive burden of insanity, shortened life expectancy,” and the hardships of agriculture, which may make of the farmer’s wife “a vision, not of youth and beauty, innocence and exuberant health but that of the pale and wan and haggard face.” 12 The death rate in towns of fewer than 2,500 residents was the highest in the nation; rural families suffered 20 percent more serious illness that caused them to miss work.13 Expert reports counted further challenges to rural health: poor sanitation, no water infrastructure, poor housing, and poor diet. Public and private attempts to consolidate and extend hospital care to more of the population were growing slowly when World War II interrupted. Despite a few early attempts at coordination and the Farm Security Administration’s experiment in subsidized insurance, hospitals remained small, private, and often faith-based. Labor unions established some “group hospitalization” plans in the 1920s and 1930s, yielding an increase in the use of hospitals, though some were substandard industrial hospitals. The United States had a relatively low population density compared to other nations and a preponderance of private hospitals at a time when other nations were nationalizing their health systems. The most common form of hospital in the early twentieth-century United States was the voluntary hospital, a mix of charity, free enterprise, and religious good work. Under the vague and highly charged label of volunteerism, these community-based hospitals rarely worked together in a coordinated fashion. These were joined by a few larger hospitals, including a growing number of teaching hospitals associated with universities and a few government-run

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hospitals for veterans. The large state-run “hospitals for the insane” were also counted among the number of government hospitals. World Wars I and II distracted attention from governmental social welfare programs and increased the medical and surgical fields in developing technologies and pharmaceuticals while also exposing servicemen and servicewomen to a higher level of medical care.14 These wartime environments favored mobile technologies that could move with units from battlefield to battlefield. X-rays and magnetic bullet detectors returned home along with the mobile surgical units deployed by the medical colleges. These mobile surgical units formed connections with each other and shared what Surgeon A. M. Fauntleroy called the “Hospital Lessons of War.” 15 After the wars, hospital construction continued to emphasize efficient operations and cures via surgery and other technologies. Preventative public health efforts such as sanitation, nutrition, and vaccines found it hard to compete with such vivid advances in hospital technologies suited to acute care. Emerging from the war, it seemed that the time might be right to at last pass national health insurance, but the effort quickly ran into opposition led by the American Medical Association (AMA), which repeatedly played on Cold War fears of communism to defeat it. The idea of national health insurance had been considered in New Deal legislation and was supported by President Franklin Roosevelt and President Harry S. Truman. Truman took up the issue and attempted to mollify the AMA by emphasizing that his plan would increase doctors’ salaries and avoid major structural changes in the American health system.16 But opposition continued mainly in ideological terms that attacked the plan as communist; the secretary of health, education, and welfare opposed “the free distribution of the polio vaccine that Dr. Jonas Salk had developed for children” as “socialized medicine.” 17 The mistrust of communal action, ambivalence about government-mandated handouts, and at times overt racism meant that efforts to establish health insurance in the United States were always an uphill battle.18 The AMA launched a major public relations campaign to defeat Truman’s efforts in 1945 and after his reelection in 1948. It hired Whitaker and Baxter, a public relations firm, whose work would continue for years through the most expensive lobbying effort to date, at $1.5 million in 1949. Using its financial resources from a high demand for medical services and a powerful position as the gatekeepers to pharmaceutical companies, the AMA amplified Cold War fears of communism. From the testimony of Robert Taft to Congress that health insurance was the “most socialistic measure the congress has had before it” to the famed pamphlet that claimed Lenin felt health care to be the keystone of the socialist state, the AMA’s ideas infected the debate and shifted public opinion to favor “voucher payments” for those on welfare and labor unions to negotiate health insurance as part of members’ contracts.19

CREATION OF COMMUNITY

This debate raged during a period of “cultural distortion” arising from fear, frustration, and great technological change chronicled as the Cold War, a term that was itself the work of public relations expertise. The AMA and others were able to play on what historian Stephen J. Whitfield calls an entirely disproportionate response to communism in the United States circa 1950. Party membership was only forty-three thousand or so within a population of 150 million, much less than in European countries such as Italy or France, yet many Americans expressed great fear about the threat of communism. To explain this seeming contradiction, Whitfield points to the sudden loss of American technological dominance after the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in September 1949, the eruption of war in Korea, and the fact that an atomic war of “massive retaliation” would mean the end of the United States as well as its enemies. After World War II, many nations undertook a national health insurance plan that included hospitals. The United States was uncommon in choosing to subsidize construction without a health insurance plan. In the United Kingdom, Lord Nuffield (William Morris of Morris Motors) funded a hospital construction program with a charitable donation that he hoped would spawn a national program of hospitals outside London. Architect Richard Llewelyn-Davies worked for the Nuffield Foundation combining architectural and psychological insights into spare hospital designs inflected for the local population. Internationally, the World Health Organization saw postwar hospitals as more than just curing the sick. These buildings housed many functions: they trained new staff, provided public health education and epidemiological laboratories, and could form a coordinated system of regional hospitals to make efficient use of specialists.20 The World Health Organization advocated standardization of information management, rules, and hierarchy based on the wartime models. Small rural hospitals were implicitly and explicitly tasked with attending to, educating, and managing the mental and physical health of the local populations in the rural UK, developing countries, or the rural United States. Architect Llewelyn-Davies encouraged designers to remember “that for most people a visit to a hospital is a frightening experience, and an atmosphere of reassurance and an absence of formality should, so far as possible, be the aim.” 21 By 1950 the fight for national health insurance in the United States was over, and the poor got vouchers, veterans fought for government care, the wealthy paid for private insurance, and labor unions negotiated for the rest of the population in a mood of optimism for American capitalism and postwar affluence. The welfare state remained divided between public and private efforts, but Truman did manage to pass a major healthcare bill that included a subsidy for hospital construction. Americans came to associate government health insurance with mediocre health care, but government-subsidized buildings within a federally surveyed and accredited network did not face that threat. The

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1.3. Hospital, Alderney, Channel Islands, designed by Richard Llewelyn-Davies and funded by the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust. Architectural Review 127 (March 1960): 203.

demand for hospitals grew during the war, as did the esteem of hospital-based care, yielding the perception of a hospital shortage. Population dispersal, an increasingly suburban population, and a greater proportion of Americans accustomed to hospital care—some of them returning servicemen or their family members—created a demand for the high-technology medical care delivered in hospitals. The production of buildings did not challenge the powerful AMA; in fact, the president of the AMA in Florida claimed that building rural hospitals was not socialized medicine but “just progress.” 22 Hospitals and the type of care delivered there were seen as a federal support of science that would mark a difference between the United States and its adversaries. Atomic medicine, immunology, and medical science involved a similar technological race; because of the need to manage radioactive isotopes in hospitals, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was directly involved with hospitals and with promoting this work on the global stage. Facing a new balance of power and unable to take on its rivals directly through commerce or violence, Americans fought communism within the guise of national health insurance and engaged the image of hospitals as progress but also as voluntary community institutions. While also remaking the nation’s built environment through urban renewal and highway construction, the federal government began a massive hospital survey and construction program.

CREATION OF COMMUNITY

Hill-Burton Creates Opportunity for Architects Signed into law by President Harry Truman in August of 1946, the Hill-Burton Act was more formally known as the Hospital Survey and Construction Act, Title VI of the Public Health Service Act. The Hospital Survey and Construction Act allocated a total capital investment of $1.8 billion, with an annual budget of $375 million for the construction of hospitals during the next five years and $3 million for state-conducted surveys of need.23 One-quarter to one-third of the postwar hospital construction boom was the result of the program. The goal of building 4.5 beds per 1,000 people was ambitious for the areas outside of the Northeast, even while being well below hospital capacities in countries such as Great Britain and Sweden. The number of acceptable beds per capita varied greatly within the United States, while the overall level was estimated at 3.4 beds per 1,000, including all states and the territories of Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.24 The existing number of beds per capita was quite low in counties with no towns of more than 2,500 residents, where the ratio was closer to 0.97 beds per 1,000.25 The construction subsidies created an investment in the health of the national population in what was one of the most ambitious programs for the development of social capital to date, and it involved architecture. 26 The act emphasized planning and quantitative standards as a means to standardize U.S. hospital facilities, but as Jeanne Kisacky’s hospital history claims, the standards were less about advanced concepts in hospital design than about quickly expanding adequate facilities to more Americans and enlarging the federal role in setting standards.27 The programs tracked “adequate” and “inadequate” beds against a Hill-Burton standard, pushing construction to areas that may not yet have known they needed such care. Hospital historians such as Joel Howell have tracked the rise of technology in hospitals in the 1920s, and Rosemary Stevens has described the policies and medical practices in the long history of American hospitals. Similarly, Annmarie Adams has charted the influence of design on medicine in Montreal, but the curious mixture of aesthetics, public relations, and federal funding deserves further scrutiny.28 The Hill-Burton Act marked a major shift toward a unified federal hospital standard as the fight to raise all facilities—particularly in segregated hospitals for African Americans—up to standard continued through the 1960s. The new national hospital accreditation process was used to sell the idea that hospitalization services were safe, modern, and suitable for an increasing proportion of the population. The New York Times applauded the shift to standardization and explained that the new government accreditation—formerly granted by the American College of Surgeons—would put new kinds of patients at ease about the quality of the hospital.29 The national survey of demographics

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1.4. The Southeast received particular attention for its comparatively low 3.1 beds per capita. Map by author, Matthew Armstrong, and Nishant Mittal using data from Leslie Morgan Abbe, Anna Mae Baney, and United States Public Health Service, Division of Hospital and Medical Facilities, The Nation’s Health Facilities: Ten Years of the Hill-Burton Hospital and Medical Facilities Program, 1946–1956 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service, Division of Hospital and Medical Facilities, Program Evaluation and Reports Branch, 1958).

was a key part of the modernization program. Officials mapped the population and considered the best locations for small rural hospitals and regional medical centers with an eye toward future population dispersal, bearing in mind “recent war experiences with area bombing.” 30 The program involved mapping, studying rural sociology, and working with remote communities to resolve the disparity in hospital bed distribution with a uniform, accredited hospital network for all Americans. The program mobilized new forms of demographic expertise and mapped the population to guide the allocation of funds for hospitals beyond the major centers of the northeastern United States. Ten years after its passage,

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a governmental review concluded that one of the most significant impacts of the Hill-Burton program was the establishment of methods for surveying the demographics and the facilities in a given urban or rural area. Maps of areas served, beds yet to be built, areas of greatest need, and existing resources were drawn and published as part of the federal program, representing substantial new expertise in knowing American cities and counties and their populations. The Hill-Burton standards did not ref lect great innovation in hospital design from a medical perspective. When the Hill-Burton legislation was passed, the state of the art in hospital design was represented by facilities such as Goldwater’s Welfare Island Hospital, which opened in 1939, or Cornell–New York Medical Center—a building with a quasi-deco exterior built by Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch and Abbott in 1934.31 The Goldwater building was designed by Butler and Kohn and York and Sawyer with a series of angled pavilions providing views of the river to all beds, in line with a continuing nineteenth-century trend to consider the orientation of the building for light and air. Both buildings were applauded in a major Hospital Planning manual in 1946, reinforcing the idea that at the end of the war, the most advanced hospitals had been produced before the war. The legislation does not seem to advocate a particular style, though some later pamphlets published by U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) indicate the need to consider that “in a time of national emergency, the quality as well as the quantity of available building materials will be controlled to some extent.” 32 The USPHS published bibliographies of its many publications on everything from how to apply to controlling noise to preventing asepsis through design.33 The prewar hospitals did not fit the style of the modern movement, though when Hill-Burton was passed, the ideas of modern architecture were not new. In 1946 architects and public relations experts were interested in the aesthetic development of steel, glass, and brick hospitals and explored these designs via a competition organized by Modern Hospital, a journal edited by public relations expert Alden B. Mills. Famous modernists on the jury and a majority of winning entries used an unadorned modern style, but cost and community relations were the main focus, and this style was not a requirement for success. One of the awards was given to a traditional hospital, with only a small doubt that it would be cheap enough to build. The high-profile jury consisted of leading architects Mies Van der Rohe, Nathaniel Owings of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and Addison Erdman, along with a hospital administrator, a hospital consultant, and a technical consultant. The jury was chaired by Marshall Shafer, the senior architect of the Hospital Facilities Section of the USPHS. Echoing the overall discussion of small community hospitals, the jury proclaimed that smoothness of operation and cost must be combined with attention to the community. Almost all of the awards were given to low, one- or two-story hospitals with large expanses of glass, ribbon windows, overhanging f lat roofs, breezeways, and

31

1.5. State-of-the-art hospital design after World War II. Cornell–New York Medical Center, a building with a quasi-deco exterior by Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch and Abbott, built in 1934. Charles Butler and Addison Erdman, Hospital Planning (New York: F. W. Dodge, 1946), frontispiece.

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1.6. Plan by Janet and Milton H. Caughey appears as though a cube of space, housing the x-ray, darkroom, pharmacy, laboratory and washrooms, has been excised from the overall block of the hospital and spun out to make space for a lobby in the favorable climate of California. Alden B. Mills, The Modern Small Hospital and Community Health Center (Chicago: Modern Hospital Publishing, 1946), 51.

pilotis. The main entrance was typically indicated as a separate volume or, in the fifth-place entry, with a volumetric subtraction, meaning that a new visitor would be able to find the entry and start off with a clear sense of how to use the building. The plan by Janet and Milton H. Coughey appears as though a cube of space, housing the x-ray, darkroom, pharmacy, laboratory, and washrooms, has been excised from the overall block of the hospital and spun out to make space for a lobby in the favorable climate of California. The plan shows the orientation of prevailing winds to cool the entry courtyard, demonstrating a sensitivity to light and air more typical of earlier hospitals.34 A simple example of “Southern traditional design” by H. P. Van Arsdall was included and commended for its appeal to the local population, though the jury was concerned that the extra cost might not be practical. So the style did not have to be simple, steel and glass, though most were. The biggest barrier to traditional architecture in this case was cost; the building had to look affordable and not wasteful. The first-prize

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1.7. The states prepared and published what one hospital consultant called regionalization plans, showing the hierarchy of the hospitals. Isadore Rosenfield and Zachary Rosenfield, Hospital Architecture and Beyond (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1969), 157.

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winner was estimated to cost a commendable $260,000, or $6,500 per bed, which did not include costs for modern hospital equipment; the jury estimated that equipment would require another 10 or 15 percent of the building cost in most cases.35 The architects also felt that cost was a major concern, and they added to the public relations conversation a focus on legible, affordable designs, though they did not entirely avoid traditional styles. The states prepared and published what one hospital consultant called regionalization plans, showing the hierarchy of the hospitals. A central base hospital received specimens, queries, and patients who would be referred from rural hospital to area hospitals to regional hospitals, in that order. In the 1960s a major hospital architect named Isadore Rosenfield acknowledged that these networks had not come to pass, and the surveys were no longer produced with the linkages between hospitals, merely the population catchment areas.36 The federal vision of a hierarchy of linked hospitals was represented if not actually built, and for the architects asked to fund and design these hospitals, the vision was key. In addition to mapping and standardization, the Hospital Survey and Construction Act was also instrumental in fighting the extreme racial inequality in health care, especially in the rural south, where there were few hospitals for anyone. Black Americans were rarely admitted to the few white-run hospitals; most often they were treated at black-run hospitals, whose numbers had dwindled from 202 in 1923 to 124 in 1944.37 Hill-Burton required equal funding for hospitals where segregation was the law, so hospitals began to admit black and white patients, though keeping them segregated by ward and then by room. The Southeast region lobbied for aid and received the greatest amount of funding, despite resisting integration. The U.S. Public Health Service published a call to architects to help achieve the ambitious goals of the program with an image of one typical small hospital. The single-story building displayed the key features of the type: low rise (often one story), clearly articulated entrance, and wings without significant adornment. As Andrew Shanken has written, the roles of American architects and planners were expanding after World War II in all sectors of planning, and their expertise was being extended to social and even public relations efforts inside and outside of the hospital.38 Because the federal government was not a consolidated welfare state, the U.S. Public Health Service did not just decide to build the hospitals, hire the architects, and carry on with design and construction but asked architects to take on the role of active organizers to work with the community to raise funds. V. M. Hoge, senior surgeon in charge, Hospital Facilities Section, States Relation Division of the USPHS, declared: “The architects of this nation have a distinct and leading responsibility to assist in guiding their own communities into logical channels in allocating material,

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1.8. Regional differences in federal spending with the greatest in the Southeast region. Map by author, Matthew Armstrong, and Nishant Mittal.

funds, and efforts. . . . Proper solution of these problems cannot be made without active participation of the architect.” 39 In turn, the architects would gain a new commission and new skills of working with bureaucracy and public relations. The American Institute of Architects assisted in promoting hospital architects by soliciting names and qualifications and then producing a list of architects who designed hospitals.40 The earlier generation of notable hospital consultants—such as Edward F. Stevens and S. S. Goldwater—gave way to a new group, including Isadore Rosenfield and E. Todd Wheeler. Both architects published books on hospital design, explaining their views and guiding other architects to the creation of modern hospitals. Rosenfield had a master of architecture from Harvard University and taught at New York University and Columbia University. He was the chief architect for New York City’s Department of Public Works and had collaborated with Goldwater on Welfare Island.

1.9. The simple composition of a small hospital accompanying a call to architects to organize funding and design hospitals. “The Challenge of the Housing Crisis,” Progressive Architecture, 1946, 74.

1.10. Rosenfield’s fame was boosted by a competition entry that won second place in 1932, rebelling against the program for a Nightingale ward and using instead a so-called Rigs ward, where beds are turned parallel to walls for more privacy and space. Plan of a typical Rigs or Riggs ward, Isadore Rosenfield, Hospitals, Integrated Design (New York: Reinhold, 1951), 292.

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Rosenfield’s fame was boosted by a second-place competition entry in 1932, a rebellion against the program for a Nightingale ward and using instead the so-called Rigs ward, where beds are turned parallel to the long walls of a ward. As a recognized expert, he was also hired to develop an integrated plan for health and hospital facilities in Puerto Rico, including a nursing home and a biomedical facility for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and he designed several of the hospital buildings as well. In his books, Rosenfield presented model USPHS plans, typical construction details, construction costs, and information for the design of special hospital facilities, including those for radiation therapy using isotopes monitored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. But he also took a humanist’s view of the role of architecture in public opinion as expressing concern both for the patient and for scientific credentials: “The aesthetic expression of hospital architecture should be such that the man in the street or friends and relatives of patients on approaching the hospital should not be intimidated by its officious monumentality. They should be made to feel that their friends or dear ones are in the presence of kindness, consideration, and scientific certainty. These are nice words, but exactly how is this aesthetic accomplished? Different individuals will produce different solutions.” He understood that appealing to the community was crucial and that a well-considered frame could then be clothed by the local architect in an appropriate style, whether Colonial, Gothic, Baronial or Modern.41 Appeals to emotion would require different styles to suit the community, but some morphological constants like sill heights and low-rise, legible architecture were common across the examples. Rosenfield worked to develop and share a typology for the modern community hospital that would be legible to patients, visitors, and potential supporters of the hospital. The creation of legibility would be key to the public reception of the building, inspiring public confidence in the institution by presenting a calm, ordered impression whatever the style. Rosenfield wrote, “With almost no exception, uniform structural bays should be used. If uniformity of structure is permitted to find expression, it will of itself give the building a sense of order, unity, and rhythmic repeat.” 42 In this way, the architect would generate a block-style hospital with horizontal elements of administration, laboratory, and entrance topped with a vertical nursing ward, though in these small hospitals that might be more of a single story than a topping. The architect should work with hospital administrators to establish an appropriate number of beds and services, which should be expressed on the facade. The nursing block should be near the southern-facing clear glass facade, giving daylight to patient rooms in contrast to the opaque northern facade. He compared the typology to an animal that naturally has a “soft underbelly and a solid back.” 43 He advocated the use of spandrel beams to

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allow for floor-to-ceiling windows for best lighting. Removing radiators and placing the heating by the projecting columns yields a clean, regular look and permits the “logic inherent in conditions, rather than emotions, to give shape and character to the hospital building.” Rosenfield was wary of overly tall hospitals with inadequate and expensive elevators, and he warned designers of the dangers of poorly organized floor plans resulting from architects simply “stuffing” the wards with department functions. The design should be as simple and logical as possible, leaving the style to tie the building to its context. The uniform designs that would later seem dull and alienating to the reformers of the 1960s were intended to look peaceful and reassuring. Rosenfield saw the building as a key tool in managing emotions so that staff could work calmly and efficiently and patients could be soothed. He proclaimed the psychological importance of the windows to workers and patients on the inside of the hospital, without much discussion of their role in preventing disease and infection, as would have been common earlier. In a chapter on “daylighting for hospitals,” he described a conversation with a member of the “lunatic fringe,” which he felt was becoming all too common. An engineerinventor accused Rosenfield of wasting public money by designing with windows and balconies. Instead, Rosenfield claimed, this engineer called for “windowless wards; in them a patient would be connected to two pipes, one marked ‘fresh air,’ and the other, ‘vitiated air.’” Rosenfield expected his readers would think it an odd suggestion until they considered the windowless factories produced for controlled manufacture and blackout; indeed, such windowless hospitals would become common in the 1970s. He objected to these buildings, declaring that the Sperry Gyroscope Company in Long Island showed that windows are not incommensurate with delicate work and climate control. Rosenfield explained the crucial importance of the “psychological factor” of daylight and the ability to work where one can see what the weather is. The architect seemed to defend against the charge that the desire for windows was merely emotional, declaring, “whether or not the reaction is emotional is not important” because the problems are real (and perhaps even functional if they impair efficiency). The discontent of hospital staff and patients was an ongoing problem and one that could be solved by simple matters such as windows. Rosenberg called for further data and predicted, rightly, that “in these days when psychosomatics, ‘the emotions that make us sick,’ are gaining increasing recognition as powerful factors in human behavior, the psychological value of good natural light deserves full consideration.” 44 A properly designed skin with large windows and good daylight was clearly part of Rosenfield’s idea of a hospital that valued patient and worker psychology. The architects who answered the call to design community hospitals continued to craft forms and particularly skins that would appeal to the patients

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1.11. Rosenfield declared the crucial importance of the “psychological factor” of daylight and the ability to work where one can see what the weather is. Isadore Rosenfield, Hospitals, Integrated Design (New York: Reinhold, 1951), 151, 293.

and staff. Ten years after the Hill-Burton legislation, an article in Architectural Forum praised a fifty-bed community general hospital for its clarity of program. The article explained that the “horizontal schemes can release the elements of the plan to be themselves” in contrast to the “specious repetition of form” in the larger “vertical” hospitals.45 The Lakewood Hospital in Morgan City, Louisiana, by Curtis and Davis was applauded for creating a form where elements of the program were separated into visibly distinct spaces, thus expressing the various types of spaces of the hospital. The repetitive elements Rosenfield had felt to be calming and orderly were used differently in different sections of the building at Lakewood. The nursing wing, admissions, and service components were to be legible from the exterior with a louvered nursing wing and paneled diagnostic core and with entrance and administration behind an open breezeway. The Architectural Forum article praised the “visual clarity” of the design such that “the plan looks clear, with its three blocks and their central links, because function is so clearly analyzed.” Here, “function” refers to the activities in the building, not the structural function of the columns, spandrels, and beams. The plan’s attention to the human-centered functions communicates their purpose to the audience in what might be called programmatic transparency. Tellingly, the nursing wing is called the “consumer” block, and it is separated from the service wing, where the kitchen and laundry created noise. The entrance wing has a long wall to provide privacy to those in the nursing rooms, who may be engaged in all the private activities of domestic life with the additional vulnerability of feeling unwell. And considering that the patients and community cared greatly about the cost of the building and worried about wastefulness of resources, the article also foregrounded the affordable design

1.12. Lakewood Hospital, Morgan City, Louisiana, by Curtis and Davis. In contrast to the repetitive forms of vertical hospitals, this architect advocated a clear plan, legible to the public through changes in the building’s skin: “Exterior walls express different portions of the hospital: louvered nursing wing at left, paneled diagnostic core, with entrance and administration far right.” Photograph by Frank Lotz Miller, Morgan City, Louisiana. Architects: Curtis and Davis. Hospital Consultant: Jesse Bankston. General Contractor: Caldwell and McCann. “An Argument for the One Story Hospital,” Architectural Forum 105 (November 1956): 119.

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at $551,872.11, or $20.06 per square foot, made even more reasonable with the Hill-Burton “financing aid.” Yet compared to the first prize entry from the small hospital competition ten years earlier, this affordable design was almost twice the price per bed ($11,037 versus $6,500). Aesthetically, it shared the affordable, legible design of the facades, deemed beautiful as well as efficient, and “thanks to a logical floor plan, this hospital looks as well as it works.” In the discussion of hospital form among architects, there was an ongoing aspiration to design buildings that were affordable and legible in line with overall aims of much of European modernism. The calming, rational look was also useful to the young expertise in public relations that was hired to help sell the hospitals to patients, donors, and communities.

Hospital Public R elations Designing hospitals that conveyed an impression of rationality, clarity, and affordability was important because hospitals faced a skeptical public at times. The religious model of hospital care that had long been dominant in the United States had a similar attention to the patient’s soul, reflected iconography that offered comfort, and called to mind religious teachings on salvation as well as influencing the layout of the wards. Historian of architecture Adrian Forty describes hospital wards in France arranged so that as many patients as possible could view the oratory from their beds.46 The community hospitals continued to have moral and religious components, but historian Paul Starr argues that in the twentieth century doctors established a new kind of authority by wearing laboratory coats and other cultural vestments of science. He emphasizes that this was not a rational appeal but a cultural one: in this new era patients would trust science. Calls for a more humane hospital and more attention to psychology indicates that hospital administrators—if not doctors—were looking to use design to influence patient mood through indirect appeals. But first, public relations experts sought a greater understanding of the various publics to which hospitals would appeal. Many worried that the patients posed a true hindrance to the all-important goal of hospital efficiency as well as the financial stability of the institution. Even patients who entered the hospital in a state of eager cooperation might quickly be distressed by the indignities and confinement of the hospital and severely challenge hospital operation. However, learning about psychology could help administrators and staff pay attention to “the psychic reaction” of the patient.47 Noted hospital consultant S. S. Goldwater declared in 1930 that wise hospital administrators would use psychology to gain confidence, increase comfort, and supply items to interest their patients.48 Patients would thus turn from a wretched or even resentful state of mind into a cooperative ally of the therapies.

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1.13. Alden B. Mills, The Modern Small Hospital and Community Health Center (Chicago: The Modern Hospital Publishing, 1946).

Over the course of the 1920s, hospital administrators consulted with psychologists. As early as 1925, journalists called for hospitals to understand that “part of their equipment is the habit of considering what the mental reaction of the patient is likely to be.” To be humane, hospitals must consider the “psychological principles” espoused by “advanced science” of the day, which declared a close relationship between mind and body.49 Patients as well would be easier to work with if management had insight into their minds and the way the environment appeared to them. Canadian hospital consultant G. Harvey Agnew explained to the U.S. hospital administrator audience that it should become adept at the “psychology of dealing with the community. This is an era of advertisement and the devil often does take the hindmost.” 50 Agnew argued that administrators must understand that the patient is “introspective, anxious, and critical; his illness is, to him, the most stupendous event since Noah ordered all hands ashore. He is impressed by minor incidents—a hasty, impersonal and, to him, indifferent or even callous reception at the hospital; an unprepared room; or perhaps the room or the bed itself too cold; apparent delay at time of admission; a lukewarm meal or a curt command.” Agnew and other consultants

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tried to predict and respond to the inner working of a patient’s mind, explaining that the patient’s response to hospitalization is complex and that the hospital must be similarly nuanced in its response. He wrote: “The reaction of a patient can never be reduced to a formula. The hospital attitude must be delicately balanced, a mixture of cold science and warm compassion.” For Angew, there was no predictive formula, though later searches for a cybernetic or diagrammatic response would arise. But for this period the effort was more intuitive, seeking a balance to contradictory needs. The institution would have to be cost-conscious but not appear to be a business or guided by a profit motive. It would need to retain patients and community support despite the necessary confinement and pain to be experienced within. The community hospital would still have the nineteenth-century charitable hospital’s compassion for strangers and gentle exertion of good deeds, but administrators were increasingly pressured to be self-aware and psychologically informed regarding their patient’s emotions and reactions. Public relations was relatively young and not above suspicion itself, appearing under headlines such as “Vast Propaganda Mill Seeks to Influence the American ‘Mass Mind.’” 51 PR men such as Edward L. Bernays thought of themselves as “psychologists,” “engineers of consent” or “liaison officers between business and the mass mind.” These men ran the gamut from inhabiting plush skyscraper offices equipped with teletype hookups at one extreme to standing in the nearest phone booth promoting nightclubs for five dollars a call at the other. Their tools ranged from seemingly harmless press agents trumpeting the good in order to cover up the bad to more misleading efforts, such as Phineas T. Barnum’s promotion of Tom Thumb. Expert public relations surged in the Great Depression, but journalist Don Whitehead argued that the public became skeptical after Henry Ford asked Thomas Edison to reenact his “invention” in Dearborn, Michigan. And yet such orchestrated events of “overt influence” expanded until public relations constituted a “vast new feature of American life.” Whitehead explained that all government agencies employed PR folks to issue a storm of handouts and press releases and that “the federal government itself has become a laboratory for the study of public information practices.” As public relations went to work for hospitals, hospital administration journals revealed that objections to the cold, greedy, uncaring or immoral nature of the institution came up far more often than concerns about the encounter with science and technology. Arthur Charles Bachmeyer, a medical doctor himself as well as former dean of the University of Cincinnati and leading administrator responsible for modernizing hospital administration, declared that “the attitude on the part of the public is a real obstacle.” 52 To manage the image, administrators should first consider the “unorganized public” that walks through the hospital’s doors. Next, consider the importance of maintaining a

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positive, human relationship with journalists and newspapers; a medical administrator may feel “inhibitions” over the issue of privacy and other medical ethics such that they fear to use the media. Hospital administrators should maintain good relationships with government while trying to remove the influence of politics but ensure that when the question of the voluntary nature of hospital finance comes up, the current system remain as it is. Overall, these efforts should both stimulate contributions for the endowments and “encourage the use of the hospital by people previously fearful of institutional care.” 53 Legibility and public relations would be key to the operation of the modern community hospital. The products of hospital public relations included events, radio, television, and advertisements in local papers declaring that they were “on guard for you” and “a good hospital never stops growing.” 54 The first use of television as a public education medium for hospitals may well have been the American Hospital Association’s show You’re the Doctor on WBKB in Chicago on New Year’s Day. The show appeared on 11,512 television sets in private homes and public places around the city at 7:45 p.m.55 In Covina, California, the Rotary Club organized Girl Scout–led tours of the local community hospital along with demonstrations of the new resuscitation unit. Freeport, Illinois, encouraged churches to feature hospital trustees who would speak on hospitals’ value, and according to hospital administrator Leonard W. Hamblin, these talks were “accepted in a splendid way.” 56 Also, a Know Your Hospital Month in Washington, D.C., included discussions about why hospitals lacked funding and disclosed hospital finances. While striving for factory-like efficiency—indeed in order to achieve this efficiency without hindrance from resentful patients—hospitals needed to remember that they were dealing with “minds and spirits” and not just bodies. The public relations conversation suggests that most of the objections to hospitals were due to two things: the “many small deprivations” and the cost of care. S. S. Goldwater, a leading hospital consultant, registered architect, medical doctor, and administrator who consulted on hundreds of projects in the United States, echoed these two objections in a Modern Hospital piece called “On Humanizing the Hospital.” Citing British philosopher Bertrand Russell, Goldwater took a humanist approach and described the indignity of wanting a glass of water and being unable to summon one. He advocated a civilized rather than machine-driven environment because “the silent elbow of the practiced cleaning woman is preferable in a hospital to a noisy vacuum cleaning system.” Putting the focus on human needs, he advocated allowing parents to visit their children in children’s wards despite worries about contagion. Foregrounding these human elements would improve the public’s impression of the hospital at a time when the hospital moved away from “the condescending spirit of the

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charity hospital, offspring of the impersonal and cold-blooded almshouse of old” to become instead a “humane institution” with “noble aims.” 57 Goldwater and others were in search of an efficient, high-technology environment that could also promote dignity by keeping limits on patient freedom to a minimum. Rarely, though, do hospital public relations experts discuss the need to explain or defend new technology, as we might expect. Such worries rarely show up in public relations programs, perhaps because technology was seen as an asset, because small hospitals were not overly technological, because the public was uninterested in hospital technology, or because questions of payment and insurance were more alarming to the public. Other articles focused on questions such as “Why Hospitals Charge So Much,” a December 1947 Cosmopolitan article by Morris Markey to which Modern Hospital published an objection called “Light Up the Truth.” Markey had complained that because “hospitals don’t care about costs and brush off their patients’ financial problems,” the only solution would be compulsory health insurance. The Modern Hospital rebuttal declared Markey’s version so full of errors that one could hardly address them all. Instead, hospitals would have to try even harder to deliver the best care at the lowest costs, regaining the institution’s moral high ground. The journal declared that “the righteous can always take heart from the fact that there is only one answer to the great question of the Areopagitica” and that in the face-off between truth and falsehood, truth wins.58 Hospital administrators should be sure to remain on the side of truth in the face of such distorted articles. For example, hospital jobs were a constant source of tension and turnover; when posting a job the administrator should be honest and simply call it a vacancy. When a position was called an “opportunity to serve,” readers should be able to see that “the difference is more than of words alone.” When the public sees such postings, it understands that the job is simply menial work and becomes disillusioned, so public opinion of the institution suffers. Readers were advised that “the public must not be allowed to develop the skeptical, cynical attitude toward hospitals that some people have toward business, toward unions, and toward government—an attitude that is caused in many cases by the fact that people have been deceived.” Modern Hospital explained that the only sure way to know if you are on the path of righteousness is to follow Saint Augustine and look “to that inner truth within the mind informed by god.” 59 The young science of psychology was not averse to invoking god when the appeal to idealism or simple introversion would speak to the audience. In matters of public image, guidance was not sought from science but from Saint Augustine. If the best way to combat such mistrust is open and overt righteousness, a building of legible design without costly finishes would be of use in that campaign. Architects responded to the challenge.

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Human Factors and Ward Geography The federal Hill-Burton legislation was primarily focused on standardization rather than innovation in hospital facilities. Yet the size, urgency, and collaboration of the program provided an opportunity for architects to take on a greater role in designing for what might have been called in another era a “mass client.” But this client was conceived not as a mass but as an audience of possible supporters and possible consumers or patients. The ingredients of psychological functionalism (or the design of form based on the way it will impact occupant psychology) were all there before the federal program started: functional modernism, a robust and growing study of behavior supported by the federal research economy, and a newly technological place for medical care. Hill-Burton added a giant construction program that brought together a mixture of urgency, fund raising, and the opportunity for buildings to provide an image of modernization. In such a large apparatus, it should not be surprising that this was not done intentionally. The aim was not to create a new subfield of environmental psychology to study the relation of environment, mind, mood, and behavior, much less to advance aesthetics or medicine, but to expand and standardize medical facilities for rural and urban Americans across regions. The Hill-Burton-subsidized hospitals did provide a venue for aesthetic experimentation and consolidation of a different kind of knowledge about the design of environments, which began with the study of interaction between humans and machines in the fields of engineering and factory management. Hospital administrators and consultants had been working with principles of scientific management borrowed from Frederick Winslow Taylor’s research on factory work. Select architects were also interested in these ideas and the work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, and the interest in the factory aesthetic certainly prepared the way for hospital designers to engage. Efforts to rationalize and standardize the movement of workers developed in factories as a means of increasing outputs, reducing worker fatigue, and maximizing profits. As early as 1912, the Society of Training School Superintendents were reading Taylor’s and the Gilbreths’ work on standardizing movement as well as European theories of the science of work that emphasized conservation of the worker’s energy.60 During the war, this research was developed during the study of human machine interfaces in cockpits to extend the pilot’s capacity to respond more quickly, fly without fatigue, and complete more missions.61 Ergonomics researchers studied the human capacity to reach, pull, sit, stand, see, hear, and even defecate in order to design interfaces to reduce the pain of interacting with machines and enable or compel humans to do more work.62 An elite minority of American and European architects had developed theories of function for hundreds of years, but their use of the term was somewhat

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different. In his history of the terms used in modern architecture, Forty charted the development of “function” starting with its organicist meaning borrowed from comparative anatomy and part to whole relationships in animal and plant morphology.63 A bone in the hand would be said to have the same function as one in the whale fin, due to their similar place in a larger physiological whole. The term “function” was then used to describe the structural components of a building as literally, not metaphorically, holding the building up. European and American modernists at the turn of the twentieth century came to speak of the use of spaces in buildings using verbs such as “sleeping,” “eating,” and “bathing,” but American architects did not commonly study the interaction between environment and subject. Forty only attributes the psychological meaning of “function” to the critics of modernism in the 1960s, though hospital architects may have encountered the term in reference to the mental or behavioral impact of an environment on a human occupant earlier in their work with psychologists. Certainly, though, this psychological function was uncommon, and psychological and social problems were rarely considered the normal work of most professional architects until the 1960s or even later. In 1946 hospital architects Charles Butler and Erdman Addison remarked that the hospital was both a “social-administrative as well as a functional problem,” thus splitting the social aspects from the functional ones even as they considered these problems of interest to architects.64 Through the 1930s, the management of human perception or human emotion via the environment was rarely considered to be a part of the architect’s job, and the adjacent fields seem to have reinforced the split. Expertise in human factors was more commonly associated with engineering and management, as these fields sought the most efficient forms for factory layouts. A 1928 manual on Industrial Engineering and Factory Management declared: “The human factor is the biggest single factor in production and must be considered accordingly. These subjects are foreign to the training of the typical architect. It is scarcely possible that he will look upon the task as that of fitting a housing scheme to a production machine—which he has also designed or at least analyzed and checked carefully—so that it will function as part of the machine itself.” 65 Attention to such human factors grew from studies of the capacity of a worker’s body into considerations of the best way to design the environment to promote productivity and reduce accidents and fatigue. Human factors and then ergonomics developed an empirical study of the fit between worker, machine, and architecture with a rapid expansion into the psychological issues of emotion, fatigue, and interpersonal elements during World War II. Using “science” and data seems to have been combined with the long interest in aesthetics, empathy, and spirit around this time. But before the critics of modernism noted by Forty in the 1960s, there was a crossover between factory logics, psychology, public relations, and hospital architects.

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Hospital architects were able to build on a long interest in the impact of design on mood. When Hill-Burton passed, architects were already in pursuit of sound reduction, color, and lighting used in an intuitive way. As readers of the Washington Post learned in 1940, the architects Francisco and Jacobus of New York used “cool subdued shades that will not reflect glare” in southfacing rooms, “while warmer, creamy tints decorate the northern rooms.” 66 The architects—experienced at designing efficient factories and power stations— designed a hospital with other systems for comfort, including soundproofing, devices for “scientific lighting,” and doors that opened electronically so that surgeons would not contaminate their hands by operating the doors. Patients and families entering Doctors Hospital in Washington, D.C., were greeted by a welcoming soft green and walnut lobby while elsewhere visitors and patients were soothed by a peach tint. Walking into the nursery, visitors would view powder blue and rose red, intended to inspire confidence that the babies in these “harmonious surroundings” would have a good start in life. Large firms such as Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM) showed in their hospital work that architects could be in command of the human functions of their architecture. From small facilities such as Little Traverse Hospital in Petosky, Michigan, the firm’s work expanded to steel and glass facades they advertised as offering superior light, as at the Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco or the Shoitz Memorial Hospital in Waterloo, Iowa.67 Shoitz’s 108 beds were arranged along double-loaded corridors, and the service and nursing wings were separated legibly with two patient rooms. Such a bifurcation was intended to prevent infection and noise contamination. The firm explained that individual bathrooms in most patient rooms would help with nursing labor by reducing the need to empty bed pans, and they would also aid healing in increasing ambulation of patients, as they would not have to travel so far to find a shared bathroom. Mount Zion became the paragon of the softly lit patient room, with header heights pulled to the ceiling and sill heights low enough for patients to view the city below, relieving the feeling of confinement.68 In section and in plan, from material to circulation, SOM’s designs reflected the firm’s understanding of the human occupants. SOM’s staffing practices meant that these hospital designers may have quite literally learned about the use of architecture to smooth human activity from the members of the firm who designed factories. In 1952 Owings described how the firm mixed in-house experts from other subfields, allowing SOM architects to learn from their hotel work for making homelike interiors or from their large housing projects for understanding what makes a pleasant space for masses of people. Additionally, he explained how “knowledge acquired in our industrial and commercial work often improves the layout of a hospital’s supply and service areas.” In 1952 Owings advertised that “long before this team draws a line,

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1.14. Diffuse light in the nursery of the Shoitz Memorial Hospital in Waterloo, Iowa. Photograph by Torkel Korling.”Hospitals by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill,” Architectural Forum 96 (April 1952): 124.

its key members practically move in with the staff of the old hospital,” learning from the users of the building from the start of the project. The architects would then meet with the staff and to work out “functions and space needs”; they do not say whether functions included mood, lighting, and other perception-based needs. Next they would create a visual representation to communicate that understanding back to the clients and users, demonstrating that the users have been heard. In their words, “diagrams, f low charts and written analyses are developed for each department, then consolidated into a complete program.” 69 Hyungmin Pai has argued that such diagrams are a key symptom of the large shift in architectural design in the twentieth century, and while it seems that steel and glass architecture was not always tied to this psycho-functional mode, SOM developed both and was celebrated for its work.70

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Hospital architects such as Rosenfield and those at SOM worked on human logistics problems differing from those of an architect like Mies Van der Rohe in substantive ways, expanding the role of architect into new arenas of management via form. In his own analysis of SOM’s legacy, critic Arthur Drexler recounted Van der Rohe’s relief that he himself did not have to design such buildings but puzzled over the idea that the firm felt compelled “to solve the least rewarding problems, as well as the most interesting, that has given SOM its enviable reputation.” 71 In solving such complex, tedious problems of human factors, aesthetics, and medical equipment, the firm developed an expertise as well as representational techniques to communicate that knowledge. These diagrams served as intriguing bureaucratic and aesthetic tools, which made visible a hidden dimension of human and organizational experience. According to Architectural Forum, the firm played a key role in expanding the acceptance of modern design through the sheer number of hospitals built during this period, likely with an unnamed but substantial assistance from federal Hill-Burton funds. Between 1942 and 1952, the firm built $134 million in hospitals; the greatest innovation for architecture may not have been modern design but the successful integration of what would come to be called human factors and logistics as part of the architect’s job. Through the 1950s, the work of human factors continued from factories and wartime cockpit studies to studies of more everyday environments. In 1956 Abraham Maslow and Norbett Mintz published a study that claimed to be the first to use experimental methods to study aesthetics and mood.72 Student researchers were asked to work in three different rooms in the same building. One room was pleasant, one was “average or unostentatious,” and the third was a “disgusting” room with two small windows and gray walls, lit by a single overhead bulb with an “ill-fitting lampshade and furnishings to give the impression of a janitor’s storeroom in a disheveled condition.” 73 Maslow and Mintz found that the student researchers spent more time working in the pleasant room and reported more enjoyment of their research, seemingly unaware of the role of environment on mood.74 In the ugly room they reported “monotony, fatigue, headaches, sleep, discontent, [and] irritability,” in contrast to the “feelings of comfort, pleasure, enjoyment, importance, and energy” in the pleasant room. Maslow and Mintz credited earlier studies of musical styles and hues as well as the formal properties of visual art (line, color, rhythm) but felt they surpassed intuitive research into environment with their study of mood, work, and even perception of the other actors in the room with this experiment. While Maslow and Mintz provided evidence that aesthetics could have a significant impact on mood, other researchers sought to move the application of environmental psychology in hospitals into social interaction and mental processes of hospital patients.

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During this time social scientists published further empirical studies of social interaction, fatigue, and confinement, including a key paper by environmental psychologist Robert Sommer and Hugo Ross published in 1958. This body of research was eventually well summarized in a 1963 paper on hospitals by Sommer and Robert Dewar; the pair applied the theory of territoriality from psychology and ecology to the mental challenges of a patient laying in a bed. Citing Henri Ellenberger’s comparison between mental hospitals and zoos, they described the patient as an animal “forced to remain outside its territory.” 75 Sommer and Dewar explained the history of personal space as first used by David Katz in 1937 for the psychic equivalent of a snail’s shell, or what Jakob von Uexküll would describe as a series of soap bubbles in 1957. Heini Hediger in 1955 and Richard Neutra in his 1954 Survival through Design further developed this theory to show that territory is impacted by the nature of the intrusion. The psychologists used a comparison to birds: a chicken sees an approaching hawk very differently than a passing robin. Writing about humans, Sommer and Dewar emphasized that status comes into play as well. The approach of a king is not the same as that of a beggar. But they emphasized that for patients, the idea of territory is not as accurate as one of personal space, a concept that would characterize Sommer’s work for decades to come. In contrast to territory, personal space is determined by the body and is not tied to a particular bed or chair or room. Personal space is mobile and therefore threatened by limited mobility. When patients were required to remain in a bed and submit to all manner of examinations and procedures, they were concerned about maintaining personal space, leaving the territory of the bed a secondary consideration. Preserving dignity was crucial, and intrusions from lower-status staff were thought to be more troubling than those of the physician. But in general, Sommer called for more attention to the amplification of distress caused by simple loss of control. A patient could become sensitive to environmental discomfort simply because he or she is unable to adjust his or her bed, leave the room to avoid an annoying sound or neighbor, get a drink of water, or lower the shades. The experience could be so amplified in cases where casts and bandages limit a patient’s perceptual space that hallucinations and other mental disturbances could threaten the toleration and course of therapy. Sommer felt that the hospital environment could be tasked with doing more to soothe patient fears and make the staff ’s jobs easier. Few studies of the experience of confinement in hospitals had been done, so Sommer and Dewar turned to studies of space medicine.76 These “isolation and confinement studies” sought to understand the experience of astronauts who faced extreme confinement and to address the fact that psychological considerations were often as limiting as the physiological ones. Through the 1950s U.S. and Canadian researchers studied sensory deprivation and noted

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the incremental weakening of a subject’s ability to perceive reality. On the verge of the Sputnik launch, psychologists at the United States Air Force Base at Wright-Patterson worked to devise appropriate amounts of stimuli from outside and to discern the meaningful contacts with the outside that would help astronauts cope. Groups of two were found to be of great help in avoiding the psychosis and hostility exhibited by Airman Donald Ferrell when he spent eighteen weeks confined in a one-hundred-cubic-foot “space cabin simulator” in 1958. While the distress was intense, George E. Ruff, chief of the Stress and Fatigue Section of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, was confident that if   f ifteenth-century explorers had been able to cope, then astronauts could similarly learn to anticipate and cope with confinement. While his data were eventually entirely lost, the conclusions reached by Ruff were later found to be valid. Ruff’s work inspired Sommer to understand that confinement could result in a situation where psychological distress was so great as to end the mission or treatment. Sommer went on to write about personal space in prisons, explaining how environmental design could cope with confinement. The application of human factors from aviation to hospital environments makes sense in some ways as, like the World War II pilot, the demands placed on mind and body of patients and staff grew rapidly in the interwar and wartime years such that a simplified environment might seem to reduce anxiety. Hospital staff encountered almost as much death, disfigurement, and suffering as the wartime pilot, and while the creation of narratives and environments able to dispel the existential threat was rarely discussed, it is hard to believe it was not present. The hospital’s religious and domestic overtones made the institution rather different from the wartime military environment, and where heroism has been used to soothe technological fears, the hospital discourse was rather more stodgy and peaceful.77 Sommer brought the experimental work to a key early formulation of ward geography suited to hospitals, and he worked with mental health centers and eventually became a vocal proponent of open prisons. Sommer had worked with Humphrey Osmond at Saskatchewan with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Canadian Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Osmond had been conducting avant-garde studies with mescaline and other drugs to simulate the experience of schizophrenic hallucinations. Osmond would also participate in community mental health center design in collaboration with architects. Sommer’s study at the Saskatchewan Hospital in Weyburn started with a geriatric ward designed to combat the feeling of hopelessness that such longterm mental hospital wards could create. Yet Sommer felt that the lighting, air conditioning, and cheerful colors used to improve the ward had unwittingly created “a model ward that effectively discouraged social relationships.” They

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described the “ward geography” created by the staff ’s perspective that “a chair becomes something to sweep around rather than a tool for facilitating social interaction.” Rather than place furniture in homelike groupings so that patients would be close enough to converse, tables and chairs had been arranged to suit the staff. An uncluttered ward did not appear “junky” to the nurses, and it made the staff’s job of cleaning and maneuvering lunch carts easier. The psychologists experimented with a new arrangement with more tables and encouraged the “ladies” to use them, declaring that aesthetics might not be as important as “geography” because “even the oldest sofa or most uncomfortable chair can be used therapeutically if the staff are motivated.” 78 They used square tables to reinforce personal boundaries and placed flowers and magazines on the tables. Both patients and nurses were coaxed into accepting the arrangement; nurses were told to resist the patients’ attempts to move the chairs back to the familiar, secure locations along the walls. Despite the lack of cooperation from some nurses, Sommer and Ross felt they had made an improvement and hoped to encourage others to see furniture design as itself a therapeutic tool. The idea had been of interest to architects, and as the 1960s began, architects like Rosenfield were joined by others who declared the importance of reading and understanding these new studies and the data collected on human behavior. In 1964 architect E. Todd Wheeler began his book on Hospital Design and Function by declaring that knowledge of the human component of the institution was crucial. As an experienced, accomplished architect, Wheeler was in command of many disparate skills, both traditional to architecture and newly social. He had coordinated the tense process of building the federally mandated construction of a chain of ten hospitals for the United Mine Workers of America, he was a partner of the Perkins and Will Partnership where he directed the hospital planning division, and he had also worked with Eliel and Eero Saarinen on the Crow Island School. He was a skillful construction manager and an empathetic writer. Believing in data and standards and a scientifically derived hospital plan, Wheeler also emphasized that beauty is therapeutic. He declared that architects need three pieces of information to design a hospital: “1. What is to be done in the space. 2. What persons are expected to do it. 3. What special equipment and physical conditions are required.” Items 1 and 3 are commensurate with functionalism, and item 2 led Wheeler and others to consider the preferences of the various types of people who would use or support the building. Like Rosenfield and somewhat unlike Owings, Wheeler wrote about the emotions of the public, staff, and patients. “No single description can fully depict the fearful, hopeful, and often miserable human being who is the patient. To some he is a number, to others a beating heart. . . . To himself he is often an enigma, often ignorant of his condition and apprehensive about his prospects, and embarrassed about

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the situation in which he finds himself. . . . The handling of the patient becomes, first and last, the most exacting task of hospital personnel.” Wheeler explained that the architect should design everything from laundry services to the “atmospheric environment,” communications, and entertainment with this emotional task in mind. His book began with three pages on public relations and the importance of public trust, explaining that “the building speaks to the public as often as does the staff, though in a different language.” 79 The buildings that house these unique institutions should be “attractive, dignified, of good quality without appearing extravagant” so as to inspire trust in their management, but they should also be “human in scale and appeal.” He notes a particularly close connection to psychology in the design of psychiatric floors, soon to be open institutions. A new era of hospital designs was beginning, moving from the emphasis on standardization toward more architectural expertise concerning those public relations and patient relations functions of a medical building. But of course, getting along with other disciplines was not easy. Problems arose because the communication between architects, patients, administrators, and psychologists was fraught with misunderstandings. Sommer wrote in 1963 about the barriers to understanding that design was itself a therapeutic tool. He described the role of the architect as translating the requests from hospital staff for “warmth, the human touch, or effective human relations” to form through the architect’s “intuition and enlightened guesswork.” Sommer echoed architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable’s statement that architecture was crucial as a “background . . . influencing interaction and behavior from beyond the focus of awareness.” Institutional environments had a subliminal influence on mood and behavior, unconscious but crucial because this influence was “inescapable,” particularly in a hospital. Sommer felt architects and hospital administrators almost never asked the patients themselves for input, and on the rare occasions they did, the topic was usually patients’ interaction with staff or other patients, not with their environment. Whether patient input was deemed unimportant, too difficult to anticipate and collect in aggregate, or too difficult to implement once a building was constructed or because the intuitive model of design seemed sufficient, Sommer did not say. Sommer and Dewar blamed architects for not attending to social science research beyond “experiments showing the psychological connotations of colors and the old Gestalt demonstrations of optical illusions.” But they acknowledged that psychologists were to blame as well, declaring that they misunderstood the architects. Architects were mostly concerned with building costs, “efficiency,” and building materials, but they were as concerned with the enclosed space as they were with the enclosure. To an architect, buildings were primarily “air-filled volumes that may overlap, intersect, interweave, and so forth.” 80 Psychologists were wrong to see the focus on volume as a concern with contagion taken care of by lines on floors to separate

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clean spaces and dirty space.81 To create more therapeutic environments, the groups would need to work together, understand each other’s views, and learn to apply the latest experimental psychology. The solutions in the block, steel, and glass postwar Hill-Burton-funded hospitals came under attack in the 1960s.

Conclusion Reading the accounts of hospital public relations, architects, and a few environmental psychologists helps us understand the challenges faced by community hospitals. The resulting architecture of legibility and serenity, tasked with soothing patients and communities, may have been more successful in helping to launch environmental design than in defending hospitals against criticism as their regular facades came to be accused of being cold rather than calming. As the 1960s approached, Sommer and others turned a critical eye onto the blockstyle hospitals as particularly unsuitable for psychiatric patients. By 1967 the community hospital was considered to be a prima donna among building types, drenched in tradition but subject to “scientific, economic, political, and social” pressures and undergoing a phase of “mild schizophrenia” but heading toward “healthy development.” In the words of Roy Hudenburg, who had worked with Mott, the institution was personified and psychologized such that “only an intimate study of her personality quirks will permit the designer to clothe the hospital in a successful architectural creation.” Repeating the metaphor, Hudenburg argued that “the successful couturier must suit his design to a woman’s personality as well as to her bones and flesh. Just as he will design in one way for a tall and stately woman and in another way for a rotund client, he must suit one style to a lively, vivacious character and another to a reserved and quiet type.” Historical precedent will not be of use; rather, the designs should be tailored to communities and explore new forms.82 Twenty years after Hill-Burton, a new call for aesthetic innovation would come to clothe a new set of federally funded institutions in a different garb, again tailored to communities and again following federal standards. Within the new aesthetic, the project of environmental psychology would continue with architects as partners in a new kind of research on population and the designed environment.

2 BETTER LIVING THROUGH PSYCHOBUREACRACY? Community Mental Health Centers

In  1963  Robert  Felix, as the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, offered American architects the opportunity to design a new type of institution. That same year, President John F. Kennedy had signed the Community Mental Health Act, calling for a national system of two thousand facilities to meet the mental health needs of all Americans—regardless of their ability to pay. The community mental health centers (CMHCs) were to be more permeable than previous institutions; these facilities would provide psychiatric care on a mostly outpatient basis in facilities located within patient communities instead of remote, residential institutions. The CMHC program’s creators touted their model, trying to persuade their audience that patients and their families would come and go more easily and to assuage fears of involuntary commitment. Felix called on architects, in a manner similar to the USPHS’s plea to participate in Hill-Burton, to create an architectural design for an institution that would become as much a part of American life as the elementary school and post office. 1 The vision of a new federal typology in each community bore traces of a postwar optimism about translating affluence to social good for all Americans, and architects found they could contribute. The larger and longer context of shifting political and presidential regimes seemed beyond their control and, based on their written records, largely beyond their ability to comment. Signed into law only weeks before Kennedy’s assassination, the program was picked up by his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, under Johnson’s Great Society banner. 2 Rather than battle poverty through redistribution, Johnson chose bold legislation and high-profile presidential commissions. CMHCs seemed

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2.1. Proposal by architect Wilmont Vickrey and psychiatrist Joseph J. Downing for a new typology known as the community mental health center (CMHC). CMHCs were to be more open and include more community functions, as evidenced by the children seen playing here among the articulated components of the central building and beneath the massive, suspended volume of another component. Coryl La Rue Jones, ed., The Community Mental Health Center, Vol. 2, Architecture for the Community Mental Health Center (New York: Mental Health Materials Center, 1967), 83.

a perfect fit with his ambition to improve American cities and thereby demonstrate the greatness of the American way of life. Accompanied by a range of other legislation including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Medicaid and Medicare in 1965, the CMHC program aligned with Johnson’s politically savvy if not always earnest attempt to improve the lives of African Americans. What began as an optimistic attempt to replace the abuses of a state-run mental hospital system quickly ran into tensions over funding during the costly war in Vietnam and accusations of unequal targeting of urban and minority populations amid an increasing amount of youth and racial unrest in U.S. cities in the late 1960s. The architects’ ambition to use vivid designs to create a new image of mental health inhabited a social and political context with its own ambitions, only some of which were architectural.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH PSYCHOBUREACRACY?

The CMHC program provided funding and influence to architects who sought to use architecture for social good; it allowed them to undertake aesthetic research and bureaucratic innovation within a political climate that shifted over the long time period required of such a massive architectural campaign. The overall bureaucratic structure was similar to the earlier Hill-Burton construction program (in providing subsidies and the shared goal of equal facilities for all on a national scale), but the forms of the buildings were quite different. Specific forms or even a shared aesthetic was not the result of the national biopolitical aims between Hill-Burton and community mental health centers or within the CMHCs themselves. Forms were only somewhat determined by the increasing influence of psychologists in the designs. The search for psychologically functional environments to manage the psyches of the nation’s population did not have a single aesthetic; rather, it yielded knowledge about (or at least theories of) design and behavior that could be in the background of many kinds of designs. The program was expansive, including all Americans as possible patients in such centers, and enabled the centers to address the most troubled of patients using new forms of drugs and empowered them to engage in talk therapy with milder forms of maladjustment, including alcoholism and family dysfunction. Government-sponsored psychology expanded rapidly after World War II, and the community mental health movement combined psychology with the epidemiological and public health backgrounds of three of the early directors of the NIMH: Felix, Richard Yolles, and Bertram Brown.3 These men believed in a cycle wherein poverty produced mental illness, which in turn produced poverty, and fostered an interest in urban sociology, urban research, and urban policy. The language of the program emphasized its enlightened approach in contrast to the horrors of previous institutions to justify the large federal presence in the mental health of so many citizens. Psychologists at a design workshop sponsored by NIMH explained the link between the new drugs and the new open environment of the health centers: “Community mental health centers are keyed to the reinforcement of human dignity. Locks, barred windows, strait jackets and other methods of physical coercion and restraint are virtually abolished. Tranquilizing and antidepressant drugs are important tools, since they have made it possible for the patient to enter more swiftly and intensively into the open door treatment program and return more rapidly to the community.” 4 The idea of physical openness was an important shift; these centers were mostly outpatient facilities where patients would now come and go voluntarily. The idea was expressed visually as well, contrasting a nineteenth-century Utica crib used to restrain patients into a small space with a new kind of architecture composed of articulated concrete volumes typical of a kind of “humanized” modern architecture. The welcoming look of the building, the arrangement of spaces within, the textures and mood created

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2.2 Graphic juxtaposition of the old and new models of the institution from the NIMH volume on the Rice Design Fete. At the top is a Utica crib, used to restrain patients in the nineteenth century. Coryl La Rue Jones, ed., The Community Mental Health Center, Vol. 2, Architecture for the Community Mental Health Center (New York: Mental Health Materials Center, 1967), 13.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH PSYCHOBUREACRACY?

were to be important tools of psychiatry, continuing a long-standing emphasis on the healing powers of the environment.5 Community mental health centers have been written about as an innovation in mental health policy as well as an extension of psychology into a greater realm of engagement beyond the couch or clinic.6 The idea that the physical environment matters to the psyche is as old as nineteenth-century “milieu therapy,” if not older, and would grow further under the name “community psychiatry.” 7 For Matthew Dumont, the city as a whole was a patient with the overtly political goal of providing mental health to enable participation in a democratic society. Ellen Herman and others have situated these efforts in larger attempts to calm a population and manage a national mood, including the FBI’s ongoing research and training, in Prevention and Control of Mobs and Crowds.8 The tools of the psychiatrist expanded to include education, community organization, urban planning, government administration, and political activism and, in the case of CMHC design, was also a tool to achieve a well-adjusted patient population. But scholarship has done less to examine the role of design, morphologically and aesthetically, in this project of expanding psychology as a tool of urban governance. The architecture was compared to the former restraining devices, but much of the restraint was now in the form of drugs and persuasion to conform with what has been called the “therapeutic state.” 9 Whether liberating or repressive— and in reality they were both—the new practices of community psychiatry were part of larger changes in the way the federal government adopted psychological knowledge to carry out its work of managing, pacifying, and tending to an increasingly urban and in the late 1960s increasingly dissenting population. Philip Rieff, James L. Nolan Jr., Ellen Herman, and others have written of the way psychology gained authority as an intimate way of knowing members of the population, labeling individuals with various diagnoses and explanations, and proposing treatments that would return them to a pacified norm of behavior.10 As Rieff wrote, these diagnoses replace religious as well as political identities with a never-quite-sick, never-quite-well regime of treatment that built upon institutional logics from earlier hospitals, as depicted by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The varied designs for early community mental health centers show an architectural expression of the therapeutic state, a gentle form of power that claimed to be doing good and that many of designers and staff truly did greet with optimism at first. The old model of institutional care clearly needed improvement and new spaces. Felix’s call to architects was only one way the NIMH fostered collaboration between architecture and psychology in creating these new institutions. In 1964 the NIMH appointed architect Clyde Dorsett to oversee the grant application process, a process which included three stages of drawings. Dorsett and the

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Architectural Consultation Section approved forty to eighty projects a year in the first seven years of the program.11 Dorsett also fostered innovative designs through a workshop at Rice University, the results of which were published as a pair of award-winning volumes packed with quotes from well-known architects such as James Stirling and Louis Kahn, as well as those with innovative ideas about human environment interaction such as Kevin Lynch and William Caudill. The workshop paired architects and psychologists in pursuit of building typologies that would fit with particular demographic and cultural qualities of American towns based on what sounds rather like market research. As hospital designers had done under Hill-Burton, but with somewhat more self-awareness in classifying types and certainly with more imaginative forms, architects designed CMHCs to fit the local population. Bureaucratically, the CMHC program built on the national view taken by the Hill-Burton Act in that both programs set quotas based on population size. However, the CMHC program had a key difference: where Hill-Burton aimed at the number of inpatient beds per capita, CMHCs moved beyond beds to the more abstract, performance-based provision of twelve essential services. Also, where Hill-Burton had produced tree-like hospital hierarchies, the CMHCs embraced less hierarchical relationships. The act called for one center for every two hundred thousand citizens, building on the territories established by the U.S. Census Bureau. Because the distribution of centers was based in population density rather than travel distance, some residents in rural areas had to travel quite far, whereas urban areas had many centers. Each geographically contiguous area was referred to as a “catchment area,” borrowing a term from human geography that suggests the population acts like a natural resource flowing to the center, as rainwater flows to a watershed.12 The centers were to be located where they would best complement other “mental health resources” within that watershed, and matching construction funds were only granted if the center fulfilled programmatic needs for a population not already served. Toward this end, the composition of each catchment area was carefully studied as part of the grant application; the NIMH required grant applicants to provide demographic data for the catchment area to be served. Maps of both demographics and existing resources were used in the San Francisco example published by NIMH in 1967; among the values mapped were juvenile court cases, major transportation routes, land use, and the location of urban renewal projects, as well as correlations between income and education and between income and unemployment.13 In this way, the CMHC program was similar to the Hill-Burton Act in relying on long-standing social science tools such as surveys to realize the vision of planning and constructing a national network of institutions to communicate with each citizen to further the nation’s health.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH PSYCHOBUREACRACY?

2.3. Detail of nationwide map of CMHCs. Dark pins mark constructed facilities, light pins mark facilities under construction, and shading indicates catchment areas. A label pasted to the map is dated January 1976. Roni McCarty’s home, Queenstown, Maryland.

The map of the nation became a key representation of the program. Dorsett tracked the CMHC program through a map of the United States divided into catchment areas. Once a grant was approved and a facility was under construction, Dorsett colored the area on the map yellow and marked it with a pink pin. When the building was completed, he would change the pin to a blue one. The image of the map was used as the cover of a brochure about the program called “A Citizen’s Guide to the Community Mental Health Centers Act,” fitting with the importance of the geographical component of the federal program. The use of a national map was an appropriate “poster child” for the program, as it expressed the intent to replace the broken system of state mental hospitals with a consolidated federal system. The demographic data used in the grant applications came mainly from census data, which was then analyzed and presented by a social scientist. Such use of demographics to locate buildings is shared with the large survey that was part of

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Hill-Burton and continued in a case by case basis with the CMHCs. The location and to a lesser degree the programmatic elements of a center were determined by quasi-scientific knowledge, a biopolitical model where the creation of outposts wore the garb of scientific social welfare. The strategy had a seeming innocence or objectivity, relying on data and resulting in a large system that varied place to place. When one challenged the location of a facility, the answer could be justified in seemingly objective data rather than politics. In the case of the Caudill Rowlett Scott project for the Maimonides Hospital of Brooklyn Community Mental Health Center in 1966–1967, a graduate student of the New York School of Social Work at Columbia University prepared data from the 1960 census.14 For the Ryburn Community Hospital in Ottawa, Illinois, an unknown contributor to Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’s grant application created maps that tracked statewide income and population growth by county, projecting the growth to 2020, almost sixty years into the future.15 Before such government programs for collecting data and the availability of university-educated social scientists to analyze the data, the decision about where and why to locate a facility would have had more to do with available land, often in a remote or otherwise undesirable area. In several cases, it appears that data analysis made it easier for applicants to locate a facility in more desirable, more central places, where it could be integrated with a community and easily reached by troubled members of a population. Architects were given an opportunity to share information, to develop ideas, and to focus on the problem of designing within a society whose everyday life was increasingly psychologized. The status of psychologists rose rapidly in the United States after World War II, as did the number of psychologists practicing.16 The rising influence of the NIMH reflects the growing status of psychology, but it also reflects the federal government’s growing involvement in the mental health of its citizen population. Before World War II, the only federal agency devoted to mental health was the Division of Mental Hygiene, an organization responsible for screening new immigrants for mental soundness, treating drug addiction, and providing counseling to federal prisoners.17 In 1949 the NIMH was formed as a cabinet-level agency within the National Institutes of Health, which was itself part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. NIMH’s budget grew rapidly, from $8.7 million in 1950 to $315 million in 1967.18 As the institute grew, the NIMH’s budget and influence led it to conduct extensive research outside of laboratory and the psychiatric institution in an attempt to justify its role and compete within the also-expanding National Institutes of Health. In 1964 a majority of the NIMH’s research budget was spent on work that was not directly related to psychiatry or biological sciences. Sixty percent of the funding went to psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, epidemiologists, and others who studied the broader implications of environment on mental health. Supported by the Great Society agenda to expand what

2.4. The black dot in the southeast quadrant of these San Francisco maps shows the strategy of locating a facility with regard to income and education, income and unemployment, juvenile court cases, and population over sixty-five receiving welfare. NIMH presented these maps as a model for CMHC design. Coryl La Rue Jones, ed., The Community Mental Health Center, Vol. 1, Planning, Programming and Design for the Community Mental Health Center (New York: Mental Health Materials Center, 1966), 23.

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historian Alice O’Connor calls “poverty knowledge,” the NIMH studied the cycle of mental illness and poverty as well as urban and architectural factors related to mental health, spawning a Center for the Study of Metropolitan Problems.19 In addition to those research programs, the NIMH administered the construction of CMHCs, whose presence in the community would include preventing delinquency, alcoholism, and other socially disruptive conditions by engaging with nearby residents. The new site of care was also the result of psychologists’ efforts to extend their expertise to more patients. Following his work with the U.S. Army during World War II, psychiatrist and founder of a famed clinic William Menninger joined the efforts of the professional association of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP), which lobbied throughout the 1950s for recognition that every American citizen had a right to mental health. Moreover, they felt that psychiatrists had an obligation to use their expertise to advance the goal of a democratic right to mental health, thereby carrying “psychiatry out of the hospitals and into the community.” 20 Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry members and other psychologists pushed the federal government to take over from what they felt were ineffectual and backward state governments in favor of a seemingly progressive, inclusive, and democratic program. The group’s efforts led to Action for Mental Health in 1961; the report by the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health was influential in the passage of the 1963 CMHC Construction Act. Internationally, a report by the World Health Organization in 1955 recommended facilities include many of the same elements of the CMHC, such as outpatient services and community integration.21 While professional and political motivations for deinstitutionalization were important, the movement of psychiatric care out of the hospital setting was made possible only by a new class of psychoactive drugs. These drugs had such an impact on treatment that the success of the new mental health centers would not have been possible without them. Introduced in 1955 the drug Thorazine is the most commonly known commercial variant of chlorpromazine, which was itself the product of research on the potential for histamines to be used as a sedative for surgery.22 The drug produced a state of calm and unconcern in patients, allowing many to wake up and begin to speak but also creating the zombielike patient familiar from films of mental hospitals. By the early 1960s, Thorazine and similar drugs had advanced to the point that they made it possible for many patients to function somewhat normally outside of institutions. The biological restraint provided by the so-called chemical straitjacket had a profound impact on the amount of physical restraint the architecture needed to provide, thus making the community mental health center possible. Even those who needed inpatient care could be allowed greater freedom within the walls of the new institution.

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Form Follows Patient Psyche Moving beyond institutional models of care meant moving beyond the remote residential hospitals for the insane, as they were called, constructed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it also meant a clear difference from the psychiatric wards in twentieth-century medical hospitals. The austere, affordable, legible, steel, glass, and brick buildings built under Hill-Burton legislation became an image to be avoided particularly as they had become understaffed and overcrowded; this antipathy soon accelerated as these environments were depicted in novels and films such as The Snake Pit (1948), Titicut Follies (1967), and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962 in book form and 1975 in film). From the start, Dorsett and others focused on the need for spaces that did not feel institutional or hospital-like. CMHC exteriors were designed to respond to the aesthetics of their context and to speak to the demographics of the catchment area. Attention was paid, as it was under Hill-Burton, to creating a welcoming entry that appeared distinct from that of a hospital. Caudill Rowlett Scott’s design for the Maimonides Hospital of Brooklyn Community Mental Health Center tried to match the character and scale of the surrounding environment and thus follow the staff ’s desire that the building be “a departure from anything resembling a hospital.” 23 Caudill Rowlett Scott designed a vertical mass in red brick, at the same five- or six-story height as its neighbors. As was often the case, the design attempted to look smaller than it was “by breaking up the massing” to match the residential scale of surrounding buildings. The strategy of camouf lage is also seen in a design by architect David McKinley and psychiatrist A. R. Foley for a “continuous form,” where a prototypical solution for a suburban environment used a low, sprawling form to match the surrounding environment (fig. 2.6). A few suburban mental health centers simply moved in to locations in strip malls. In the Woodlawn neighborhood in Chicago, a group of psychiatrists affiliated with the University of Chicago quickly realized the importance of placing the center within locally owned buildings and not the medical campus owned by an outof-town landlord.24 Such things sent the right or wrong message, as Dorsett and the Architectural Consultation Service of the NIMH came to realize. Dorsett observed that the book is very much judged by its cover, that the “client group” will judge the facility in accordance with its location and its appearance. The idea of the permeable institution that is enmeshed in its surroundings and permeated by the human geography and aesthetics of its catchment area was not limited to CMHCs at this time. Daniel Abramson has argued that hospitals were themselves moving in this direction in search of a solution to their continual problems of expansion and technological obsolescence.25 Elements of East Coast schools were also turning to more context-sensitive projects behind the

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2.5. Caudill Rowlett Scott’s design for the Maimonides Hospital of Brooklyn Community Mental Health Center. Box 11, Folder 5, Clyde H. Dorsett Papers, Avery Drawings and Archives Collections, Columbia University, New York.

2.6. McKinley and Foley’s continuous form, integrated with a suburban mall and hospital. Coryl La Rue Jones, ed., The Community Mental Health Center, Vol. 2, Architecture for the Community Mental Health Center (New York: Mental Health Materials Center, 1967), 32–33.

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banner of Robert Venturi’s 1961 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. However, the sources cited explicitly by Dorsett and his collaborators focus more on public relations and concealment. The NIMH guidelines illustrated the point with a quote from Museum of Modern Art curator Arthur Drexler’s essay “The Disappearing Object.” In the essay, Drexler described the nondescript space of airplane interiors and hotel chains as the way of the future, contrasted with the figurative design strategies of the Bauhaus. He argued that the object was no longer an isolated, discrete unit emphasized as the Bauhauslers did with singular geometric shapes. Instead, he observed that “the object is no longer a finite thing; it is merely one element in a system, like a telephone, and what makes it work successfully is the coherence of a system whose invisible forces are removed from me in space and time.” 26 Drexler recognized that to design in ignorance of the systems that surround an object was the strategy of a previous age, not one suited for the age of technology, mass consumption, and large social organizations that characterized the postwar United States. Instead of maintaining the illusion of singularity, designed objects should dissolve or disappear into their environment by understanding the environment and satisfying user needs. Drexler criticized designers who continued in the Bauhaus tradition, producing bad design by “naively” trying to make singular objects. Instead, designers should understand that they are asked only to design uninteresting containers and to remember that “what is inside the box is what is really interesting.” The alignment with CMHC design philosophy is clear, not only for the desire to dissolve the individual center into the larger system of psychiatric care, the catchment area, and the social community, but also for the focus on the inside of the container: the human element within the facility. The architecture needed to care for and support its human cargo, or its mission would fail. Architect Kiyoshi Izumi collaborated with the well-known psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond and compared psychiatric facilities to space capsules in which the patient’s personal space was like the privileged tip of a rocket, where the precious “soft goods” of a mission are placed.27 Izumi and others worked to visualize and then design spaces to fit the social interaction between patients, as in the case of Izumi’s scheme for the Rice Design Fete. The scheme was for a prototypical community: a 150,000-person catchment area in the southwestern United States composed of ethnic and social groups ranging from suburban residents to “hillbillies.” Working with Osmond, Izumi planned to create an environment in which such diverse residents could be encouraged, slowly, to interact with each other in increasingly larger groups.28 Izumi’s diagram makes these interpersonal forces visible, and the architecture of a similar facility he had designed the year before suggests that the final form would also make these forces legible. The circulation within Izumi’s plan

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2.7. Architect Kiyoshi Izumi collaborated with the well-known psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond and compared psychiatric facilities to space capsules, in which the patient’s personal space was like the privileged tip of a rocket, where the precious “soft goods” of a mission are placed. Kiyoshi Izumi’s diagram for Rice Design Fete. Coryl La Rue Jones, ed., The Community Mental Health Center, Vol. 2, Architecture for the Community Mental Health Center (New York: Mental Health Materials Center, 1967), 34.

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reflects his idea of the territoriality of the inhabitants, in stark contrast to the uniform, double-loaded corridor. In this Saskatchewan scheme, the primacy of the large circle remains as an echo of the diagram or merely as a symbol of the community in the mental health center. At least in theory, the concern for interaction between patients would be visible in the form of the building via a series of circles translated into radial walls. For CMHC designers the attention to the patient’s social behavior was translated into a close attention to program. The designers often used words such as “humanized” to reflect the departure from the rigidity of the machine aesthetic of the earlier hospitals in favor of what they claimed was a greater attention to human factors of design. Frequently, architects justified a design by claiming that the form reflected patients’ behavior, movement patterns, habits, and anxieties. In short, they sold their designs as producing a close fit between form and function, as manifested in the legibility of the patient’s attributes in the final design. The fit between form and function was mediated through an important document: the program. The NIMH volume on the San Francisco prototype called the program “the first basic document [used to] establish true needs” and then “shape and order them, as environment and space.” 29 The components of the program, such as the number of offices, bathrooms, and so on, were located using the sequences of treatment, then assembled by the architect using other psychiatric considerations such as a prevailing theory that hierarchical, territorial clusters of spaces made patients comfortable and thus more likely to interact in group therapy. The result was a strategy of draping form around the programmatic components, calling out individual treatment rooms, gathering spaces, and clusters of offices to achieve a maximum of what might be called programmatic transparency—that is, the visibility of the shapes of the interior functions on the exterior. Dorsett and his colleagues were aware that the patient’s needs were a moving target, and he wrote that the spaces were “to be individually tailored to their needs as they progress from early diagnosis through a continuity of treatment and back to a productive life in the community.” 30 Dorsett’s choice of metaphor here was not accidental; in many important ways the design of the new institutions resembled the tailoring of a suit of clothes that fit the client’s body closely.31 The architecture of the CMHC was tailored to the architect’s and the psychologist’s image of the patient, even at times differentiating between various stages of treatment. The tailoring of form to program was a psychologically based goal, but it also reflected Dorsett’s and the group’s admiration of the work of architects Louis Kahn and James Stirling. Using Kahn’s words from an interview in Perspecta, the NIMH text reinforced the need for the program to reflect the realities of limited resources and the demands of the various constituencies in

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2.8. Plan by Kiyoshi Izumi for Saskatchewan. Laurence B. Holland, ed., Who Designs America? The American Civilization Conference at Princeton (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966), 306.

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a clear “form drawing.” According to Kahn, the form drawing would produce an architecture with “a proper separation of parts and the differing visual expressions.” 32 In the adjacent margin, a quote from Stirling advocated “the direct expression of the actual accommodation volumes in relation to each element determining the plastic composition of the building. . . . If space can be imagined as a solid mass determined in shape and size by the proportion of a room or the function of a corridor, then an architectural solution could be perceived by the consideration of alternative ways in which the various elements of the programme could be plastically assembled.” 33 Community mental health center designers looked to Stirling’s architectural legibility such as the references in the 1959 Leicester University Engineering School where the auditorium, the laboratories, and the offices were clearly visible as singular, plastic volumes on the exterior. This articulation of program took on a more specific function at the CMHCs—that of making the patient, the government client, and other architects believe that the form would allow the building to attend closely to its mission of psychiatric care. Hallways were a space of particular concern in CMHCs. Designers worked to shape the circulation to suit patient needs, contorting interior hallways to replace the straight, wide corridors of the old institutions. The hallways were a key way to demonstrate the tailoring of form to program while leaving the basic unit of the patient room or treatment room intact. The long, unyielding hallway was flawed from the perspective that form should be tightly linked to program, allowing the expression of the programmatic volumes on the exterior and being responsive to patient and staff flow. Architects saw the long hallways as a problem, monolithic, inflexible shapes on the plan of a facility that they were arguing had a tight fit between form and program. The hallway that persists unaltered by programs, territories, and densities, as well as its external environment, for such a distance not only evoked the monolithic, un-homelike impression of a modern hospital but also implied a certain hardness, unresponsiveness, or deafness to the spaces around it. How could such a form be claimed to be responsive to its human inhabitants and to present a tight fit between form and function? Instead of trying to justify the long hallways, most of the architects of the new institutions chose to use more complex shapes for circulation, more clearly inflected by the program within. Many new hallway schemes were targeted at improving the monotonous experience of the long, straight double-loaded corridor of the old hospital. From the nineteenth-century Kirkbride-type mental hospitals—which had been organized as a series of pavilions along a long spine—to the postwar block-style hospitals, the long, straight corridor had been a central feature, constituting the “ward” on which the life of an institution centered.34 The long galleries were important for ventilation; as extensions of day rooms they allowed patients’ rooms

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2.9. Soft materials in a ward hallway at the Buffalo State Hospital for the Insane. Annual Report of the New York State Hospital Commission (1898), n.p.

to be aired out during the day. Their length also provided an indoor alternative to outdoor walks on inclement or simply muddy days, a concept reminiscent of the amorous galleries at the phalansteries proposed by Charles Fourier and copied in the United States at communitarian utopias in the mid-nineteenth century. Isaac Ray, superintendent and principal designer of the Butler Hospital for the Insane in 1848, argued passionately instead for the single-loaded corridor with windows along one wall to allow a view to the outside.35 But the hallways were not universally loved even then, and the sheer size of these buildings—some of the largest built in the United States at the time—led Ray and others to object to the huge expanse of dead wall found in such arrangements. Nevertheless, the problem was comparatively minor in the nineteenth century, given the width of the corridor as well as the texture and placement of carpets and furnishings in these institutions. The spaces were often more like rooms themselves, sufficiently responsive to human needs to avoid concerns beyond clearing out odors, noise, and so on. This feeling of softness changed in the postwar hospital environment, however, and it was these hospital wards that concerned patients, staff, and architects.

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The long hallways of the postwar hospital were only used for circulation and egress, leaving the hall as a space cut off from natural light with wall surfaces dominated by the regular pattern of doors, opening onto standard-sized patient rooms. Indeed, meeting the requirements of the Hill-Burton legislation basically required a long, double-loaded corridor to promote quick egress of non-ambulant patients in case of fire as well as easy circulation for the gurneys and equipment that came to be a central part of the modern hospital. Unlike the nineteenth-century mental hospital, the mid-twentieth-century mental health center was slick with easy-to-clean plastic or vinyl materials and glossy with new metal and glass building materials. Combining the long, narrow hallway with such disorienting materials was seen as a danger by some psychologists early on, and by the 1980s institutional environment expert Mayer Spivack wrote compellingly of the dangers of combining these materials with long corridors. He described how they exacerbated the problems of “paradoxical images” or mismatch between perception and environmental reality in patients, particularly schizophrenics. Evoking a Tati-esque critique of modern design, Spivack wrote: All surfaces—floors, walls and ceilings—have either been painted or constructed of materials with a highly reflective glossy surface. The walls are the usual hard plaster, slickly painted. Polished plastic f looring stretches unbroken by pattern, and meets the walls without even an edge, curving dizzily up into the walls. The ceiling is like a mirror; it is covered with perforated metal soundproofing squares, probably chosen because of their washability, and painted with a glasslike gloss white. The total effect is that of looking down a gun barrel. Reflections, shadows, silhouettes all stream endlessly down the walls, floor, and ceiling directly at the observer. I found it nearly impossible to keep my eyes focused when looking down the corridor.36

Spivack, putting himself in the patient’s shoes, described a streaming, swirling environment unwittingly caused by the cost- and maintenance-saving material choices in the modern institution. Adding the acoustical problem of such a hard environment, Spivack described the distorted sounds of footfalls and sneezes bouncing along through such a long space. Hoping to communicate the hallucinogenic quality of these spaces, he produced series of photographs documenting various illusions, such as the appearance of a man walking through the glass wall of a vestibule, an illusion produced by a double reflection and poor lighting. He was concerned about the disruptions caused by the light at the end of the hallway, a well-intentioned design choice advocated in Christopher Alexander’s patterns as aiding orientation but in Spivack’s view resulting in multiplied unexpected shadows and a lack of expected shadows. Still more disturbing, these distortions would shift as the observer or the observed walked

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2.10. Spivack’s illustration of the problem where “the sunlight so blindingly contrasted with the dim artificial illumination within that people appeared as blurred silhouettes.” Mayer Spivack, Institutional Settings: An Environmental Design Approach (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1984), 99.

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down the corridor, past an unbroken rhythm of doors. Spivack described what he saw and what he imagined a patient would see: “People had fuzzy outlines, were at indeterminate distances, had no feet, ankles, wrists or necks; they also appeared to float over the floor because of the contrast.” 37 The effect of the materials was the result of good intentions, translated into the choice of affordable, easily maintained materials, which nevertheless resulted in one of the largest problems of institutional environments. The long hallway became almost universally objectionable for CMHC architects. In redlining applicant drawings from his desk at the NIMH, Dorsett often traced in yellow the path of the patient from entry, to reception, and through facility spaces such as interview rooms, group therapy spaces, or inpatient rooms for emergency or temporary care. At times, these paths were long and convoluted because many schemes included the CMHC as part of a larger hospital complex. Dorsett often approved the projects anyway, but the tracings and his comments reveal his concern with the way that moving through the hallway would impact the patient’s experience of the building. Later in his career, when Dorsett produced more developed reports as a private consultant, he would sketch something akin to a Noli plan with only the circulation spaces and a few accessible rooms drawn. The drawing from Dorsett’s report on Augusta shows the hallway as a connecting space with attachment to gathering spaces, waiting rooms or lounges, and poché for the private spaces. CMHC designers also worked toward a literal softening of the materials in the circulation spaces, as at Elmcrest Psychiatric Institute, published in Architectural Record in 1975, or at the Ridgeview Institute in Smyrna, Georgia, thirty minutes from Atlanta. But they also worked to devise new forms of circulation, to eradicate the central hallway wherever possible by contorting, looping, widening, zigzagging, and creating subzones of circulation. Numerous schemes were produced to widen the hallway into a space that could again be used as a room, as well as for circulation. A typical example was designed by noteworthy hospital designer and visionary E. Todd Wheeler of Perkins and Will, who also published two books on hospital design.38 A sketch of the Charles F. Read Zone Mental Health Center, built in Chicago in 1968, showed the central circulation space populated with recreational activities, shuffleboard, seating areas, and a bookcase, all under the watchful eye of the nurses’ station.39 Rather than a sudden transition from main hall to patient room, the scheme marked off a separate zone of space at the corners where the doors to the patients’ rooms were. The overall shape is like that of a pound sign or octothorpe, with subzones for movement along the edges of the main room leading to the corners where their intersection is marked with a column. Elsewhere, in a scheme by architect Sim Van der Ryn in Berkeley, this transitional column was dubbed an “onlooker column” for Van der Ryn’s proposal that an onlooker could stand behind it or

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2.11. Noli-style hallway plan (cropped). Dorsett’s undated report on Augusta Area Mental Health Center, Box 5, Folder 1 Clyde H. Dorsett Papers, Avery Drawings and Archives Collections, Columbia University, New York.

lean on it, thus receiving psychological and architectural support which would make it easier for him or her to observe and then join social interaction in the main space. Whether or not such arrangements would work, the important point is that the comparatively subtle gradations of space in such designs provided a more nuanced alternative to the long hallway, arrived at by designers and psychologists who sought to create an environment to fit their idea of the sensitive and fearful mental patient. When architects and psychiatrists were forced to work within that long hallway, they sought ways to sculpt and soften the space to make it suitable for the new institution. The proposal to redesign the Stone Treatment Building at Topeka, the site of the Menninger Clinic, was even tailored to the patient’s changing mental health. In 1961 a series of influential conferences were held, attended by Richard Neutra, Dion Neutra, and Alfred Paul Bay (who would later participate in the Rice Design Fete held by Dorsett), among others. The architect, Lawrence Good, proposed to repopulate the hallway with modular furniture, textiles, and plants. As expressed in a diagram, reading from

2.12. View of a central lounge space at the Ridgeview Institute, of the same configuration as Wheeler’s Zone Mental Health Center. Private Psychiatric Hospital—Brochure, Ridgeview Institute, Box 18, Folder 25, Clyde H. Dorsett Papers, Avery Drawings and Archives Collections, Columbia University, New York.

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2.13. Populated with figures playing shuffleboard and standing in pairs or alone, Wheeler’s design for the Charles F. Read Zone Mental Health Center shows the circulation space as its own complex zone for activity. Long ward hallways are replaced with shuffleboard and onlooker columns in the corners to divide the central lounge space from zone in front of the patient rooms. E. Todd Wheeler/Perkins and Will, Charles F. Read Zone Mental Health Center, Hospitals 42 (February 1, 1968): 111.

left to right, the patient would move from blue to red to green spaces. Upon arrival at the short-term care facility, the patient would be housed in a blue area in what the designer called “introstatic” spaces: small, personalized areas separated from the distractions of the larger facility. 40 The blue areas would also be highly controlled by the staff. Next, the patient would move to a red area, a space with more flexible furnishings and materials. The furniture was intended to “force” patients to interact with each other and with their environment, by moving the furniture. Lastly, the patient would occupy green areas, “normal in character,” meaning that there would be no proscribed furniture arrangement, and the patients would be responsible for their own living

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2.14. Furniture follows recovery and in turn influences mental health in a diagram for modular furniture that would be chosen based on a patient’s recovery stage at Topeka. Lawrence R. Good, Saul M. Siegel, and Alfred Paul Bay, Therapy by Design: Implications of Architecture for Human Behavior (Springfield, IL: C. C. Thomas, 1965), 20.

habits. The result was a progressive program of therapy, using psychologists and furniture to develop a self-controlled individual using individualized furniture units. Richard Neutra’s comments were influential for CMHC designers given the architect’s emphasis on the connection between environment and human needs. He remarked on the explosion in statistical information available to guide design and approved of the study of mental illness as a means of creating mental health for the community. Good, the designer of the scheme, was president of the Environmental Research Foundation in Topeka and argued that technological solutions were not themselves sufficient. Instead, he referenced Bruno Zevi’s belief that architecture is only created when it is experienced by a human subject moving through its spaces.41⁠ Neutra concurred and applauded the redesign for its attention to human needs, reiterating his belief that “man is the measure of things” and that design must address man’s psychosomatic nature and connection to the natural environment.42

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2.15. Furniture tailored to the middle stage of a patient’s recovery, termed the red stage. Lawrence R. Good, Saul M. Siegel, and Alfred Paul Bay, Therapy by Design: Implications of Architecture for Human Behavior (Springfield, IL: C. C. Thomas, 1965), 31.

Triangular and even hexagonal forms were common in such experimental schemes for institutions. Good explained that the triangular forms were used because the asymmetry allowed a triangle to frame space without the rigidity and closure of a square. In this way, a simple form could produce more flexible environments and more complex flows of space.43 No doubt the triangles appealed to Dorsett and the NIMH as a “fresh and creative” look that would distract from the impression of alienation or even manipulation that plagued long hospital wards.44 The design for the New Jersey Woodbridge State School for “severely retarded” boys and girls used triangular rooms arranged in a hexagonal plan, as shown in a 1965 brochure. The triangle and hexagon produced an alternative to existing institutions, producing an image of warm and domestic “cottages” scattered on a wooded site, integrated with the landscape rather than standing apart from it.45 While the resulting plan resembles a panopticon, the center was occupied by toilet rooms rather than a nurse’s station or other type of powerful central control point. Instead, the radial arrangement produced

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2.16. Plan of one hexagonal cottage at the Woodbridge State School. The aim of the centrally located toilets is probably not surveillance but shortening the hallways, appearing naturalistic on the landscape and simply looking unlike previous institutions. Box A2, Roni McCarty’s home, Queenstown, Maryland.

by joining the narrow ends of the triangles made the hallways connecting the rooms far shorter. While surveillance from nurses’ stations was a common concern, it appears to have been less important than the geometry of the hallway and central location of the bathrooms in this case. At the most personal scale, Dorsett proposed a new type of bathroom mirror that was intended to reinforce the patient’s sense of his or her ego.46 The designers observed that while it is “culturally unacceptable” to linger in front of a mirror in the kind of communal, institutional washrooms provided in a hospital, the patient needs to do so to produce a coherent image of self. Because it would not be practical or safe to provide psychiatric patients with private bathing facilities, the alternative proposal was to redesign the mirror. The mirror was curved

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to create a surface on which patients would see “a visual image of space—a volume enclosing the user,” allowing them to linger. From the welcoming image on the exterior to the intimate design of a bathroom sink, community mental health centers sought to tailor forms to a theory of patient psyche. Under the umbrella of a massive federal program, design research explored a new building type and devised new strategies for patient-oriented design.

The Specialist Architect Rather than confirming a history of architecture in which one architect (or even a single firm) is clearly the author, CMHC architecture involved complicated authorship typical of large organizations. In almost all cases, a partnership between psychiatrists, social workers, and architects was central to the design process. On the architects’ side, two or more architectural firms were often involved in the same project, as at Maimonides in Brooklyn where Caudill Rowlett Scott was the consulting architect, Kahn and Jacobs was the project architect, and Kaplan was the project manager. 47 In addition to partnerships between firms and between architects and social scientists, the community mental health centers were shaped by Dorsett from a distance through legislation, funding, and paperwork. He called himself a “specialist architect” and described his work as formalizing the ideas of others, putting the new knowledge from institutional design and management of community mental health centers into the right hands, where it could be used to build treatment centers.48 Dorsett gained operational skills in the same way as many of the so-called organization men of his generation by watching the logistical expertise of the U.S. military under high-stakes wartime operations. He served in the military during World War II, participating in the Normandy invasion and other combat operations with the army in Europe. For his service, he received two Bronze Star Medals. 49 After the war, he completed a bachelor in architecture from North Carolina State University in 1953 and went on to design small, modern schools using innovative prefabrication methods in North Carolina. In 1963 he completed a master of science in hospital architecture at Columbia University, where hospital and public health planning and design was one of four options in the master of science in architecture, along with central business district design, general program, and urban planning.50 At Columbia, Dorsett prepared a detailed study of an existing hospital in the Bronx, as well as a tower design for an urban hospital, which was later published in the journal Hospitals, along with a classmate’s more sprawling design.51 One of the main ways Dorsett influenced the forms of mental health centers was through changes in building code. In line with a larger shift toward specifying performance rather than dimensions, he worked to change the way mental health centers were classified as less like hospitals and more like communal

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2.17. Clyde Dorsett described himself as a specialist architect. “Community Mental Health Centers Team, Everyone’s in a Different Game,” P.H.S. World (May 1966), 26, Box 4, Folder 01, Clyde H. Dorsett Papers, Avery Drawings and Archives Collections, Columbia University, New York.

living environments. Building codes are written assuming that occupants will react to scenarios such as fire in ways similar to past behavior, with past calamities written into the shape of future structures. They map the movement of fire through combustible material assemblies, but they also map the movement, or lack of movement, of human occupants toward exits under urgent conditions. Dorsett explained that it was no longer common for patients to be confined to their beds in community mental health centers as had been the case with patients who were restrained or otherwise unable walk. He argued that continuing

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to follow the Hill-Burton regulations for hospital accreditation (primarily regarding the “life safety” of the occupants) would yield an overly clinical or institutional environment. In these hospital codes, the stairwells needed to be enclosed, and hallways needed to be wide, long, and unencumbered with the kind of furniture he admired in the Topeka case study. His efforts were successful, and by 1970 the surgeon general affirmed the ambulatory nature of community mental health center patients, shifting the code to accommodate the vision of community psychiatry in a lasting and widespread way.52 Shifting the code was challenging and only one part of creating guidelines for a new type of institution; Dorsett and his team’s Planning Aid Kit (PAK) and collaboration with Christopher Alexander’s patterns also helped disseminate architectural ideas. Dorsett led an NIMH group known as the Architecture Consultation Section, which included a small staff of one architect and a few junior designers who struggled to approve the many drawings during the peak years. To extend their influence, they worked with the National Bureau of Standards to create something in line with the work on “performance specification techniques” already being done with exterior wall assemblies in units for the Federal Housing Administration and for offices in federal office buildings.53 They theorized a gradient from concrete criteria, such as requiring particular hardware, to more abstract criteria, such as “requesting performance,” and noted that on the abstract end of the spectrum new challenges arose. The creation of meaning or a calm mood might be a performance request, phrased in terms of what the environment needed to do rather than what it should be made of. Questions of performance were inherently complex as well as subjective, and the authors sought a mechanism that would avoid the usual politics, where the outcome was defined by whoever was making the list. The task appears to have been significant and undertaken with the good intentions of avoiding institutionalized environments as well as translating the many intimate, emotional, political, and aesthetic needs of staff, patients, families, and the NIMH into a form that could be used in many institutions. The ambition was to create a code that would keep patients safe, provide healing, and eventually replace large parts of building code but that would be flexible enough to allow different communities to create buildings to suit them. The result was a tool that collected the personal hopes and fears of patients, their families, and the staff to be used as a demonstration of care while having little effect on mental health or politics. It had already become evident in the work with housing that some performance requests were too open-ended, and while it seems that basic functions should have been clear enough, many of the government’s goals for such environments included the ambition that residents should “identify” with the “place.” The Planning Aid Kit, which resulted from the NIMH’s emphasis on community psychiatry, was an attempt to navigate this complexity. The kit was

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2.18. Paperwork as a tool of the architect to demonstrate attention to user preferences. Planning Aid Kit, Box 19, Folder 1, Clyde H. Dorsett Papers, Avery Drawings and Archives Collections, Columbia University, New York.

described as a “formal explicit way” to help participants “to inform each other.” The kit led in stepwise manner from uniting the participants, articulating the problems, and selecting courses of action (such as rehabilitation or custodial care) to listing the necessary activities and performance characteristics, or PCs that the environment needs to provide. The nine main PCs were described as gradients of psychological functions, including commonality to privacy, familiarity to remoteness, or ambiguity to legibility.54 An environment could be specified as providing a degree of the performance characteristic “sociopetality” to “sociofugality” following a common theory that spaces can encourage gathering (sociopetal) or push people apart (sociofugal) borrowing terms from physical science. Through meetings and paperwork, architecture researchers devised new tools of psychological bureaucracy for design. Dorsett’s effort was informed by an ongoing conversation among architects seeking universal, social science–based solutions. Two such groups were the Environmental Design Research Association, which published the PAK in its initial volume, and the Design Methods Group, whose membership included Christopher Alexander, who also published Dorsett’s ideas in his book of “patterns.”

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Dorsett and his staff distilled their ideas about architecture and behavior into “patterns” that allowed them to influence many projects at a distance as required by overseeing such a large construction program. Learning from the experience of evaluating forty to eighty projects a year, Dorsett and his team developed some frequently used design solutions for problems of entry, waiting, and creating the right mood through architecture. His notes and reports often reference letter-sized sheets with “patterns” that could be sent along with the reviewed drawings to communicate to the project architects. The ideas were eventually formalized and published by Alexander in 1973, spreading these ideas about institutional design from CMHCs to a wider audience. Alexander’s 1977 book A Pattern Language presented his theory of architecture as a collection of moments and spaces that could be mixed and matched to produce meaningful environments. After starting his career with the Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard and MIT in the 1950s and 1960s, Alexander moved to the West Coast and in 1967 established a Center for Environmental Structure at the University of California–Berkeley with support from Edgar J. Kaufmann of the National Bureau of Standards.55 Where other systems thinkers were mainly concerned with grammar and form, Alexander had a humanist interest in meaningful environments that fit well with the softer goals of the NIMH program. In 1971 and 1972, he was directly involved as a consultant in the design of a community mental health center at the Stanislaus County Hospital, located in California’s Central Valley, along with project architect Nacht and Lewis. Alexander and Dorsett may have met at that time but had likely known of each other longer, they also shared a contact through Friedner Wittman, who worked for both architects and who stated the importance of the patterns to the bureaucratic expertise of the CMHC designer or specialist architect. Wittman had worked with Alexander on The Timeless Way of Building as part of the Center for Environmental Structure, and later he assisted Alexander in getting a grant from the NIMH’s Center for the Study of Metropolitan Problems.56 He had also been the West Coast representative of the ACS, but by the 1970s he had been sent to the NIMH’s Facilities Engineering and Construction Agency as the CMHC projects slowed. In a report addressed to Robert Wakefield, the head of the NIMH’s Center for the Study of Metropolitan problems, Wittman described the patterns and testified to their utility for the work that the Architectural Consultation Section had done. He wrote, “We feel dissemination of the Patterns to governmental agencies and applicants could greatly reduce the need for architectural consultation site visits, and would make available continuously the expertise we now provide in one- or two-day visits or by letter / telephone.” 57 Wittman’s remark was a junior architect and bureaucrat’s attempt to justify a research apparatus to a government agency; perhaps that context trumped any

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loyalty to the ACS or architecture as a profession, as he indicates here a reduced need for architectural labor. After all, the publication of the system of knowledge would save the NIMH and other government agencies considerable expense for travel and salary. Wittman’s remark is also evidence that Alexander’s type of systemization was being framed as a competitor to design knowledge, making it more understandable that some architects felt Alexander’s transferable knowledge and other variants of social science–informed design constituted a threat to their interests. Certainly, federal agencies’ specialist expertise was not the same as each designer’s creating solutions one at a time. Instead, Dorsett, Alexander, and Wittman focused on the particular points of pain in the experience of visiting community mental health centers, devoting attention to designs that would calm visitors and staff. In A Pattern Language, Alexander thanked Dorsett for a pattern called “Reception Welcomes You,” focusing on a part of the building that designers of community hospitals and community mental health centers found crucial to the overall vision of the new typology. The pattern pointed out and responded to the tendency for large public buildings to make humans feel like objects in that they are “processed by the receptionist as if you were a package.” 58 In these patterns, the institutional experience was used as a model of what not to do, and the knowledge gained in designing community mental health centers was codified into Alexander’s architectural manuals. Dorsett often attached copies of the relevant patterns to his reports, using the 1968–1970 versions that were being developed by Alexander and the Center for Environmental Structure.59 Dorsett emphasized the importance of creating a homelike environment, which he believed could be communicated to the patient by stretching out the transition from exterior to interior at the main entry. He believed a gradual transition would produce a sense of arrival and a desire to linger. In an undated report on the Augusta Area Mental Health Center, Dorsett used language similar to that of the entrance transition pattern, but he supplied his own prototypical plan to direct the architects. He encouraged architects to change the patient’s approach path and to produce changes between light and dark using a covering over the walkway. He also recommended a change of paving patterns, so that the patient would feel a sense of arrival. This language is similar to Alexander’s but contains Dorsett’s comments specifically referencing the applicability to the community mental health center environment (fig. 2.19). Other patterns attached to CMHC reports concerned the position of the coffeepot, the process of getting information from the receptionist, and the anxiety of sitting and waiting in a lobby, with references to the bureaucratic terror of this experience as conveyed by Franz Kaf ka in The Castle and The Trial. The pattern on waiting cited a 1966 study on welfare recipients’ views of the bureaucratic system.60 Alexander and his collaborators encouraged

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2.19. “Augusta Area MHC, University Hospital, Augusta, Georgia,” Dorsett Consultation Report, Box 5, Folder 1, Clyde H. Dorsett Papers, Avery Drawings and Archives Collections, Columbia University, New York.

2.20. Diagram of “Free Waiting” that gives the impression of choice by locating activities near the people who are waiting. Pattern for Free Waiting, Environmental Patterns Kit, Series II: Professional Papers, Box 17, Folder 6, Clyde H. Dorsett Papers, Avery Drawings and Archives Collections, Columbia University, New York.

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architects to remember that seemingly endless waiting has a “deadening effect on people.” A diagram showed how waiting areas should be placed within sight of the interview location, with reading material and other activities nearby (fig. 2.20). Ideally, the waiting space would provide a feeling of freedom, with an area for walking around that could also be used by those who are not waiting. The presence of such people would make the wait less oppressive and seemingly more voluntary. Essentially, these bureaucratic architects and programming experts were in search of forms that would fit a psychologized understanding of institutional architecture with its need to handle patients as well as consider their experience. The result was a set of innovations that treated psyche as a management problem. Dorsett’s evaluations often included his own bubble diagrams, which were similar to those made by Izumi, Caudill, and others. Through these diagrams, PAKs, and patterns, they expressed the fit between the activities of the institution and the spatial envelope that housed it. An example of such diagrams as visual communication of psychology and architecture is seen in the admissions diagram produced for the Southern Nevada Psychiatric Facility (fig. 2.21). The diagram describes important adjacencies for processing a “client” or patient, including places to bathe incoming patients, lockers for storing their possessions, interview rooms, and a recommendation for a specific “shelf-type desk,” all under the watchful symbol of an eye at the control room. In an institution, the flow of documents through the space is almost as important as the flow of patients, and the diagram also identifies an important location for a secure pass-through for patients’ records. The admissions diagram is tailored to a specific flow; the architecture should accommodate the processing of one to four patients—at most two at a time—and the process should last from an hour to an hour and a half. The architect recommended that the configuration should “make the admissions experience for the arriving client comfortable, informative and safe.” The environment should be “bright (well lit), clean,” but also “secure, nonbreakable, [with] no sharp edges,” along with the ever-present request for good ventilation. From ventilation to soft materials, from a smooth admissions sequence to the careful coordination of patient interaction, the architecture of the permeable institution was at the forefront of new techniques for housing and healing a population that would rather be elsewhere. The forms and the diagrams present a pragmatic view of architecture: it is less about the appearance of the facility than the way the arrangement of partitions can facilitate the chronic use of the environment. The key feature of such diagrams is utility as an instrument rather than resemblance to a built reality as a plan or section might show. These diagrams, kits, and patterns are definitely instruments, recommending and communicating the arrangement of components that will work best for the smooth and gentle treatment of the patient.

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2.21. Detail from a page of the Matrix for Admissions/Intake Activity for the Southern Nevada Psychiatric Facility Forensic Program, showing a diagram of “plan relationships,” inverted by author. Box 9, Folder 38, Clyde H. Dorsett Papers, Avery Drawings and Archives Collections, Columbia University, New York.

By the 1960s, with the growth of architectural programming at the hands of Caudill and the like, design was increasingly concerned with the elaboration and choreography of such abstracted spatial bubbles. Such architecture was tailored to the goals of the social institution it housed, which acted within a national bureaucracy and functioned as a large mechanism to house and manage yet smaller units. By visualizing the invisible—social forces, territorial hierarchies, and flows of people and objects—the diagrams eased communication in the large bureaucracy and incorporated abstractions into a discursive format. Dorsett was able to produce diagrams to direct applicants about best practices, and applicants were able to convince Dorsett and NIMH of their responsiveness to psychological factors.

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Conclusion Despite the significance of its goals and the new institutional typology proposed, the CMHC program had many critics and failed to create the kind of change its proponents hoped for. The avant-garde schemes for a new, enlightened mental health care typology were not realized, though not due to a lack of architectural inventiveness. The program lacked adequate staffing grants for years, and because a certain bureaucratic expertise was needed to apply for the funding, the lowest-income areas did not receive assistance. The system also faced accusations of attempted social control under the ostensibly innocent idea of mental health. Given the late 1960s context of racial tensions, urban riots, and the targeting of CMHCs at low-income, often urban and minority populations, the use of drugs made many people uneasy. Psychoactive drugs internalized the architecture of restraint, altering the internal environment of the patient’s mind and allowing the external architecture to persuade rather than contain. In a sense, the drugs made it possible for the environmental controls to be dissolved into the individual patient’s brain chemistry. Unsurprisingly, the internalization of control was frightening, particularly by the late 1960s and early 1970s as criticisms of psychiatry generally—and the CMHC programs specifically—grew.61 In 1968 Kenneth Keniston published an essay, “How Community Mental Health Stamped Out the Riots (1968–1978),” chronicling a fictitious “Operation Inner City” that followed a strategy of total saturation of psychological experts to stop the riots once and for all.62 In 1969 psychotherapist and New York University associate professor Chaim Shatan published a critique of community mental health, arguing that the growing emphasis on preventive psychiatry would lead psychiatrists to be more and more involved in social control. He accused the CMHC program of using management techniques instead of seeing many disorders as behavioral adaptations to larger social and class issues.63 The federal program was also subject to national and international politics; Lyndon Johnson won his fight against Barry Goldwater in 1964, but the struggle left its mark as the president chose to devote more resources to the geopolitical struggle in Vietnam. Facing a lack of public faith, growing New Left movements among the youth, and organized movements for racial justice, he found it harder to hold onto the power to push through his domestic policies. When Johnson lost the election in 1968, efforts to extend CMHC funding had to go through two Republican presidents, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. President Jimmy Carter took on the issue of mental health and crafted a new bill, but his legislation was vulnerable, and in 1981 Ronald Reagan passed a version that dismantled the funding into state-by-state block grants, losing the force and vision of the program.64 As with other social legislation, the aid was broken down into segments for various groups, and no leadership could assemble consensus to

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keep the program going. Some CMHCs remain but without the architectural vision of the early program; instead they mainly inhabit buildings that look as any other office might. After an optimistic beginning and two solid years of construction, construction tapered off after 1967. With the first phase of construction closing, the NIMH increasingly renovated existing facilities rather than building new ones. Moreover, the NIMH’s mission shifted to include an even larger range of services, including corrections, child care, drug abuse, alcoholism, and elderly services.65 The ACS was also transitioning, having gone through a program where they trained the newly created Facilities Engineering and Construction Agency, now tasked with administration of construction funding and supervising construction within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Wittman, who had been in charge of the western arm of the ACS, moved over to the Facilities Engineering and Construction Agency. Dorsett and the ACS were now primarily concerned with “problem” CMHC projects and with the dissemination of mental health facility information that had come from their own work. Dorsett described the ACS’s new role of serving as a kind of “clearinghouse” for architectural information rather than paying close attention to individual designs.66 After 1970 the growth of CMHCs slowed drastically, and in 1972 Dorsett found enough time on his hands that he applied for a sabbatical to continue developing forms and other planning kits that the Facilities Engineering and Construction Agency and others could use for meetings with user groups. In 1972 Dorsett described the funding for CMHCs as at a “low ebb.” 67 By 1973 there were only 493 federally funded CMHCs, and not all of those were fully operational. By 1975 603 had received some funds, but only 507 were operational.68 In 1973 the initial period of funding came to an end, and it was not renewed. After that time, most of the CMHC’s proponents—and the specific organizations that had worked for the program—were reabsorbed into the larger NIMH or moved off into private consulting. As the funding for ACS and the CMHCs dried up, Dorsett, Wittman, and even Leonard Duhl, who organized and led a group of architects and psychologists, did not cease work. They merely turned to private consulting, consulting for international organizations, prison-related work, or academia. In 1980 Dorsett left the NIMH but maintained his role as architectural consultant, expanding into private consultation. He was hired by the World Health Organization and the U.S. Agency for International Development in Grenada, West Indies. The fact that Dorsett continued his career as a private consultant reinforces a classic American narrative of the privatization of formerly government affairs in the 1970s, as does his involvement in prison reform following his research on psychiatric care. The architecture of CMHCs was simultaneously a fascinating example of the development of architectural knowledge under favorable political conditions

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and a cautionary tale of architecture’s presumption, its desire to do better. While a new typology was not created, several methods and design strategies were carried forward in other typologies, particularly the studies of open prisons by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Community mental health centers persist in unremarkable buildings throughout the United States where it seems every few years someone suggests novel designs could smooth the process of adjusting mental health—somehow not realizing that this has already been tried. After the optimistic programs of Johnson’s Great Society floundered with reduced funding and were eventually almost entirely dismantled by Presidents Nixon and Ford, social science and architecture research increasingly focused on crime and prison reform.

3 OPEN PRISONS Dematerialization of the Building but Not the Architect

The  design  for  a  prison  w ith glass walls at Leesburg, New Jer-

sey, began with concerns over increasing prison riots in the 1950s. Architect Jordan Gruzen remembered the design as a personal crusade that was eventually held up as a model through the 1970s. Gruzen and others thought that a more open facility, literally a series of glass houses, might reduce the throwing of stones. This glass prison became a touchstone for architects, psychologists, and critics such as Ada Louise Huxtable, who hoped architects could use their recently established expertise in environmental psychology to advocate for more humane designs. The community mental health center construction program and other similar anti-institutional efforts seemed to offer an opportunity to rethink imprisonment in light of new research as some of the same experts turned from one typology to the other. Riding the ongoing tide of deinstitutionalization, architects sought to prove their relevance and their ability to address the large social questions of the time. Confronting prison design pushed architects to acknowledge their relationship with power, though many found the topic unpalatable and sought other directions for their work. In the 1960s, the profession and discipline of architecture were under attack by those who felt the field was irrelevant. Many of architecture’s attempts to address larger social concerns—such as the Museum of Modern Art’s 1967 show studying Harlem—were marked by criticism over the profession’s irrelevance.1 These critics felt that architecture had failed to participate in a meaningful way in the waves of revolution and reform sweeping the postwar globe. Architecture had yet to find its place in the social science research economy with its many social and economic applications.2 In schools of architecture from Princeton and Yale to Michigan and Berkeley, students were often at the forefront of the

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drive to revise the field to be more relevant and more scientific. Amid student protests of the war and the curriculum, architecture educators sought to reframe the field to give students more relevant skills for the future. Architects tried to use their knowledge of psychology and mood to create a new type of open prison and perhaps most importantly to continue to advocate for a new role and relevance for architects as experts in environmental psychology and design. The rapid expansion of prisons in the United States was not the subject of optimistic legislation, as postwar hospital and mental health center expansion had been. Instead of a consolidated effort to update the regulation of facilities and find new forms, prison reform was a spurred by financial incentives from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. The LEAA was the result of President Lyndon Johnson’s task force on criminal justice, which recommended the 1968 Safe Streets Act. Part E of the 1970 Omnibus Crime Control Act set aside funding for innovative prison facilities and programming, and the LEAA spent $251 million between 1970 and 1973.3 Though not a single construction program, the LEAA effort was similar to the earlier hospital and mental health center construction programs in that the funds were to be a partnership between federal money and the applicant organizations. In this so-called franchise state model, the federal government set the agenda and guidelines, then smaller groups with the desire and skills to do so would make use of the opportunity, lured by financial incentives or a desire to do good or both. A central clearinghouse was established at the University of Illinois Architecture Department, giving power over the use of funding to a group of experts outside of the formal government. Directed by architect Fred Moyer and sociologist Edith Flynn, the National Clearinghouse for Correctional Programming reviewed around 370 projects in its first two years, awarding funding to only a few. In 1973 Architectural Forum published a prototypical design with a double-height interior “street” under a triangular roofline with an asymmetrical window. A rendering showed offenders talking or reading the paper and a disabled offender or visitor in a wheelchair in a leafy environment that could easily be mistaken for a shopping mall. Underground and attached parking might indicate a sally port for an architecture of security, though this element is not incommensurate with shopping mall architecture either. Architects, psychologists, and prison experts such as Robert Sommer looked at the closing of remote psychiatric hospitals and their replacement by

3.1 (opposite page). A prototype design by the LEAA Clearinghouse showing a welcoming prison with a greenhouse-like interior street; offenders talk and read the newspaper, looking down from a second-story dayroom on a space not too different from a shopping mall. Suzanne Stephens, “Pushing Prisons Aside,” Architecture Forum 138, no. 2 (March 1973): 50.

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CMHCs as a partial success story that could be duplicated by replacing prison facilities with a similarly open and nonresidential network of rehabilitation spaces. Sommer was himself involved in both typologies starting in 1958 when he had been one of the first to publish a study of “ward geography,” as he called it, observing the placement of furniture in a geriatric ward for the way it influenced patient behavior. In 1969 he published Personal Space as a quasi-scientific theory that the best way to design taverns, airports, and housing would be informed by psychological research as well as by studies of animal behavior. He was critical of institutional environments and the lack of freedom afforded by fixed seating, but his optimism about a solution remained. In 1971 Sommer undertook a study of prison design funded by the LEAA; his next book, Tight Spaces: Hard Architecture and How to Humanize It came out in 1974 bearing the traces of that experience. He was even more critical of institutional architecture in these later books, and one can see how he had learned from his own LEAA funded research on prison design. In both Tight Spaces and an article, “Security State of Mind,” he diagnosed the shift in environmental design from a focus on occupant well-being to a confrontation with others in one’s neighborhood.4 He warned of the toxicity created when neighbors are seen as enemies; he worried that such perceived threats from within groups cause anxiety and internalized pathology. He acknowledged that designers and administrators may think that using such tactics makes urban and institutional environments easier to control. But he emphasized that he had seen no evidence that the hard architecture works, while he was aware of ample evidence of the cost to occupants. As an example, Sommer described the preparations for President Richard M. Nixon’s inaugural parade route, which had included spraying the trees with a bird repellent so that the motorcade would not be splattered with droppings. The fact that birds would be unable to roost in these trees for two years was only a problem for the birds and of no concern for those whose focus was the president’s embarrassment.5 Sommer and other psychologists and architects had been less critical during the studies of hospitals and mental health centers, untroubled by the idea that power could achieve its ends with less cost, less rebellion, and less controversy through design. The good intentions of institutional power seemed safe when explored in the studies of confinement, isolation, and fear that would be ameliorated by new psychologically informed hospital design or the conversion of remote residential mental hospitals into welcoming treatment centers. There were critics among patients and the public, but few were architects or psychologists, most of whom seemed to approve of enabling hospital patients and mental patients to enter such buildings without fear. These experts seemed to agree that it was for the good of the many to have patients cause less trouble in flailing and fleeing and to accept the use of design as a seemingly innocent agent of power in contrast to nurses or orderlies, whose use of physical restraint

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was more likely to be abusive. But in prison design, the role of the institution as a tool for power became harder to avoid, and savvy architects crafted a more self-aware role for themselves. Sommer described the group of psychologically oriented prison reformers as a liberal establishment caught between the left and the right.6 Neither radical nor supportive of the multi-billion-dollar prisonindustrial complex, this group sought to carve a space for reform often using interdisciplinary training, as criminology was a low-status field. An improvement to the prison environment seemed a fitting strategy, though larger changes to the programming and the role of the architect also ensued.

Architects and Open Prisons before 1969 As early as the 1930s, architects acknowledged in published discussions of prisons that with this typology, the architect needed to carefully consider his or her role as well as the possibility that confinement was not necessary. The earliest open prison seems to have been at Witzwil in Switzerland in 1891; a few more followed in the United States and the UK in the 1910s, with growth in the 1930s and 1940s.7 In 1931 the director of research for Architectural Record speculated that cell blocks might be obsolete, framing his proposal in terms of the new language of performance favored by modern architecture. He argued that prisons should be determined by use, not by form, requiring adequate air and spaces for sleeping, then letting the designers solve the problem. He combined this “functional” analysis with technological solutions that freed the architecture from providing restraint in such visible ways, for example, by using electrical alarms on windows instead of bars.8 The architect explained that designers faced a challenge in identifying their true clients and therefore the interests they were representing; was the client the one with the funding, the one running the institution, or the ones who would be spending time in it? He suggested that speaking too much to the wardens had produced unnecessary fortresses because only 30 percent of inmates needed to be restrained to prevent escape. Because wardens were not responsible for the condition of the inmates upon their release, they rarely worried about long-term improvement, but he felt architects and society should concern themselves with the ultimate well-being of offenders who would rejoin society. Prisons remained troubled despite such proposals, and the number of prison riots rose in the 1950s, with more than fifty riots between 1950 and 1953.9 In 1955 the United Nations issued a recommendation that open prisons be used for as many offenders as were suited to them because the risks of escape were outweighed by the potential for rehabilitation.10 Even so, in the 1950s most of the existing prisons in the United States were of the closed Auburn type rather than the rehabilitative Pennsylvania type.11 The Auburn model valued efficiency and security above all else, consisting of an extremely structured routine

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3.2. Small prison cell of the severe Auburn type at Sing Sing. Photograph in Norman B. Johnston, Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 78. Courtesy of Ossining Historical Society.

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where prisoners lived in silence in tiny individual cells of 7 feet, 6 inches by 3 feet, 8 inches with 7-foot ceilings. Prisoners slept in these cells and followed a controlled routine from sleep to work, pausing for a sermon between receiving their food and eating it, and then moving back to a solitary cell at night. The Auburn system was austere and pragmatic in contrast to the other American model—the more philosophically developed Pennsylvania system, which was more closely based on Jeremy Bentham’s ideas. In the latter, solitude and anonymity were intended to produce reflection, repentance, and rehabilitation. Prisoners often wore masks and were referred to by number rather than name to further remove their identities. Through work and Bible study, the prisoner was to emerge a changed and improved subject. The Auburn model was more concerned with hard controls than complex mental processes, as sociologist and prison historian Norman B. Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania described it.12 Calls for prison reform continued in the 1960s with one major change: the growing inf luence of social scientific models of environment and behavior. Studies of prison culture learned from Donald Clemmer’s 1940 The Prison Community, which argued that assimilating to prison culture was one way for immigrants and other new arrivals to cope with inferior status. He explained that the disruption a prison causes to the inmate’s personality then created a major barrier to reentering society. Gresham Sykes’s 1958 The Society of Captives and Erving Goffman’s 1961 Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates looked at the impact of social environment on patient psyche. When forced to comply with rules to the detriment of basic personal autonomy—losing control of when and how to shower, sleep, eat, defecate, and urinate—the inmate may despair of having control and become “institutionalized.” In 1961 the leading professional association of architects, the American Institute of Architects, organized an interdisciplinary conference on corrections, calling for more scientific knowledge about prisons, prisoners, and the impact of form on behavior. Norman Johnston, who was in attendance, expressed his frustration at the variety of institutions he had seen abroad. Each English prison he visited seemed to have a different answer to questions such as whether walls painted in bright colors might be able to reduce vandalism and other disciplinary problems. As a social scientist, Johnston found the discrepancy between designs unacceptable and called for a shift from “impressions and opinions” toward the use of “real research methods,” including a clearinghouse for collected data.13 He felt that the age of professional penology required a “more precise” approach. He was enthusiastic about the potential for social science methods including statistics, probability, and behavioral models to yield helpful insight. Howard B. Gill, director of the Institute of Correctional Administration at the American

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University School of Government and Public Administration, declared that social science would help corrections shift from “bird shot penology” to a targeted “bull’s eye penology.” 14 The sociologist, Johnston, pointed out the importance of designing for particular types of occupants, tailoring forms to the way power was to be exerted, a systematic understanding of designing for unknowable individual inmates. Step 1 of the bull’s-eye approach was to classify the heterogeneous inmate population. The types would then be placed in facilities targeted to the penologist’s understanding of their motivations and their potential to be changed. Such classification has a long history in the social sciences, where it allows for management through knowledge of type members and isolation of types into groups with shared traits.15 In the nineteenth century, Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso classified criminals based on the physiology of their heads, creating a type of population knowledge. Johnston explicitly labeled his theory in these terms, as a “divide and rule” approach that called for four types: the new, the tractable, the intractable, and the defective. The first step for a new inmate would be a period of observation of their behavior to determine their type. Johnston argued that inmates who wanted “treatment” and could respond to it should be separated from those who lacked one or the other of those qualities. He predicted that about half of state and federal prisoners would be of this “tractable” type and that such individuals would be cooperative, able to “respond to mutual trust,” and capable of living in normal conditions.16 The others would be labeled “intractables” or “untreatables,” and these hardened inmates would receive a similarly hard approach, as there was little hope of reforming them. He explained that such inmates may even be considered “good prisoners” because they often just wanted to do their own time and not cause trouble. Even so, they should experience “rule by fear, force and deprivation,” including even “abnormal restraint” typical of the aptly named hard system. For these last prisoners, the best hope was to attempt to break their spirits through “shock therapy.” For each type of inmate, the sociologist prescribed a specific type of architecture. The classification center for incoming inmates was labeled with the welcoming name of a “reception center.” The classification center was located adjacent to the intractable facility to make it easy for hardened criminals to be reclassified if and when their spirits were broken. The tractable inmates were to be treated in institutions known as “therapeutic communities” or “community prisons.” The idea of the therapeutic prison shared goals, strategies, and architectural elements with similar reforms in psychiatric facilities—absent the pharmaceutical component—which were being developed around the same time, though they were implemented slightly later. The most notable experiments in therapeutic penology were carried out in the state of California, which employed half of all prison psychiatrists,

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psychologists, and social workers. 17 After the collapse of an earlier groupcounseling program in the 1950s, California started a Correctional Research Division to pursue psychological rehabilitation under more quantitative methods, as well as to sort and classify prisoners. Between 1960 and 1965, the program used a “base expectancy score” that ranked a given individual’s likelihood of rehabilitation based on similar psychological research done for the military. California experimented with sorting inmates and group therapy in remote experimental communities, such as the forest labor camp of Pilot Rock run by the Division of Forestry in 1960. The group was later moved to a less remote location known as Pine Hall, but this experiment—along with another, larger 1,200-bed facility—failed, and the focus on group psychology only seemed to exacerbate racial and social tensions.18 With the escalating events in California—the student protests at Berkeley in 1964 and the Watts riots in 1965—the tide turned away from such struggling efforts to implement psychology in prisons. Along with other investments in the population’s health, education, and welfare, it began to seem too kind, too “soft” on undeserving criminals. The very power of the biopolitical paradigm to sneak in as a program of caring became a liability when Ronald Reagan stepped in as California governor in 1967, declaring a harder stance on crime and cuts in welfare for all but a few deserving groups.19 Of course, many have suggested that the medicalization of prisoners may not have been more humane nor made their time easier. Historian Volker Janssen has suggested that when prisoners heard about the disease model of crime and deduced that once they were “cured” they would be released, they quickly learned to con their way through therapy in order to be released, by performing a conformity with the psychologist’s aims.20 Such doublethink may not be as physically harmful but may replace pain with detachment and deceit. Historian Eric Cummins argued that prisoners in California were better off after the end of the therapeutic model, when they were freed of “the rehabilitative language of the treatment-era prison” in which they were never quite healed and therefore always trapped.21 Despite the critical conversations, architects continued to be interested in using environmental psychology to craft new prisons and a new expertise for themselves.

Van der Ryn: Architect’s Role in the Institution and a Prison Studio At the University of California at Berkeley, an articulate architect named Sim Van der Ryn studied open prisons shortly after engaging in curriculum reform to try to position architecture as relevant to students in an age of social change. He worked alongside Catherine Bauer and others until Bauer’s death in 1964, when he took a leading role in shifting Berkeley’s program to provide future architects with the science and humanities knowledge they would need to

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be effective in the midst of complex and rapidly changing social and political structures. Changes included continuing the integration of the departments of architecture, planning, and landscape; expanding urban and regional studies; enhancing research in architecture and landscape; developing a professional internship; and starting a program of environmental studies to bring in knowledge from other disciplines without the burden of professional education.22 The new program also deemphasized the studio in terms of credit hours allocated to allow students to take more courses on environmental control systems, structure and production, design theories and methods, social and economic factors, architectural administration, and environmental history.23 In the fall of 1967, the five-year bachelor of architecture and one-year master of architecture were to be replaced by a four-year bachelor of arts in Environmental Design with three options for a master degree—the one-year post-professional, twoyear professional for those with the bachelor of arts, and a three-and-a-half-year professional degree for those without. Additionally, studio courses on specific problems were to be offered; Van der Ryn’s own course was among those available during the period of restructuring between 1965 and 1969. Van der Ryn’s studio on open prisons addressed a segment of penology of great current interest. The studios focused on juvenile detention, perhaps hoping to benefit from Van der Ryn’s previous work on student housing or perhaps as a means of appealing to potential students.24 The concept of a separate system for juvenile offenders was relatively new and, as with the novel type of the community mental health center, seemed to call for a new kind of architecture. Concerns over rising juvenile delinquency were common through the 1950s and early 1960s, but the juvenile justice system was not formalized until shortly after the Berkeley studios.25 These included the Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Control Act of 1968, which encouraged states to do just what Van der Ryn and his colleagues were doing, namely to work on design programs that would integrate juvenile detention within the community. States that created such programs would be eligible to receive federal funding. Van der Ryn felt architects were restricted in that they moved too quickly to solve individual problems of design rather than build a body of knowledge about the way forms manifest social conditions. In the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, he recommended that UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design see design as a tool for “the systematic extension of knowledge,” and in the case of the prison studios, this was knowledge of the environment’s impact on behavior and on the way modes of power change that relationship. Acknowledging that architects often feared science, he countered that science would not restrict innovation; design should not “imitate” nor “mock” science, since the two are different activities. He argued that architecture had failed to produce “humane urban environments” because architects did not think

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3.3. Sim Van der Ryn (left center) with Paul O’Rourke (left) and Sargent Shriver (right center), inspecting models of Van der Ryn’s and Sanford Hirshen’s foldable migrant workers’ shelter in the UC Berkeley Center for Environmental Design Research Lab. Sim Van der Ryn, Design for Life: The Architecture of Sim Van Der Ryn (Salt Lake City: G. Smith, 2005), 29.

systematically about the problems at hand.26 Van der Ryn had encountered a quasi-scientific way of thinking about design at the University of Michigan in 1953, where he encountered and began to question modern orthodoxy presented by former students of Mies van der Rohe.27 When Buckminster Fuller arrived on campus, his charismatic presentation of science- and technology-based ideas about design had a great impact on Van der Ryn.28

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Van der Ryn argued that the way architects could influence society was through the design of institutional environments. He admired Roger Baker’s well-known theory of behavior settings, wherein architecture can shape expectations of social behavior, he hoped architecture could act as a “cultural gyroscope.” Defining institutions as “specific arrangement[s] for allocating resources, directing activity, or providing service,” Van der Ryn observed that institutions were becoming dysfunctional: “Mental hospitals are not curing. Schools are not educating. Housing projects are not getting rid of slums. Prisons are not rehabilitating.” 29 The cause of the institutional dysfunction was a failure to keep up with social change; indeed, he described institutions as barriers to change. As examples, he cited both tenured faculty’s tight rein on curriculum (a battle he had been enmeshed in at Berkeley), as well as the extensive paperwork generated by institutions. To exert power, architects would need to understand institutions. As an individual, the architect could not change major environmental policy or tell General Motors to replace the internal combustion engine. In his words, “I cannot convince political leaders that preserving wilderness close to urban areas has a potentially greater survival value than keeping air force majors and engineers busy tinkering with new toys. I cannot keep agribusiness from poisoning us with aldrin or ddt.” 30 He began at this time to describe a kind of “ecological” theory of the institution, dealing with the natural environment as well as the social environment. His tone in the piece was tinged with weariness, and he was not alone in studying institutions and bemoaning their failures at this time. In the prison studio he coordinated at Berkeley, he worked to help students engage with the social and psychological functions of detention within existing power dynamics and institutions. Three studios with three pairs of instructors brought students into direct contact with juvenile detention environments, as well as the administrative and theoretical knowledge that governed the design of the current environments. Studio time included visits to facilities, discussions with guards and offenders, and consultations with sociologists.31 Students were exposed to social science research and other theories of environment and behavior; Edward T. Hall, author of the Hidden Dimension, participated in their sessions, as did sociologist Carl Werthman.32 Hall explained that after his wartime experience with different cultures, he noticed that the preference for personal space varies, beginning his well-known studies of proxemics, or the varied distances for social interactions. Published as Three Proposals for Innovative Correctional Facilities, the studio work by students and faculty included a branching, low-rise building with a nested series of wards, in this case, three groups of six around a central lounge, designed by Howard Menashe. As with the community mental health center designs, this project diverged from typical long hallways in favor of an internal

3.4. Central lounge and proximity to the counselor’s room allow for “adequate surveillance” of juvenile offenders. Howard Menashe, Michael Thomas, Garry Smith, Glenn Lym, William Burnham, and Sim Van der Ryn, Three Proposals for Innovative Correctional Facilities (Berkeley: Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley, 1967), 9.

3.5. Diagram of community interaction. Michael Thomas and Garry Smith, “An Urban Rehabilitation Center,” in Howard Menashe, Michael Thomas, Garry Smith, Glenn Lym, William Burnham, and Sim Van der Ryn, Three Proposals for Innovative Correctional Facilities (Berkeley: Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley, 1967), n.p.

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lounge and easier surveillance down the hallways to the rooms, without direct views into each room. A notation on the side of the plan calls attention to “adequate surveillance,” though some rooms would be easier to see into than others. The notation also indicates that each room had its own bathroom to prevent a major source of conflict in group living situations. Visualizations showed how offenders would move through stages; the architecture was a mere envelope to filter the offender from courts to social services.33 As with other open prisons, there was an emphasis on sorting prisoners, choosing those most suited to the institution. In the studio led by Van der Ryn, the relationship between form and institutional power took a central role in a study that sorted offenders by personality type. Along with William Burnham of the Berkeley School of Criminology and Glenn Lym from architecture, the group proposed a different “regime,” which was defined as the “manner in which authority is deployed.” 34 The first type was the “structured regime” for boys used to such rigid institutions; here, rules about meal times and other aspects of daily life were laid out and publicized clearly. The text was careful to remark that there was no reason the staff could not be as relaxed and friendly under the structured regime as the others. The second type was to be an “unstructured regime,” where “control is exerted by the staff on an ad-hoc basis” and mediated by the relationship between an individual and the staff with little regard for the situations of his fellows. The theory was that such an “unstructured regime” could bridge between an unsatisfactory home environment to a situation of “social independence.” The third case was the “group-oriented regime,” wherein decisions about what is acceptable are made by the group, such that “each is his brother’s keeper.” In this way, the architects optimistically thought architecture might become a tool for prosocial behavior. A few years earlier, Van der Ryn had expressed hope that the federal government would support designs that disregarded the status value of visible forms in favor of a new understanding of architecture’s function.35 Van der Ryn was not alone in seeking performance standards or more systematic knowledge of architecture as the result of complex forces, but he was notably self-aware in discussing the relation to government and then presenting work in a way to emphasize not aesthetics but performance and theory. Sean Keller and others speak of the importance of such systematic knowledge of architecture as a way to regain authority. Diagrams and other new kinds of visualization became key for making the case for more complex and rigorous understandings of the relationship between form and function. Beyond representations of what Van der Ryn called “immediate form” (plans, photographs, and models), he called for abstract communication that would distill the key principles of social function. He went so far as to blame the lack of such diagrams for the degradation of modernism by midcentury, writing that “Ville Radieuse was translated into

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Peter Cooper Village, the Garden City into slurb, Mies into the contractor curtain wall.” 36 He clarified that by communication he did not mean “vague verbal statements,” as those only caused confusion where rigor was needed. Van der Ryn reframed the key elements of his project as transferable knowledge products he called “design variables.” 37 Similar to Christopher Alexander’s patterns, these design variables were brief formulations of design principles that could be combined in various ways under different regimes. These diagrams presented sketches of the essential morphology of components, such as the adjacencies and openings, yet the larger context, specific dimensions, materiality, and many other details were omitted. In the first diagram, he outlined a semiurbanist question regarding the way the building relates to its site. He defined one condition where the building separates the grounds into two sections as a “separated exterior” and another condition where the grounds wrap three sides of the building as a “contiguous exterior.” Another diagram visualized the “right to retreat,” the provision of a space to which an offender could cool off and find space to be quiet. Such spaces would be key for dispelling tension between residents, an element Van der Ryn and his colleagues felt would be important in the structured mode of power. The architects worried that this tension could overwhelm the hostel, so they provided spaces for its dissipation. In the unstructured regime, space for retreat would be less important, as architects felt there would be less tension. In the group-oriented regime, the space again became critical for individuals to use as a semantic gesture. The designers describe it as a place for the individual to express that he was “opting out,” something the group as a whole should then address.38 The model of self-organization requires a more complex architecture, adapted to the degree of freedom; the building steps in and allows the guards to recede. Several of the diagrams were of circulation; as with mental health centers the study of circulation was focused on seeking new forms to promote sociability. Van der Ryn defined the connection of four rooms spatially by opening up the cruciform intersection at their center and creating “contiguous rooms” rather than isolating “corridor separated rooms.” He developed the idea in the next design variable, focusing on just one of the “contiguous rooms” with its cropped corner and designing an “onlooker column” that would become a popular reinforcement for shy residents. The onlooker column was also used in the permeable psychiatric institutions, allowing the entry to be shifted to the side so that the occupant is somewhat hidden, with psychic support from the vertical column. They could lean on it, touch it, and decide when they wanted to enter the social space.39 The idea was to encourage social interaction by providing halfway points neither fully in the room nor entirely out of it. The onlooker column was also illustrated in the rendering of what one such prototype facility might look like. In the bottommost room, a few offenders watch television

3.6. These design variables represented an attempt to convert architectural knowledge into transferrable units that could be combined in any individual design as with Alexander’s patterns. Howard Menashe, Michael Thomas, Garry Smith, Glenn Lym, William Burnham, and Sim Van der Ryn, Three Proposals for Innovative Correctional Facilities (Berkeley: Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley, 1967), 14.

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3.7. Drawing of first level of juvenile facility with an “onlooker” column in the television room at the bottom of the image. Howard Menashe, Michael Thomas, Garry Smith, Glenn Lym, William Burnham, and Sim Van der Ryn, Three Proposals for Innovative Correctional Facilities (Berkeley: Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley, 1967).

sitting on stools, while others look on, leaning on the column. The idea of the column was a transferrable design variable that could be used in a number of contexts, allowing designers to create ideas, test them, and build on them as scientific experiments might do. This question of how best to design an environment to promote social groups but not oppression was key in the 1960s, when studies of fascist authority in wartime shifted to the challenges of community as they began to fall apart. 40 Van der Ryn was able to see that architects were not immune to the changes in their communities; they too were impacted by their social formations. He declared architects needed to seek an organization more like the brain than like the loose community of flatworms. Both are made of cells, but one is highly organized and able to do complex tasks, while the other is only able to go in search of food.41 When the field lacks such an “organized body of knowledge,”

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3.8. A less buttoned-up version of the architect pursued ecological design later in his career. Sim Van der Ryn, Design for Life: the Architecture of Sim Van Der Ryn (Salt Lake City: G. Smith, 2005), 41.

single designers are unable to resist the forces of the society at large and produce only the same banal structures as are already around them. However, with the strength of an organized body of knowledge behind them, the few can exert power and cause change.42 The issue of social organization was crucial to the events at People’s Park, which ultimately led Van der Ryn away from such institutional work. He was closely involved in the struggle between UC Berkeley and the group that came to inhabit, design, and build up a space that was opened up after the university

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demolished an old building. He may well have been chosen as the go-between because of his work with the chancellor over student housing, where he showed that he was able to understand the needs of the younger generation and explain those needs to the administration. In this case, the architect served as a translator between the youth and the administration to encourage the youth to organize and elect a leader. Van der Ryn was appalled when the military came to gas the young people in the park when negotiations over the fate of the park deadlocked and the occupants refused to leave. Added to the other uses of force to suppress efforts at social and racial justice, the event left the architect discouraged and frightened. He took his young family out of the city and turned his efforts to designing a compound for himself, developing his interest in ecological architecture made of simple materials, beginning the phase of work for which he is better known.43 In the later piece “Architecture, Institutions and Social Change,” he observed that he was not alone and among many formerly socially engaged, well-intentioned intellectuals, questions of environment in the ecological sense were replacing social issues as a discussion topic at cocktail parties. In his words, “Ecology is rapidly replacing poverty as the rallying cry of concerned liberals, not to mention radicals and some reactionaries. Ecology seems to know no political boundaries.” 44 While Van der Ryn already had an interest in ecology and spoke of institutions as ecologies, the events at People’s Park in 1969 no doubt served as a catalyst for his shift away from the study of correctional and psychiatric institutions.45 Elsewhere the tone was also shifting from naïve optimism to more resistance in the face of a more security-conscious government strategy.

Another Deinstitutionalization: Gainesville Forensic Psychiatry Through the early 1970s, architects were critical of the aims of the prisons but were also still willing to try to have a positive impact by designing new facilities. Architect Clyde Dorsett supplemented his work overseeing deinstitutionalization at the NIMH with designs of similarly anti-institutional prison buildings before leaving the NIMH entirely around 1980. In 1973 Dorsett worked alongside a younger colleague he had met while pursuing changes in building code to allow more open mental health centers to produce a new forensic psychiatric facility for both the mental health and corrections agencies of the State of Florida. In 1973 many states faced an increasing problem of adapting to a new landscape for mental health care along with a seeming rise in crime. In Florida these problems were compounded by a population explosion, increasing urbanization, and an increasingly complex economy operated by a diverse society. Crime and mental health were complex, costly social problems that overlapped and yet were addressed by distinct agencies. At the time, seventy offenders with

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mental illness were referred out of corrections each month into a state hospital ill-equipped to deal with each offender’s complex problems. At this time, a pair of architects who had worked on mental health centers took on the task of designing a facility for forensic psychiatry to sort those with mental health challenges from those who broke the law and then simply appeared pathological due to their institutional environment. The secretary of Florida’s Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, Emmett S. Roberts, described the facility in optimistic terms, mentioning the tension between maintaining order and human compassion. He wrote that the facility would aim to help both: “the meek and the vicious, the malingerer and the overly psychotic, the falsely accused with the justly convicted. This center is directed to take this plunge for understanding in an era when increasing property values sometimes outweigh human compassion, when human compassion sometimes blinds good judgement, and when judgement in the arena of civil liberties and human rights sometimes runs counter to Legislative mandates, community concern and criminal court direction.” 46 With new design and great optimism, the facility might be able to succeed where traditional prisons and psychiatric hospitals were clearly failing to keep up with the changing climate of justice. Yet by 1973, when work started, institutions’ negative effects on even mentally well persons were well known through the work of Erving Goffman and others and vividly enacted through the Stanford Prison Experiment from 1971.While that experiment has since been reinterpreted, at the time it was felt that Philip Zimbardo’s study showed that even pre-screened Stanford undergraduates would turn into abusive guards and riotous inmates in a few days.47 If the prison setting—in this case the psychology building—could so quickly cause aberrant behavior, then how could forensic psychiatry carry out its mission of determining who was rightfully pleading not guilty by insanity? The Federal Bureau of Prisons and other agencies sought new designs that would be sufficiently secure without being “institutional.” In Gainesville Dorsett and his team tried to design a prison that would not be a prison so that the deleterious effects of the institution would not confuse the determination of a defendant’s sanity. The architecture would be used as a mechanism for evaluating and sorting the meek from the psychotic. Under the watchful eyes of concealed guards, hidden in half levels so as not to contribute observer bias, the inmates would inhabit an institution trying very hard not to be one. Because the facility was mainly for observation of defendants’ behavior, surveillance was key to the functioning of the architecture. To this end, rooms for surveillance, or “control rooms,” were placed between floors to enable guards to watch the inmates as they went about everyday life. Where other facilities used surveillance and camouflage to manage and heal inmates, Gainesville was

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3.9. Section through the control room at Gainesville Clyde H. Dorsett Papers, Avery Drawings and Archives Collections, Columbia University, New York.

itself a sorting mechanism. Far from trying to reform the system, the short-term facility was intended to smooth the functioning of the justice system. Those who were found to be sane and were later convicted would not find their new institutional residences nearly so soft. Critical sentiment against the use of behavioral modification did not seem to touch their proposal, and the architects launched themselves and their design counterparts, Kemp, Bunch and Jackson, into this complex tangle of problems, values, and forces. The treatment center was intended to deal with the most troublesome of inmates, the criminally insane and the mentally disturbed sex offenders. Beyond what other prisons or community mental health centers had done to look unlike an institution, Gainesville went further, taking advantage of its scale to have multiple buildings that would mimic a post office, shops, and so on in buildings that lined “streets” complete with street lamps and benches. The early schemes show the intended urban setting of the facility, though other schemes were designed into more Y-shaped streets, perhaps to enable

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3.10. Early urban sketch for the Gainesville facility. Clyde H. Dorsett Papers, Avery Drawings and Archives Collections, Columbia University, New York.

surveillance. In this way they hoped to avoid what architecture critics were then noting about some of the hard separations that disrupt natural behaviors. In an Architectural Forum article, architects noted the problems inherent in an attempt to control inmates by separating them from guards with a (presumably plastic) window and surveilling them with a series of cameras. Suzanne Stephens argued that this environment caused unnatural behavior, as the inmates needed to yell and bang on the window to get the guards’ attention, after which they would be punished for their outburst.48 Gainesville used more typical architecture to solicit more typical and more peaceful behavior. Clyde Dorsett and Constantine Karalis were in a position to understand both the good and the negative impacts of psychology in institutions, though they left little written commentary on the complexity of the townscape facility at Gainesville. They appear to be—as Sommer had suggested—a liberal establishment trying to make improvements within an accepted system using the tools they felt they had. Both had expertise in working within and against bureaucracy, and both were familiar with the use of psychological insights to welcome and pacify occupants from their work on community mental health centers. The pair had met while working on altering the building codes that applied to mental health centers so these buildings would be less like hospitals, combining Dorsett’s expertise at the NIMH and Karalis’s at the National Bureau of Standards after he graduated from MIT in 1968. Karalis became interested

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in prison work in 1969, when he was asked to design a tightly closed facility. He received a call from the Rhode Island Department of Corrections asking if he could make an escape-proof prison, and he remembered the call ending abruptly when he replied that there was no such thing. 49 But the idea stuck, and Karalis felt prison reform was an important challenge and a place where architects might do some good. In a partnership between the Rhode Island School of Design (where he was leading an urban design concentration) and the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, Karalis produced a report titled “Prisoners Are People” in 1972.50 Karalis sought out further work with Rhode Island, calling and learning about an impending request for a $15 million bond issue to be spent on prison reform. Karalis declared the sum far from adequate, and when he inquired about the plan of action and learned there was none, he was asked to prepare a report with recommendations, for which he was paid six thousand dollars. Karalis showed some resistance to making hardened prisons, using his knowledge for a partway solution. Karalis also used his bureaucratic expertise to present his architectural knowledge in a format legible to those he was working with. The architect’s report presented best practices for planning a system of corrections for the state, using sheets similar to those Dorsett had used to evaluate mental health centers. Karalis used separate sheets and sketches for “program analysis,” “program specifications,” conceptual diagrams, and space allocation forms.51 The activities to be programmed were numerous, including religion, visiting, passive recreation, and legal counseling. Karalis developed paperwork to demonstrate a clear understanding of the program, including factors that might be found in any other architectural type, such as public, private, and semiprivate spaces. But it also included many levels of security, as well as planning for therapeutic and supportive programs in the facility. One typical sheet laying out the program specifications for individualized learning abstracted the ideal form and presented alternatives tailored to the type of power exercised. In this case, though, the variation was in security level, with high-security, low-security, and prerelease spaces.52 Dorsett and Karalis used skills and paperwork roughly contemporaneous to mental health center design to reform prisons, showing that the knowledge and tools were transferrable both between individual buildings and between typologies. The occupants of Gainesville were not free to come and go, but they were given an architecture that tried to remove the overt aesthetics of confinement. Walking down prison “streets” with streetlights and benches or heading to the post office under the watchful eye of concealed guards, these detainees would have inhabited an architecture operating as a concealed apparatus for mental health diagnosis. The architects seem to have felt this was an acceptable improvement.

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3.11. Program specifications for individual learning. The paperwork was designed to be acceptable to administration, showing clearly what design elements were needed and why. The paperwork accounted for physical, relational, as well as symbolic or intra-psychic functions of design. Constantine Karalis, “Prisoners Are People” (Adult Correctional Facilities, State of Rhode Island, September 6, 1972), 145.

Behavioral R esearch at Butner, North Carolina Other novel prisons designs in the mid-1970s were also presented in oddly glowing terms, avoiding the darker aspects of security through environmental psychology. Picking up on the themes of free love and the flower generation, one Federal Bureau of Prisons facility was described as a place where men and women mixed, wearing their own clothes, including miniskirts, and reading from I’m OK—You’re OK.53 At “Charlie’s Love-In,” the inmates describe guards who are almost too nice, and the news article retains a hopeful, even playful

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3.12. An early scheme for Butner showing circles for program as an initial step. Frederic Moyer, Correctional Environments (Urbana, IL: National Clearinghouse for Correctional Programming and Architecture, 1971), 16.

tone. In the mid-1970s, the idea of more open, therapeutic penology came to be known as the Norval Morris Model, after the University of Chicago Professor Norval Morris, who wrote a book called The Future of Imprisonment in 1974. The reality of such psychologically based prisons was not as pleasant as journalists at times suggested, even if the facilities looked fashionable. The contrast is evident in perhaps the most controversial “open” prison: the federal prison at Butner, North Carolina. Planning for the facility began in the 1950s, construction started in 1972, and the prison opened in 1976.54 The design by Middleton, Wilkerson, McMillan was supposed to look like a town with shops, educational facilities, and a town center linked by a colonnade, as was the aim for Gainesville. An earlier diagram shows the “cluster” strategy

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3.13. In contrast with accusations of A Clockwork Orange–like behavioral research methods, the advance renderings for the Butner, North Carolina, facility could have been for any shopping mall circa 1973. Suzanne Stephens, “Pushing Prisons Aside,” Architecture Forum 138, no. 2 (March 1973): 42.

that would ultimately look similar to the tree-like community mental health center buildings in their low-rise, articulated shapes. The prison evolved into a center for behavioral research, and over the years optimism waned as the public and experts learned more after the facility opened. Routinely compared to A Clockwork Orange, the facility and its name, Center for Behavioral Research, triggered objections. Groups such as the Commission on Racial Justice based in New York accused the facility of targeting African Americans and “politically oriented troublemakers.” 55 Critics argued that the intent was to develop methods of control—psychosurgery, drugs, brainwashing, and hypnosis—for use on the majority black prisoner population. And yet the renderings published before its completion were unremarkable and could be mistaken for shopping centers. The Butner facility’s aesthetic contrasted sharply with the dark view of suppression through environment because the sinister side of the prison was clothed in apparent innocence. In one account of a visit in 1977, a journalist described an almost pastoral approach to the open prison down a long drive

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through a stand of pine trees. Passing an unattended guard box and then a pair of chain link fences, he arrived at an entrance monitored by one television camera.56 He described the campus-like architecture as a relaxed, non-hierarchical environment accentuated by the lack of a separate dining facility for staff. When he arrived, he waited patiently on a brightly colored plastic chair to be greeted by a long-haired, college-educated staff member. He spoke with several inmates and shared quotes from the two extremes. Both inmates were disillusioned with the promised programming: “This place is a farce,” said Mayo Turner: “They say they have a beautiful this and a beautiful that, but where are the beautiful programs?” Turner was presented as a father of two, with a year and a half of college education, who wanted to improve himself, get out of prison, and go back to work. The prison was intended to serve those who wanted to participate, and at least in Turner’s case it appears that he would have been eager for therapy and retraining. Soft, open architecture could only go so far. It appears not to have entirely mollified Turner, who rightly saw through the beauty of the place and sought therapy. Design was not enough for Turner. But even before 1977, Butner was criticized by Robert Sommer, who followed up his 1974 book on Tight Spaces declaring that the United States should seek an “end to imprisonment.” 57 After his LEAA-funded study in 1971, “Research Priorities in Correctional Architecture,” he became more critical of security-oriented design and noted that the environment is such a part of behavioral modification that one chairman of the Commission of Behavioral Modification of the American Psychological Association, Leonard Krasner, declared it should be renamed environmental design.58 Sommer attacked Butner in particular as an example of the worst of behavioral modification. Speaking of the facility as a Clockwork Lemon, because it did not work, Sommer explained the trauma of the “attack therapy” used by psychiatrist and warden Martin Groder. He quoted Groder’s psychological description of his verbal abuse: “I just shit all over them about all the things that had come to my attention that were so obvious to me about their trickiness, the lies, the misrepresentations, their attempts to get negative strokes by playing Kick Me, their inane dedication to stupidity, their tremendous fear of breaking any of the rules of the so called ‘convict code’ while at the same time being busily engaged in breaking them and covering up the fact—just the whole dirty ball of wax.” 59 For the environmental psychologist, who worked in the field for more than twenty years, it became harder to justify a system that used psychological insight to maintain power, confusing inmates over whether their treatment was therapeutic or punitive and reversing their faith in their own solidarity with each other and their own perception of the situation. For Sommer, Groder’s approach was an example of an unsuccessful system seeking to use psychology to tear people down to control them. Sommer and others began even louder calls to end the system of imprisonment.

OPEN PRISONS

Conclusion: Dematerialization of the Prison but Not the Architect’s Role Looking back from 1976, Sommer observed that he did not begin his study of the psychology of prison environments as someone “hostile” to prisons. Like Sim Van der Ryn and others, he felt incarceration could have a role to play as long as the facilities were built close to home, were accompanied with psychological, social, and vocational programming, and kept stays short. But he recalled that after his experience with the federal task force, he came to believe the only answer was an end to imprisonment. Comparing an end to prisons to the movement for world federalism or the abolishment of nations, Sommer declared that there was no good reason to continue the separations.60 No amount of psychological softening could make prisons work. Sommer opened his 1976 book on The End of Imprisonment suggesting that despite the challenges and flaws in the community mental health centers movement, corrections could learn from the closure of psychiatric institutions because of the massive reduction in the number of involuntary psychiatric patients. He felt corrections had an even greater chance of being abolished because only emotional and historical reasons kept the system in place, as there was no evidence that prisons were effective no matter the architecture. It was only that Americans had come to see prisons as indispensable. But they were not, and indeed the solidity of the architecture, the type, was one of the main tools keeping them in existence: “The monumental solidity of prison architecture—the massive gates, the tall gun towers, the thick stone walls and steel doors—has endowed the institution with an aura of undeserved permanence.” 61 But what then of the architecture of the non-prison, whether the imagined leafy interior street as proposed by the LEAA clearinghouse or the townscape or cluster prisons? Such architecture approached a form that could be mistaken for a Brutalist university campus, a form that Sommer had objected to in his earlier book on hard architecture. Photographs from the time show the stark quality of some of these townscapes, even the rolling site in Hickman County, Tennessee, where the owner, the Board of Hickman County Commissioners, built a facility that cost $1 million to level and create wide open space between the glass pavilions that served as residences for 600 boys between the ages of 17 and 25. Construction of the facility itself cost $8,822,890. In one photo a pair of offenders relax against one glass pavilion while another is seen in the distance, but presumably these concrete and glass complexes were not what Sommer advocated as a place to support rehabilitation through personal space. Sommer was of course not the only critic of prison architecture, and a few architects also discussed the implications for the erasure of dedicated prison buildings. In Architectural Forum critic Suzanne Stephens examined some recent

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3.14. Showing the open, Cartesian spaces at the cluster / townscape at Turney Home for Youthful Offenders in Tennessee by Howard, Nielson, Lyne, Batey and O’Brien with Curtis and Davis. Construction cost $9,000,000. Suzanne Stephens, “Pushing Prisons Aside,” Architecture Forum 138, no. 2 (March 1973): 35.

prison designs and recommended that architects come to see their expertise as wider than the design and construction of individual buildings. She began with an acknowledgment that yes, the 7 percent commission on the $251 million that the LEAA had spent in three years was significant. She felt architects should learn to make use of their “erstwhile interest in the psychological and sociological implications of correctional facilities” while understanding the need to stop building prisons, even those supposedly “enlightened and rehabilitative.” William Nagel’s 1973 The New Red Barn claimed that social programming that could be run out of any simple barn would be as likely to rehabilitate offenders. The treasured link of form and function seemed to be turning into a liability, and some architects feared a “de-materialization of the architect’s role” accompanying this wave of de-institutionalization.62 Psychological functionalism provided an abstract expertise and a role for architects beyond building prisons. Stephens explained that prison architecture had been addressed by a team of experts who felt the situation was “not the product of good and bad architecture” but the result of “deep mutual suspicion, great cynicism, and pervasive

3.15. A Federal Bureau of Prisons Federal Youth Center, where architects Frank L. Hope and Associates declared that severity of crime need not imply security of imprisonment. Instead they envisioned offender’s rooms as a dorm or residence. Suzanne Stephens, “Pushing Prisons Aside,” Architecture Forum 138, no. 2 (March 1973): 44.

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3.16. Cameras provide surveillance of the corridors at Orange County Jail so that detainees and guards do not have to “breathe the same air.” The result, according to Nagel, was a situation where detainees cannot ask questions in a normal manner and instead must rattle bars or otherwise act out to gain attention. Suzanne Stephens, “Pushing Prisons Aside,” Architecture Forum 138, no. 2 (March 1973): 44.

hypocrisy as the kept and the keepers played old games with each other while using the new sophisticated language of today’s behavioral sciences.” Architects could learn from and act on behavioral insights but with less constraint, at least overtly. She and other experts advocated two aspects of a new design theory in which architecture’s contribution lay in what it did not do rather than what it did. First, architecture needed to avoid the impulse to be overly limiting by tying form closely to program. Secondly, and in line with calls by Charles Jencks and other postmodernists, architecture should take care not to remove referents such as ties to people and pasts.63 Kevin Lynch had proposed a similar emphasis on environments that make sense to urban inhabitants; Christopher Alexander’s search for patterns hoped to do the same; and Mario Gandelsonas and Peter Eisenman framed an NIMH proposal to seek generative patterns that spoke to inhabitants.64

OPEN PRISONS

The framing of a role for architects as experts, or in Dorsett’s case as consultants or specialist architects, would accommodate a reduction in prison commissions and an extension of psychological expertise to all environments. Sommer’s diagnosis of a security state of mind applied to all kinds of non-prison environments would be an extended platform for this expertise. While prison architecture continued apace (Sommer was unfortunately quite wrong in that prediction), other architects did find a lucrative trajectory in using federal funds to study another avenue by which psychology impacted institutional design: when these ideas about territory were applied to housing and to cities. In doing so, the role of the architect as behavioral expert continued but in a less self-aware way and without the challenge prisons provided. The overt discussions of power and manipulation decreased as the design for a security state of mind and the systematic creation of an urban environment that would be psychologically meaningful became pervasive.

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4.1. Cover of Newman’s Defensible Space.

4 IN DEFENSE OF SPACE Housing and Crime Prevention through Environmental Design

In  1969,  ten  years  after returning from Europe, a young ar-

chitect and urban planner decided to study the principles of perception and design behind a housing type he had seen there. He admired the sociability he thought resulted from an “enclave” created by a block of housing whose residents shared a central park. Having met a psychologist who shared this interest, the architect and psychologist approached the National Institute of Mental Health for funding, as many other architects and psychologists had. But their request was denied, and the architectural research was funded by an organization whose aim was maintaining order rather than health and welfare. Oscar Newman and his colleague George Rand found funding for their research under the Safe Streets Act and went on to launch a new subfield of environmental psychology, called crime prevention through environmental design, without virtue of science but on the strength of charisma and writing. This collaboration of architecture and psychology to redesign form would not inhabit an agency of its own but would rely on Newman’s entrepreneurial talents to sell the idea. The architect’s and psychologist’s idea of preventing crime through an environmental incentive for good behavior seemed to offer an affordable solution to a rising fear of crime in urban mass housing that fit with a weakening American welfare state. The book, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design, provided a rhetorical fix to the idea that modern high-rise housing and urban design were failing.1

Background Where many of the social research agendas of the early 1960s were founded in the belief that Americans could use their “pragmatic genius” to solve any 131

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social problem they put their energy into, that optimism and energy were on the decline by 1968–1969, when Oscar Newman began the defensible space research. By the end of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the Great Society ideal of improving life for all Americans gave way to a division among welfare programs, with social insurance programs for some groups—such as Social Security for the elderly—split off from the increasingly unpopular Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which served low-income women and children, often African American.2 The discourse of poverty shifted to more quantitative research, shying away from the controversial “culture of poverty” theories in the controversial 1965 Moynihan Report on African American families, but also in service of a government with an increasing appetite for data about poverty programs.3 Through careful rhetoric and skillful television advertisements, candidate and then president Richard M. Nixon awakened a “silent majority” of white, suburban Americans who feared the changes of the past decade and sought security in a nostalgic vision of American self-reliance. The president began to shift funding sources from large federal programs promoting the health, education, and welfare of the population to franchise-state efforts to prevent crime, punish offenders, and manage the population through incentive structures. Between 1960 and 1973, fear of crime became increasingly important in American politics. Demographically, there was an increase in the proportion of the population between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, which probably contributed to an increase in crimes against property.4 Such vandalism presented a visible marker of disorder that worried many older citizens, especially when combined with politicians’ tendency to conflate violent protests with street crime under the heading of “violence in the streets.” In addition to riots, three prominent assassinations—of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.—added to the perception that the stability of American society was threatened by violence. Experts in the 1960s cited a range of factors as causes in the alleged crime wave, whether it was the liberal Warren Court and its protection of defendants’ rights or the general thirst for violence diagnosed by William Walter Menninger as a persistent feature of American society.5 The sensational presentation of violence in the news media most likely also played a part in rising public fears, contributing to a general sense of the deterioration of the moral and social order. However, it was unclear then, and remains unclear today, whether the number of crimes actually increased or if more reporting and the automated processing of reports produced the impression of a crime wave.6 Along with the growing use of punch card systems, closed circuit cameras, and streamlined reporting systems like the 9-1-1 telephone system, criminologists and other social scientists took on an increasingly public role, causing further public exposure to the problem of crime.7 Through opinion polls that asked respondents about their fear of crime, that fear grew out of proportion with the real risk of victimization.

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4.2. Increased crime monitoring through technology, as in this photograph from Compu-Guard brochure attached to report by Newman. Folder: J Christian, Secu-Reports, Secu System Defensible Space Modifications to Eight Jersey City Projects, August 1973–October 1975, Chairman’s Files, Box 0088B2, Folder 06, New York City Housing Authority Collection, La Guardia and Wagner Archives, Queens, NY.

Fear of crime played an important role in national politics when Republican candidate Barry Goldwater made it a central issue in his campaign to replace President Johnson in 1964. While Johnson won that election, he was sensitive to the urgency of the rising fear of crime as a potential political threat that could be wielded by the Republicans. He began to frame a new “war on crime,” while at the same time arguing that his war on poverty was in fact a war on crime. In 1967 Johnson called for a Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, which eventually yielded such actions as creation of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and the emergency 9-1-1 system.8 The LEAA was funded with the passage of the Safe Streets Act of 1968. Amid debates about federalism—the extent to which the federal government ought to intervene in social problems—the LEAA was structured as a system of grants from the federal government to state and local agencies.9 It was this agency that funded Newman’s initial work.

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Newman began the defensible space research project in early 1969 while he was teaching at Columbia University.10 There, he encountered Rand, who was working on a two-year fellowship sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education on the relationship between spatial perception and architectural design.11 He was also teaching a course on the social meaning of space, bringing together sources from philosophy and anthropology, mixing Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Robert Ardrey. According to Rand, Rand was the one who introduced Ardrey’s ideas about human territoriality to Newman. Realizing their shared interest, Rand and Newman decided to pursue a joint project and started to look for funding at the NIMH. Rand recalls that they had several connections there and were aware that aware that NIMH had funded other architectural research, such as Christopher Alexander’s work and Lee Rainwater’s research on proximity and friendships. After visiting Washington several times without success, they decided to shift their efforts to the LEAA and the recently passed Safe Streets Act, which made funding available through the Department of Justice. While both the researchers and the LEAA were initially skeptical, Newman was convincing, and the pair eventually built a good relationship with Henry Ruth, the head of the LEAA. Turning their attention to crime prevention meant a new subfield for environmental psychology, the branch of psychology that studies the influence of the environment on psyche and behavior. The subfield was young, but by 1970 a few edited volumes presented canonical papers on its topics. In neither Leonard Duhl’s collection on policy and urban form from 1963 nor the classic reader Environmental Psychology was there a paper focused on crime.12 The idea was not entirely new, of course, and several other variants of crime prevention through architecture had been published, including the books by Elizabeth Wood and Jane Jacobs in the early 1960s that suggested cities could be made safer through surveillance by neighbors. In 1961 Wood published an illustrated version drawing on her experiences with the Chicago Housing Authority.13 The similarities between Wood’s and Newman’s work extend to such details as the prophylactic power of associating specific neighbors with their front doors. Additionally, a student of Alexander named Shlomo Angel produced a booklet with quantitative analysis, but neither Wood nor Angel had the backing of a major publisher and therefore had a much smaller reach. 14 Newman was of course aware of Wood’s work—and that of Jacobs, Angel, and others—and he was careful to

4.3 (opposite page). Illustrations by Leon Brand in Housing Design depict many of the same tenets of Newman’s Defensible Space, such as visibility at the ground floor and grounds zoned for use by men, women, and children. Elizabeth Wood, Housing Design: A Social Theory (New York: Citizens Housing and Planning Council, 1961), 16.

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thank them for “historical” purposes, which is its own kind of distancing, as well as for their “initial formulation of the problem,” thus signaling that his own work would be more complex and mature than theirs.15 In Jacobs’s just-so story from her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she described standing at her window and seeing a man take the arm of an unwilling girl on the street. Even before Jacobs could challenge the man, a shopkeeper downstairs confronted him. The scenario presumed that any “good person” would act as the shopkeeper did, but that faith in the urban society had begun to deteriorate in the face of media presentations of crimes such as the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964. Newspapers chronicled the gruesome murder of a young woman coming home from work late. Watched by her neighbors who allegedly did not intervene, she was attacked, escaped, and finally she was killed. Recent accounts have shown that her neighbors did shout at the attacker and did call the police. But the account of the murder shocked the public and exacerbated the lack of trust in one’s neighbors that only worsened with the decade’s social change, many upheavals, scandals, assassinations, riots, and a government that was failing to solve social problems even as it became further involved in an unpopular war. Newman’s version of Jacobs’s “eyes on the street” idea responded to the narrative of the Genovese murder and to the theory of the bystander effect that social psychology produced to explain the event.16 The bystander effect suggested that more witnesses to a crime decrease the likelihood that any given person will intervene; each one thinks one of the others will help. Fitting with a longer theory that crowds are dangerous, the argument was made that only individuals, not groups, could be trusted. The problem in Genovese’s case was not that her neighbors were cold and inhuman but that, isolated in their homes, they did not know whose job it was to respond. Newman accommodated this popular finding and argued for partitioning the grounds and making residents feel responsible for each patch of hallway, sidewalk, or lawn. He argued that providing sight lines was not enough and that architects and urban designers had to stop crime by segmenting the shared spaces to create a safe privatization so that it would be clear who should protect the next victim.

A Tale of Two Architectures In order to appeal to his audience, Newman needed to have an intuitive sense of the structure of the discourse, its central themes, and its central contradictions, as well as writer’s skills to craft a compelling tale. As a well-connected architect, urbanist, and novelist, Newman’s writing found readers far beyond architecture, providing a mechanism and a simple parable to explain the problems plaguing public housing in the late 1960s. Published in hardcover in 1972 and in paperback in 1973, Defensible Space reached a wide audience through the assistance of

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Newman’s publisher, Macmillan. The book was widely reviewed in the popular media, such that by the time the paperback was published, it boasted a laudatory quote from Time magazine on its cover as well as praise from the San Francisco Examiner, the Sacramento Bee, the Village Voice, the New York Times Book Review, and Forum, as well as an endorsement from Ada Louise Huxtable, the New York Times’s architecture critic, on the back cover. Additional readers no doubt heard of it through the many reviews in journals that ranged from Fortune to the Journal of Architectural Education to Contemporary Sociology. Because the social effect in Newman’s case was crime, the book was lauded as a way to solve growing “urban problems,” particularly the failure of modernist public housing. The book was promoted as part of a series on urban affairs with an advertisement that played on the urban public’s confusion and dismay about why cities were struggling to assimilate and create healthy cohesion.17 The slogan of the advertisement read: “Unmeltable ethnics . . . drowning cities . . . screwed-up planning . . . wasted dollars . . . What’s Happening on the Urban Scene?”18 An excerpt of the book was also published in Intellectual Digest in 1973 and in a compilation on habitat to be distributed to nine thousand school libraries through the Social Issues Resources Series.19 Highlights from Intellectual Digest include statements such as “develop proprietary attitudes in people and you will significantly deter crime,” and “unlike the middle class, people on welfare react sharply to physical environment” such that social control would be appropriately exerted through architecture in their case. There is a long history of instilling middle-class morals through middle-class housing, backed by science, on behalf of the government. The construction of modern housing earlier in the twentieth century would have used similar language of propriety instilled through proper housing, though the discussion of morality and race were more covert in Newman’s work. And while the desire to instill middle-class values through housing was not new, the designs of the housing would be quite different in terms of massing if not adornment. Newman’s theory of behavior was used to support a turn to low-rise, high-density housing with defined spaces for each family and control provided by self-policing. Defensible Space was published at an extremely opportune time, coinciding with the partial demolition of a notorious housing project known as Pruitt-Igoe in Saint Louis. Lee Rainwater, author of an NIMH-funded study of Pruitt-Igoe, voiced the feeling that most public housing researchers felt very much under attack.20 He advocated any approach to the study of public housing that would provide a more concrete grounding from which advocates could argue. Demolition began only months before Defensible Space was published, in time for vivid images to appear on the dust jacket with the caption “The final remedy found by the city of St. Louis for part of its public housing problem.” 21 The photographs demonstrated the stakes of ignoring Newman’s book, and while they were too

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late to appear inside the book, they were used with later articles to add drama to the theory that crime could be prevented through environmental design. Critics like Huxtable also made the connection between Pruitt-Igoe and defensible space: “It took the violent and necessary act of destruction of part of a public housing project that had become an obscenity of American life to make it clear that we have been doing something awfully wrong.” 22 Eventually and hyperbolically, critic Charles Jencks would declare that the demolition of this housing project marked the death of modern architecture itself.23 Against the backdrop of destruction, Newman’s book seemed to offer a way to save architecture and urbanism, and moreover his writing suggested that it would be possible for architects to do so through what they did best: design. His idea of defensible space was commonly taught in schools of architecture for a while, and he came to influence a generation of policy though his work with New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and other housing authorities. Engaging with Henry Cisneros at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) led to a publication and other efforts that fit with an era shifting toward vouchers and more diffuse housing aid.24 Newman achieved an understandable, memorable, and relevant presentation of his theory of crime prevention through a before-and-after parable: a bad environment and then a good one. The dominant version of the parable was in essence an updated version of the familiar good city/bad city tale. In the bad city, a would-be criminal walks into a neighborhood and sees that there is no one watching. The man sees evidence of vandalism, from which he concludes that no one is invested in the care of the space. The would-be criminal then decides to commit a crime, either further vandalism, a robbery, or a burglary. In the bad city, those who witness the crime do not intervene, for just as in the Genovese case they are too far away, too scared, or perhaps unsure of whether a crime is being committed. By contrast, in the good city, the buildings are designed such that residents take care of the environment, eradicating any cues that it is okay to commit a crime there. The would-be criminal enters this environment, feels the eyes watching him, and chooses to move on. Newman told the same story over and over, through photographs and examples. In one variation of the tale, the would-be criminals are merely unruly children who play unsupervised because their single mother is unable to watch them from the towering heights of her apartment. In the version that appeared in Progressive Architecture, photographs on the left and upper right vividly demonstrated the consequences of bad design with the images of Pruitt-Igoe’s demolition (fig. 4.4). In the lower right, tidy, leafy streets promised an “alternative to fear” if Newman’s ideas were implemented.25 This theory of crime would eventually become known as the broken windows theory, though Newman does not use that label in Defensible Space.

IN DEFENSE OF SPACE

4.4. Opening spread of Newman’s article “Defensible Space: Alternatives to Fear,” in Progressive Architecture. Photographs on the left and upper right vividly demonstrated the consequences of bad design, and the lower right promised an “alternative to fear” if Newman’s ideas were followed. Oscar Newman, “Defensible Space: Alternatives to Fear,” Progressive Architecture 53 (October 1972): 92–93.

In Time magazine Newman gave an account of his personal discovery of the effect of human territoriality on architecture at Pruitt-Igoe in 1964, when he visited as a young researcher. In this account, the good and the bad are located within the same building, with defined territory as the only difference: The idea of defensible space first emerged back in 1964, when I was part of a team of architects and sociologists who were studying why the notorious Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in Saint Louis was being torn apart by the people who lived in it. Every public area—the lobbies, the laundries and mail rooms—was a mess, literally. There was human excrement in the halls. Except in one small area on each f loor of each building. You had to go through a fire door and then you were in a little hallway separating two apartments. This little hall was spotless—you could eat off the floor. When we called out to each other in the other hallways, we could hear people bolting and chaining their doors, but in this area we heard peepholes click open. Sometimes

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people even opened their doors. The reason was that they felt this little hallway was an extension of their own apartments. We knew we were on to something.26

In this discovery narrative, the young researcher comes upon a self-evident, quasi-natural phenomenon in the field. The story describes the environment of a housing project, but it reads like an encounter with a foreign tribe living in a jungle. The residents are only indicated by sounds and smells—or the irrational, animal action of tearing apart their own housing—not language. Newman’s claim to “proof ” centered around two existing examples of public housing projects in New York City: Van Dyke Houses and Brownsville Houses. The narrative appeared in Defensible Space under the section heading “A Tale of Two Projects,” and it was also featured in an article on Newman’s research in the New York Times in 1970, two years before the book was published.27 Newman told his readers about two projects in Brooklyn, practically identical in all regards, sited across the street from each other. He emphasized that the two projects had roughly the same number of residents (6,000 each) and roughly the same density (288 people per acre). They shared the same housing authority administration and policing. Despite all these similarities, the reader was told, the two projects had very different crime rates. Van Dyke Houses consisted of fourteen-story towers in a park-like setting, reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse and presenting what Newman called a monolithic appearance. More than a hundred residents shared one front door, and this entrance had no clear relation to the public street or the space between the building and the street. Mothers at Van Dyke were fearful of letting the children play outdoors or even in the hallways outside their apartment doors; too many people used the hallways for the mothers to feel safe. Across the street at Brownsville Houses, the low-rise design allowed each entryway to serve only a few units, and residents were able to use the interior hallways and grounds as extensions of their living spaces. Mothers allowed children to play in the hallways, leaving their apartment doors open to monitor their play. Even the police perceived the difference in the two projects: at Van Dyke, police felt “callous and indifferent” about entering, whereas at Brownsville they felt cautious about “invading” the privacy of residents.28 The surveillance and monitoring of the shared, semiprivate spaces of the project were key to the difference in crime rate, according to Newman. The book included illustrations of the differences in hallway design, contrasting the long, straight, undivided corridors at Van Dyke with the short, divided corridors at Brownsville, which served only six units each. Architects reading the book could thus get a quick sense of Newman’s point while only scanning the text. Those not comfortable reading plans could get similar information from the small perspective sketch, which otherwise seems rather uninformative.

IN DEFENSE OF SPACE

4.5. Van Dyke Houses in the background and Brownsville Houses in the foreground. Photograph by Oscar Newman, in his Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 38.

Newman’s study was challenged by social scientists at the time, and the graph is not a solid demonstration of a causal relationship between height and crime rate. He provided two tables of socioeconomic data that he encouraged his readers to “inspect” for proof that the projects were comparable. Aside from the vaguely criminological connotation, the choice of the word “inspect” is telling in ways that Newman may have intended and in ways he probably did not. To solve a proof by inspection is to solve it at a glance, either because it is so simple or because intuition has jumped to the answer. While Newman probably did not intend this meaning, he did intend his readers to check him with such a simple intuitive glance. He must have intended this reading because it is readily apparent from the tables that the housing projects are not as comparable as he suggests. A thousand more people lived in the high rise at Van Dyke than in Brownsville, yet they had fewer young children in the first through sixth grades. There was no data reported about senior citizens. Newman also neglected to address the question of whether the police’s comfort with entering the shared, open spaces at the high rise translated to a higher rate of incident reports by the police, in contrast to crimes happening but not ending up on police reports in the comparatively less patrolled, allegedly “private,” low rise.

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4.6. Illustration of the hallways in “A Tale of Two Projects,” showing the crime ridden high-rises at Van Dyke Houses and the comparatively safe low-rises at Brownsville Houses. Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 43.

IN DEFENSE OF SPACE

Newman’s account of the two projects reduced a great deal of complexity to a simple lesson: “It is the apartment tower itself which is the real and final villain of the piece.” 29 In a vast oversimplification, he argued that the high-rise form of the Van Dyke project caused it to have higher crime than the low-rise Brownsville. Later in the book he elaborated on the dangers of the high rises, whose heights prevent mothers from supervising children, leaving their “generally unattended” offspring to cause all sorts of harm to themselves and others.30 In a particularly gruesome passage, Newman described the children’s recent attempts to entertain themselves by destroying the elevators. The cost of this play was reported to be dismemberment and decapitation, amounting to twenty-one deaths between 1969 and 1971, as reported in the insurance statistics of the NYCHA. He acknowledged that rising land values made high-density housing necessary, but he argued that density itself was not the cause of crime.31 Newman claimed his theories could make public housing safe at high density, but only when combined with low-rise buildings. The message is that architects had been wrong to propose that shared spaces and shared grounds are good for the masses. Newman wrote, “The evolution of this building prototype could only have been conceived by a group of anxious men following the barest thread of rationalism: the search for the most economical solution; a way of housing the most within the least.” 32 The moral lesson is not that the citizens are to blame but that the architects and planners have pursued the wrong goals and stacked the so-called deck against residents. Trying to subvert the natural, human desire for a proprietary piece of the ground yields an unnaturally unsafe environment. The message would have been appealing to all kinds of readers, removing the blame from residents—sidestepping the culture-of-poverty controversy—and at the same time placing the potential for change back in the hands of architects, who had come to wonder if they could make any difference in social problems. In the preface Newman claimed that he had intended to write the book for housing developers, architects, city planners, and police, but given the significance of the findings, he felt that the study needed to be shared with a wider audience. The result is an accessible text, amply illustrated with diagrams and photographs that repeat the parable by contrasting downtrodden, vandalized before photos of public housing with the tidy, visibly “safe” public housing after Newman had intervened and established clearly defined territories. The text remained at the level of popular reporting, never going into detail about the criminological, psychological, or sociological models Newman was working from. Although the text was followed by a forty-two-page appendix with data and more methodological detail, the data and method were not compared to the book’s overall argument about height and crime.

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4.7. Illustration of the hallways in “A Tale of Two Projects,” showing the crime ridden high-rises at Van Dyke Houses and the comparatively safe low-rises at Brownsville Houses. Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 43.

4.8 (opposite page). Photograph by Newman, showing a clean, safe entry to Breukelen Houses, the positive, low-rise project he compared with Pruitt-Igoe. The baby carriage acts as an index of the safety of the entry area. Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 92.

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Even with police data and some graphing, Defensible Space was hardly an academic study, as is obvious when compared with a fitting foil, another book by a criminologist, C. Ray Jeffery, the year before, in 1971.33 Jeffery had a PhD in sociology and served as the book review editor of the Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science.34 While Jeffery’s book bears a title similar to Newman’s—Crime Prevention through Environmental Design—it appears Jeffery did not know about Newman, and Newman’s work contains no mention of Jeffery.35 Despite similar theories and titles, the books are quite different. Jeffery’s work was based in quasi-behaviorism, with its tendency to treat the individual mind as a closed, unknowable black box and studying manifest relations between input and output, or stimulus and response. Early in his career, Jeffery had been influenced by the work of behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner while earning his PhD. Jeffery paid close attention to the implications of a deterrence model and the presumptions about criminal behavior that deterrence requires. He argued that the current system, which relied heavily on prisons, had not worked because only a tiny proportion of crimes result in punishment and because the time gap between the act and the punishment was too great for learning to occur.36 Moreover, he wrote, punishment causes avoidance behaviors and aggression, not crime prevention. Prison wardens are rewarded for keeping a quiet, uneventful facility. Emphasizing that punishment did not deter crime, he proposed a more humane solution of reforming the environment because it is the environment that provides the rewards for criminal behavior. Changing the environment would extinguish the behaviors and thereby prevent crimes from happening in the first place. Moreover, he felt that blaming individuals for what was really caused by their environment was wrong. On several occasions, he used a quote from Buckminster Fuller to illustrate his feeling that changing the environment was more humane than changing the subject: “Reform the environment—not man. . . . Don’t attempt to reform man. An adequately organized environment will permit humanity’s original innate capabilities to become successful. My philosophy and strategy confine the design initiative to reforming only the environment in contradistinction to the almost universal attempts of humans to reform and restrain other humans by political actions, laws, and codes.” 37 Despite his invocation of Fuller’s lighter, more freeing approach, Jeffery was deeply Skinnerist and sought to change behavior through environmental controls that rewarded and punished desired and undesirable behaviors respectively. Later in his career, he came under criticism for arguing that biology determined behavior, eventually arguing that heavy metal poisoning and poor nutrition played a role in causing high crime among low-income urban populations.38 The more abstract and more ethical book was also less visual; by contrast Newman understood and spoke to the world of architecture.

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Newman accused architects of paying too much attention to the world in their heads, focusing on the work of Minoru Yamasaki, who had designed Pruitt-Igoe in Saint Louis. Newman did not, however, discuss the use of streets in other housing projects, such as Alison and Peter Smithson’s Golden Lane or Robin Hood Gardens, but not because he was unfamiliar with the work or with the lineage of the type. Instead, he was personally involved with Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and its development of the idea. When Newman wrote Defensible Space, he was familiar with the intellectual and practical problems of architecture and urban design in the postwar period. Over his life, he came into direct contact with some of its most influential ideas. Newman was born in Montreal to a union organizer father and a mother whose family had emigrated from Russia to Quebec in 1840. He began his studies at McGill University in sociology but soon lost interest and dropped out to work on a farm in New Jersey.39 He eventually returned to McGill and graduated from the six-year architecture program with honors in 1959, then went to Europe on a travel scholarship. After his funds were spent, he sought work with Jaap Bakema and his firm, Van den Broek and Bakema, where he was given the task of chronicling the recent 1959 conference of the avant-garde group Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne in Otterlo.40 Producing an account of the conference brought Newman into close contact with Aldo Van Eyck’s anthropological viewpoint and the Smithsons’ attempts to remake Le Corbusier’s “streets in the air.” Returning from the Netherlands, Newman received awards and became acquainted with inf luential members of the East Coast architecture field, including Kevin Lynch and Peter Eisenman. 41 He taught in Saint Louis at Washington University, where he conducted his own architectural research, leading an Urban Renewal Design Center. 42 Moreover, in the early 1970s, he participated in debates at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, led by Peter Eisenman.43 Newman also exercised his aptitude to bring his reading of architectural discourse to a broad public. Newman published a novel with Macmillan in 1981 and later worked as a consultant in a suit against the city of Yonkers, New York, for housing discrimination as has been documented by the HBO series Show Me a Hero. He also proposed a defensible space game, about which he declared, “Fundamentally the purpose of this game is to hold on to your money while you make some more. This is achieved by each player making his property secure and defendable from attack, while at the same time preying on his less fortunate or careful neighbor.” 44 The board game demonstrates Newman’s interest in making environmental deterrence available to a wide audience of entrepreneurs. One can only speculate how Newman’s initial interest in researching enclaves would have developed within an NIMH research program, in contrast with the LEAA’s more prevalent interest in crime prevention rather than

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4.9. Portrait of Oscar Newman. Fortune 87, no. 1 (January 1973): 161.

community building. But what can be said with confidence is that unlike architectural research produced from within a bureaucracy, Newman took on an increasingly common role in the franchise-state economy, where he acted as part researcher and part entrepreneur. Rather than having a single salary and a single mission, as Dorsett did at the NIMH, Newman paid for his research through grants—such as the LEAA grant—and through consulting work, most often for housing authorities. Working closely with housing authority clients, Newman came to understand their problems, their budget, and their priorities. Newman’s need to find work and to market his ideas to clients, in addition to his temperament, may be the main reason he published a parable-based book that reached a wide audience, whereas Dorsett published short advice-type articles for the psychiatry community.

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An Entrepreneurial R elation between Psychology and Architecture As the grant money from the LEAA arrived in 1969, Newman and Rand’s research enterprise grew. They opened an office on Broadway near Columbia University and took on a study of failing housing projects in Cleveland as a first test case. The pair also worked on a redesign of the grounds at Clason Point in Brooklyn, subdividing spaces as a way to reinforce territoriality and repainting each building in a color chosen by the tenant in an effort to stimulate feelings of ownership and belonging and to camouflage the fact that it was public housing. One of the earliest articles on defensible space in the New York Times, from 1970, claims that the enterprise had grown to include roughly thirteen members, sociologists, architects, statisticians, and graduate students. Newman is credited with leading a Project for Security Design in Residential Areas in 1970 and with directing the Institute of Planning and Housing at NYU in 1973.45 Newman continued to seek opportunities and was offered a position at New York University in public policy. Newman and Rand received a second grant from NYU and secured a new office closer to the university. Prompted by the LEAA, the pair organized a conference on “Design for Improving Safety in Residential Environments” in November of 1969. The conference was attended by a mixture of LEAA personnel, HUD administrators, and NYCHA representatives; at least thirty speakers were heard over the two-day conference, which was held at the Men’s Faculty Club at Columbia University.46 Rand and other social scientists debated various options for testing Newman’s theories using experimental means, while acknowledging the everpresent problem of conducting experiments in real-world social conditions. The strongest suggestion was to take a given project, measure the current crime levels, then modify the environment according to defensible space principles and measure the crime again. Then, to show that it was truly the new fences, for example, that produced a change in crime, the fences would be removed and the project retested. However, as Rand and others mentioned, there was an ethical complication to even this mild form of experimentation. If they were to find that the fences worked, how could they justify taking them out again? As with experimental drug trials, how could they justify withholding what might be life-saving treatment? Yet the well-known psychologist Erving Goffman argued that the right course of action was to do just that: to wait and study the implications before changing housing form. Speaking after Lee Rainwater on the first night of the conference, Goffman, as the author of a well-regarded study of behavior in public spaces, was interested in the semipublic zone between housing and the street. He had also written the 1961 study Asylums, which compared the semipublic,

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4.10. Photograph of Newman’s modifications at Clason Point, showing the concrete blocks outlining the front yards of the dwelling units and the widening and additional lighting of the middle path. The dwellings were also painted different colors to promote identification of owners with units. February 2, 1972. Photograph ID 02.003.42960, New York City Housing Authority Collection, La Guardia and Wagner Archives, Queens, NY.

semiprivate spaces of public housing to that of the mental hospital.47 In both environments, behavioral norms and expectations for order are shifting and unstable without a clear sense of whether the spaces are public or private. He objected strongly to trying to move from analysis of behavior in such semipublic spaces to design decisions. He worried that while psychology knew a bit about how the “ergocentric” kind of territory—that is, personal space, an individual soapbubble—works, it was still vague on the way that “turf” functioned in humans.48 Goffman presented the social sciences as severely chastened by their failing to predict the racial unrest and student protests of the 1960s and thus as being in no position to radically redesign housing.49 Architects and administrators might feel it was their job to make such choices in light of inadequate information, but Goffman declared it was not the role of social scientists to advocate policy when the facts were still uncertain. In a very memorable invocation of the divide

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between scientists and administrators, he declared: “Just because action is going to be taken doesn’t mean that I have to present a plan. . . . I can argue with you about the binds you get into when you start trying to act rationally about so large and vital and living a thing as living arrangements, and just because somebody has to make those decisions does not mean to say I have to. I will just stand by and criticize whatever you do. . . . That is my job. You make the decisions, and I do the bitching.” In response to Goffman’s critique, Newman countered that he did not think social science had achieved any great rational theory of society, so that architects might as well try. The architects and administrators whose job it was to make decisions were electrified by Goffman, and they continued to refer to his remarks on the second day of the conference. Various interpretations of his words were offered, among them the conclusion that it was so rare to hear an intellectual of that caliber address the topic of public housing that they had all been stirred up by it. This remark serves as a reminder of the context for Newman’s work: a significant part of his audience was made up of persons entirely unused to the presentation of complex ideas by a charismatic thinker. No doubt Newman’s own impact had something to do with his status as an intellectual and an intense personality, particularly in this context. His presentation was charismatic enough that one of the participants later remarked that Newman’s ideas were very “saleable” and that they belonged on Madison Avenue.50 As a result of the conference, Newman and Rand gained a substantial transcript of material, and NYU gave them another grant that allowed them to hire five or six staff people for the office.51 As co–principal investigators, Newman and Rand framed an “elaborate” research project to study the 165 housing projects with almost 1,600 buildings under the aegis of the New York City Housing Authority. NYCHA provided crime report data, allowing Newman to claim he had access to a vast laboratory of public housing. With the help of Lucille Nahemow of City College, whose assistance is also mentioned in the Defensible Space acknowledgments, Newman and Rand hired a few graduate students to analyze the data. The study was intended to come out in 1970, but the release was interrupted when Rand accepted an offer to teach at UCLA and departed from what he recalled as a “tumultuous” relationship with Newman.52 Rand did not care to say more on a long-past conflict, but a sense of the disagreement can be gained from an essay he published in 1969. In the essay, he objected to the way that “the architect-planner” instrumentalizes psychologists for “a redefinition of priorities, a finger on the panic button, and a rationalization for his carrying out his strategies as quickly as possible.” In an elegant framing, Rand described the architect-planner: “He looks to the psychologist to redefine the moral status of life and death so that he may loosen the funds from industry and government to convert each metropolis into a ‘Garden of Eden’ in accord with his utopic vision of the good life.” 53

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The two never published a coauthored study, but it seems Rand was aware of his utility to Newman in receiving funding from the LEAA. After Rand left, Newman leveraged his early success to grow his consulting practice, eventually founding an Institute for Defensible Space. He performed a study of crime prevention through environmental design for the Jersey City Housing Authority, which paid him fifteen thousand dollars for his recommendations of hardening locks; placing officers in transparent, bulletproof “booths”; installing intercoms and better lighting; and rearranging the grounds.54 And of course, after Rand departed, Newman published Defensible Space. Newman’s experience with several audiences allowed him to write something that engaged a diverse group, from sociologists to the urban public and from housing administrators to architecture scholars and practitioners. From insider references in section titles to turns of phrase and examples, the book provided something for each of its audiences. The result was a combination of genres that complicated the readers’ task of evaluating its message. If the book had been only a popular, journalistic work judged within that genre alone, then its reasoning would have been subject to scrutiny, lacking the legitimacy of data and the disciplinary context of architecture, criminology, and psychology. If on the other hand it had been an academic study, the methods of proof through data would have been inadequate, and he would have received little attention. Newman’s book was a combination of narrative, theory, statistical analysis, and formal analysis. He correlated demographic statistics such as family size with crime statistics gathered by the New York City Housing Authority Police, then produced graphs that combined those statistics with specific architectural information, such as the location in the building where the crime occurred, the number of floors in the building, its floor area ratio, or its stair type. The first such graph is included in the second chapter, on “The Problem.” The x and y axes of the graph show the number of floors in the building and per-capita felony rate, respectively. The presentation of the information is further complicated by a modification of the symbols used to represent the data points. Each point is composed of two shaded bars which are then augmented with, for example, a letter E if the population of the building is more than 75 percent elderly. The symbols also code further demographic information, namely the breakdown in ethnicity and the percent of residents receiving welfare, as well as architectural data on the size of the project and whether the building had an elevator or stairs. This graph covers the entire page, yet requires the reader to bring the book close to his or her face to decipher the small print that indicates these important distinctions. 4.11 (opposite page). Graph of building height for New York City Housing Authority projects versus felony rate per 1,000 population. Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 26.

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What the reader does not have to squint to see is the line of asterisks that has been drawn from the lower left toward the upper right. In tiny handwriting, the key explains that the asterisk line indicates the mean felony rate for each height category. This unifying feature of the graph literally simplifies the complexity of the phenomenon into the central, broad assertion that Newman was hoping to prove: the correlation between building height and crime rate. Defensible Space also presented detailed architectural information through circulation diagrams, produced with the help of an architecture graduate student named Jerry Rosenfeld, through which Newman compared the relative merits of various types of stairs in terms of how well the hallway spaces could be seen from the units and from outside. His drawings often isolated the circulation of a housing block, using tools familiar to architects to explain the specifics. He also included conceptual diagrams explaining his reading of private and public zones, making something intangible into something apparent and easy to believe in. Newman was, after all, an architect. In addition to reproductions of existing spaces, Newman presented a spatial diagram that is the key to his theory, demonstrating the spatial relationships that maintain clear lines of turf. In the drawing, soft pencil lines trace eight small circles, which are in turn placed inside a larger boundary, with their backs to the heavier boundary. The small spaces float freely inside the larger boundary, maintaining their independence from each other and their detachment from the building envelope. The small circles represent individual housing units, the private space of family life, but there is no further information given about the spaces inside the individual unit. It is not the internal family life that interests this architect; the units are left as empty circles, a kind of black box. The only detail is the sharp arrow that stabs out from each private space into the central void inside the heavier boundary. These arrows convey the argument that a shared space will be controlled and made safe through the action of these vectors, the eyes and ears of the unit inhabitants. The larger, collective boundary is broken at the front by a series of short, parallel lines, which resemble steps on a brownstone or similar dwelling. Indeed, Newman was very much in favor of using steps and slight sectional shifts to mark territorial boundaries. In the diagram, the parallel lines convey a similar visual impression, and through their repetition they build up a darker zone that blocks access to the interior spaces. The building envelope is also broken by a series of arrows, connecting this larger boundary to the linear space beyond and proposing a similar directional monitoring and safeguarding of the spaces outside the collective dwelling. Newman’s reading of multifamily domestic space is that the interior is unproblematic, but more than that, these interior spaces can control or reduce problems in the outer space through the visual connection represented by the arrows. Reducing form to boundary and vectors presents a manifestation of the spatial components of his theory of human territoriality, giving the idea credibility

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4.12. Diagram of private and semipublic spaces as small, closed circles, which are in turn placed inside a larger boundary with their backs to the heavier boundary. Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 9.

and putting it in play for design by making it visual and open to imagination in a way that the housing project plans do not. Such diagrams also contributed to the self-evident quality of the book, transforming behavioral and sociological theories into the visible realm. By drawing them, he made these abstractions accessible to the design process. The diagrams are at once clear and projective, explaining his concept but remaining suggestive about how the ideas could be translated into form in an architect’s studio. It seems that the combination would have been alluring to architectural readers, for it spoke their language. The drawings may also have appealed to his audience of housing officials in expressing the ideas visually, exhibiting the skills of the architectural profession but applied to the problems of housing management. The diagrams also emphasized that his argument was not only architectural but spatial. In other diagrams reprinted in Intellectual Digest, the territories were extended upward. Newman’s theory of architecture is, after all, a theory of defensible space, speaking the language of architectural design as the design of three-dimensional volumetric ideas and focusing on the spaces immediately surrounding the dwelling unit. Because of his familiarity with his architectural audience, Newman mixed themes and references that were both avant-garde and mundane. Echoing Goffman’s comment on the variety of territoriality that is mobile, like an ego bubble,

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4.13. Diagram of vertical territories. Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 10.

Newman referred to the British neo-avant-garde group Archigram and its theory that one’s car acts an extension of the home.55 In another reference from the discipline of architecture, he gave a knowing wink to the generation of architects that followed CIAM, known as Team 10. He referred to their discourse and the problem of “Housing for the Greatest Number” by naming a section on the “Significance of ‘Number’ in the Subdivision of Buildings and Projects” with the word “number” in quotes.56 Instead of writing number of units, or writing the name without quotes as if it were simply an idiom of the time, he called out the reference. But at the same time, he did not alienate his audience of American housing authority officers or the general urban public by referring to the Eurocentric discourse that was both literally and conceptually foreign to their way of thinking. The book spoke instead about helping “residents” establish a sense that they were “sharing” halls and lobbies, using the everyday language of common sense or journalism. He carefully avoids most references to the group, the crowd, or the masses, except where speaking critically, preferring instead to talk about neighbors and residents.

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Where others might use collective nouns, he pluralized singular nouns such as “neighbor” or “resident,” echoing the midcentury American distrust of groups.

Defending Architecture In choosing to focus on the question of territoriality in shared housing, Newman foregrounded a topic with deep roots in the history of modern architecture in Europe and the United States. The topic of territoriality in shared housing was also receiving new attention and much criticism, as outlined earlier in my discussion of the controversy over Pruitt-Igoe, which was just beginning to develop.57 Newman’s work managed to build on a lineage of modern architecture that had studied habitat and to declare that it was possible to heed criticisms of high rises without rejecting all of modernism. His architectural audience would have been aware of the idea of architecture as habitat, which was well known by the time Defensible Space was published in 1972. In the 1930s, habitat had a comparatively concrete meaning in biology, where it referred to the connections between an organism and its environment. The term was then applied to planning in Britain in the interwar years, and in 1949 Le Corbusier made his first of several failed attempts to produce a charter of habitat at the meeting of CIAM in Bergamo. The attempt failed, as did two subsequent efforts, largely because of the complexity of the term and its referent. Moreover, the younger generation was resistant to producing a single, universal definition of “habitat.” 58 Dissatisfied with the monotony of the realized CIAM schemes, the next generation looked for a richer, more “authentic” or humanized alternative, in which the occupant would not feel as alienated from his environment. Van Eyck, Bakema, and Alison and Peter Smithson sought this human element in diverse sources, from expressionist art to the play of children to béton brut, but within this heterogeneity the conversation coalesced around the idea of housing as a “habitat.” 59 This translated to a focus on the design of the spaces immediately around dwellings, the corridors and grounds and streets that connected those dwellings. The threshold became the key interface, and the Smithsons developed what they called a “‘doorstep philosophy’—an ecological approach to the problem of habitat—and a new aesthetic.” 60 The CIAM 9 conference at Aix-en-Provence in 1953 proposed a charter of habitat that declared that instead of viewing housing design as a problem of multiplying individual dwelling units, architects would do better to study the idea of the “immediate environment of the dwelling.” 61 Newman’s audience was thus primed to pay attention to such spaces. The idea of providing social space immediately around the dwelling while separating pedestrian and automobile traffic found form in the elevated, openair corridor in large housing projects that came to be known as the “street in the air.” The type had its origins in Le Corbusier’s immeubles villas, maisons à redents, and Unité at Marseilles.62 Newman’s book on the CIAM conference at

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4.14. The ideal of modern architecture and a “doorstep” philosophy, depicted by Allison and Peter Smithson. Loeb Library, Harvard University.

4.15. Bakema’s streets in the air at Royamount. Max Risselada, ed., Team 10, 1953–81: In Search of a Utopia of the Present (Rotterdam: NAi, 2005), 118.

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Otterlo included Alison and Peter Smithson’s London Roads study, a scheme for terraced housing, and their reading of “Problems Regarded as Central to Architecture in the Present Situation.” 63 Both proposals focused on the idea of mobility, developing their Golden Lane proposal into a large-scale, multilevel elaboration of the semipublic, semiprivate streets in the air. Bakema and his firm also used the type in their Buikslotermeer Urban Study in 1962–1963.64 Ten years later, in 1972, just as Defensible Space was published, the completion construction of the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens resulted in the publication of further images of life in these streets in the air. The discussion of habitat and the spaces adjacent to dwellings was well established, and some studies began to look at mat buildings or low-rise mass housing, which would soon become cliché when Newman delivered his own theory of lobbies, hallways, and grounds. These semipublic spaces were much studied, some projects had been built, and new permutations of the idea were brewing even then in the promotion of low-rise, high-density dwellings. Drawings of aggregates of small units, each with their own piece of the grounds, were published along with the Smithsons’ “Criteria for Mass Housing” in 1967, two years before Newman began his research on defensible space in earnest.65 The photographs and drawings in the book are almost entirely of such in-between spaces, the grounds, lobbies, and hallways of housing projects. The abuse of these spaces was documented in numerous photographs in Defensible Space, in which Newman analyzed various configurations of these spaces in public housing. While Newman attacked Yamasaki for his communal streets in the air at Pruitt-Igoe, Newman did not attack Team 10. He chose Yamasaki’s vision for these streets in the air, when he could have just as easily attacked the visionary collages of the Smithsons or Bakema. There are many reasons he may have chosen not to do so: he may not have wanted to alienate the influential architects, he may have felt their work would not be as familiar to his American audience, or he may have felt their modulation of the spaces was sufficient. In the end, he chose a project that his American audience was familiar with, or at least a city they knew, which they would have related to more easily than a Dutch or British scheme. The few explicit references Newman made to Team 10 were apologetic, declaring them to be well-intentioned and generally right even if they had failed to realize their goals. In 1980 he wrote that the Smithsons were basically correct in their “social criteria for mass housing,” including age-appropriate play spaces for children in nearby outdoor space. He explained that they had failed because they were unable to realize their “social commitment” in architectural form, because they were too concerned with pleasing the “style metaphysicists” who demanded they follow Le Corbusier. Similarly, he applauded Van Eyck in his role as a philosopher-architect whose rejection of the theory of Existenzminimum was appropriate to the postwar Netherlands.66

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4.16. A low-rise, high-density scheme with defined territories for each unit, published as part of a “Housing Primer” that included twenty-four other similar examples and a reprint of the Smithsons’ “Criteria for Mass Housing.” Lionel March and Neave Sinclair Brown, “Housing Primer: Low and Medium Rise Housing,” Architectural Design 37 (September 1967): 398.

What Newman shared with these Team 10 architects was a desire to ground architectural theory in underlying universals about the nature of humanity. The white, European architects in Team 10 and others pursued an interest in anthropological research on so-called primitive societies to inform their studies of habitat. A proposal by the Modern Architectural Research Group suggested a comparison of the habitat of “a primitive African or Asian society” and a “more materially advanced” one.67 Van Eyck was entranced by the mud villages built by the dogon in Africa, and a Native American pueblo found its way into his “Otterlo Circles” as the illustration of the “vernacular of the heart.” 68 Similarly, the Smithsons pursued an interest in the Sea Dayak longhouses—particularly the multipurpose space of the longhouse porch—as they designed the elevated corridors for the Golden Lane Competition in 1952.69 The Smithsons were

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intrigued by the anthropological lens that was turned on the British working class—as well as indigenous peoples like the Sea Dayaks—by Tom Harrisson, a polymath anthropologist with a popular series of BBC television programs on remote locations such as Borneo. The Smithsons’ work was informed by photographs by Nigel Henderson and discussions with anthropologist Judith Stephen.70 Photographs of African dwellings were common in the pages of the journal Forum, and Newman used one such photograph taken by Van Eyck to illustrate his theory of the threshold. The message was that in studying people untainted by the modern world, architects were able to tap into the basic nature of humanity and what they needed in a home. The proposition was as much about the problems facing the white Europeans as it was about the Africans and others. Direct references to African and other non-white peoples were left out of Newman’s work. Even so, his writing would have recalled the popular anthropological theory of human territoriality. Arising from zoological studies, the idea of human territoriality was gaining exposure in the United States in the late 1960s through works such as Desmond Morris’s 1967 book The Naked Ape and Ardrey’s 1961 African Genesis and most specifically his best-selling The Territorial Imperative from 1966. The idea of territory morphed from its original meaning related to sovereignty, which dates to the 1450s, into a naturalists’ usage starting in the nineteenth century. The idea of territory then grew to have its own abstraction: “territoriality” in the zoology of the 1930s and 1940s.71 The field of human ecology and human geography picked up the idea and applied it to human behavior shortly after. Nevertheless, the strength of the argument for the popular audience was due to the familiar idea of territoriality as expressed by Ardrey, whose books accounted for two of the ten sources in the bibliography of Defensible Space.72 Ardrey, a playwright, was impressed by the work of anthropologist Raymond Dart, which showed that the evolution of large brains had not predated the development of tool use among early humans but that in fact humans had started using tools and then developed large brains. Or, as Ardrey, the professional writer, phrased it, it wasn’t that man fathered the weapon but that “the weapon, instead, had fathered man.” The theory was that the need to defend themselves had led early humans to pick up and wield objects, and these skills had led to larger brains. The idea is illustrated in the famous scene around the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Released in 1968, just as Newman started his research, the film’s depiction of primates fighting was another illustration of the “killer ape” theory, which argued that human violence and technology are inextricably intertwined. As mentioned earlier, this theory that humans were inherently violent and warlike was meaningful in an age dominated by fear of nuclear apocalypse and crime in the streets. The idea

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4.17. “Mud House” in Sudan, above a Neolithic settlement in Turkey. Photo by Aldo Van Eyck. Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 5.

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4.18. The first of many illustrations by Ardrey’s wife, this one shows a human habitat framed by an animal habitat, neither of which look inviting. Drawing by Berdine Ardrey in Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (New York: Dell, 1966), 2.

was provocative: that try as one might, one’s innate nature would always govern. As Ardrey put it, “The hounds of our anxieties bay at old, cold traces, while nature’s foxes watch amused.” 73 Or, “The dog barking at you from behind his master’s fence acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of his master when the fence was built.” 74

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Research on territoriality arose in the 1920s and 1930s, and Ardrey marked this time as one when thinkers and leaders were intrigued by the possibility of a communal society that would do away with property entirely. But, he explained, even though they wanted to get rid of property, these thinkers had to admit that property was the basis of a drive as strong as the one for sex, if not stronger. He claimed that the drive toward territory had not been discovered because most of the research on behavior was done by zoologists using animals in zoos and by psychologists using animals in laboratories. In the zoo or the laboratory setting, animals have ample food and little ability to establish turf. This particular discovery story explains the revolution in thinking about the sex drive which occurred when American psychologist C. R. Carpenter returned from studying howling monkeys in Panama in 1934. The psychologist returned home to his “low-flung modern house,” with tales of untroubled easy sexuality and violently defended territory in the Panamanian jungle.75 His account “demolished” Sigmund Freud’s theory of the sex drive as only applicable in situations of ample food and restricted space, such as zoos. In captivity, where the animals had enough food and not much land to defend, the sex drive governed.76 Ardrey did not comment on which model fit modern humans better, whether they are like animals in the zoo or animals in the wild. He did not allow for the possibility that urban humans are now more like zoological monkeys—many if not all of whom have ample food and little turf—such that humans might also be governed largely by a sex drive rather than a territorial imperative. It is even more surprising that he did not consider this flaw in his logic, when one bears in mind his tendency to equate human and animal. He drew equally on others’ research in animal behavior as well as his own vivid experiences in postcolonial Africa, with all its upheavals and political unrest. Ardrey evidenced the same confusion of animal and human outlined by Marianna Torgovnick, who argued that accounts like Ardrey’s draw on their own image of the primitive to answer the problems of modern society, equating animal behavior with non-Western societies and denying the coeval status of the non-Western.77 Most likely he was just hoping to suggest that modern human inhabitations were unnatural, in order to make his own point about the best ways to live. Following Ardrey, Newman never forced his readers to make the conceptual leaps between animal and human explicit, instead relying on his audience’s willingness to make the leap from animal territoriality through “primitive” universals to the residents of public housing. On the first page of Defensible Space, Newman wrote, “We have become strangers sharing the largest collective habitats in human history.” The claim was a simple, clear declaration of his opinion that cities are artificial. But it was also a formulation that, washed of any specific idea of who “we” are, allowed a growing silent majority to make the leap untroubled by any explicit racial implications. Perhaps because he was

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talking about public housing, he removed the animal or anthropological examples that might have seemed strange to his readers and replaced them with the language of common sense. He simply opened the chapter on territoriality with the declaration that “historically the intactness of the family living unit and the territorial zone of the cluster of family units has always been given architectural expression.” But instead of a history of ideas or a survey of anthropological, historical, or psychological evidence for such a claim, he simply made the statement and then went on to evaluate specific projects, suggesting ways to improve the corridors or grounds. Rather than spending time on topics far from his general audience’s familiarity, he presented the only evidence for the claim to innate human territoriality in the first few pages, where he outlined a swiftly constructed historical lineage of photographs of streets. The photographs began with Van Eyck’s image of a mud house in Sudan, then moved to Pompeii, a “Street in Eighteenth-Century Dutch Town,” and finally a “Row-House Street typical of Nineteenth Century American Cities” in an unnamed city.78 All of these photographs were taken in the 1970s, except for Van Eyck’s. Nevertheless, his audience was familiar with the idea of innate human territoriality and thus many found the theory convincing. While territoriality may have become familiar enough to be convincing, the bibliography of Defensible Space included scant evidence for the theory, though that hardly mattered to readers like Ada Louise Huxtable, who declared that Newman had proof of the phenomenon. The bibliography included ten books on human territoriality, drawing on both psychology and anthropology, as well as a classic reader, Studies in Human Ecology, edited by George A. Theodorson.79 The sources spanned the zoological and the psychological, many of them borrowing from both fields without demonstrating that conclusions from one were valid in the other. Taken as a group, these sources offered little support for the idea of territoriality in humans as Newman applied it. Newman cited anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s well-known comparative study of personal distances in conversation, a clear case of the mobile, personal, or “bubble” variant rather than the idea of a fixed turf. The bibliography listed two books by Goffman, who had expressed his skepticism about the idea of turf at the 1969 conference with Newman and Rand at Columbia.80 Newman also referenced an article in Landscape by David Stea, an interdisciplinary fellow in environmental design and psychology at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Stea’s article emphasized the need for people to have their own space, with anecdotes about a “cage” in an office setting that fostered a group’s seclusion and cohesion by being walled off from the rest of the office by a filing cabinet. However, the phenomenon of the “cage” is not demonstrated as result of defense of a territory but rather as a relief from surveillance from the boss and colleagues.81 Clearly, a drive for privacy would not act to prevent crime in the same way as defensible space.

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Robert Sommer’s Personal Space provided the strongest grounding for the idea of turf, though it too failed to argue convincingly for an innate territoriality in humans.82 Despite other strengths, Sommer’s text also slips between studies of human and animal behavior without distinguishing between them. For example, the second chapter of Sommer’s book is ostensibly about zoological confinement, yet it segues without preamble into research on patient behavior in asylums. The book offers only weak evidence that the soap-bubble variant of territoriality leads humans to defend pieces of the ground. Many of the studies of human personal space cited by Sommer were really about temporary occupation of spaces. If an individual defends a zone around him or herself at a desk in a library, that may simply be the reinforcement of a soap-bubble-type space marked by furniture and not the possession of a piece of the ground in the way Newman intended it. Sommer did include studies of primate behavior, where switching the cages of monkeys altered the dominance in favor of the host. Perhaps most significantly for Newman, the objection of neighboring monkeys to the intruder played a role in reinforcing the dominance of the host monkey. Researchers found that in the library example, human students did not react anywhere near as strongly to intruders taking over a neighbor’s seat. Moreover, the question of whether students temporarily occupying space in a library are at all similar to public housing residents was never demonstrated. Despite critics like Huxtable who believed Newman had proven that human territoriality was a real factor in architecture, the literature he relied upon was more cultural and rhetorical than experimental. The lack of an experimental or scientific link between animal and human behavior did not, however, mean that the concept was not powerful. In the face of a growing liberalism or privatization of American urban and political life, the idea of innate territoriality gained relevance. Theories of innate behavior were often used to support the idea that private property was the “natural” route to a good society. Ardrey’s book spotlighted the link with its title: The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations. In the human ecology reader Newman cited, Chicago School sociologist Robert Ezra Park defined human ecology as the theory of “biological economics” or “an extension of Economics to the whole of life.” 83 These economic theories of ecology view the natural world as a collection of populations that are involved in an ongoing process of resource exchange. Populations trade with other individuals of the same species, with members of other species, and with the environment. Within this network of constraints, individuals make rational choices between their options, seeking to maximize their own well-being. For Newman, as for many of his readers, the possession of a piece of the ground was “the symbolic token of having a stake in the social system; it is deeply rooted in notions of proprietorship and belonging to the establishment.” 84

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Newman claims that this proprietorship conveys maturity, success, and special rights in legal processes. Defending himself against the charge that he is simply applying his middle-class values to public housing—or, alternately, artificially suburbanizing the city—Newman claims that if it is middle class to want security through the control of your living space, then the poor do share middle-class values.85 He rejects as romantic any view that does not acknowledge this. He also argues that it is easier to provide security for middle-class residents because they “have developed a refined sense of property and ownership.” Combined with everyday social experiences that reinforce their feeling of “social competence,” the proprietary sensibility gives the middle class “a feeling of potency in protecting and enforcing their rights within a defined sphere of influence.” He argued that it was more difficult, then, to secure low-income areas, as the poor lack this sense of potency or entitlement. Newman explains, with no evidence, that “Children who live in high rise buildings seem to have a poorly developed perception of individual privacy and little understanding of territory.” The proper formation of members of society requires proprietary pieces of ground; lacking this attachment, the community falls into what Newman and Rand called an “apartment culture.” Lacking territory, the community disintegrates into a dangerous state. In other words, “When people begin to protect themselves as individuals and not as a community, the battle against crime is effectively lost.” 86

Conclusion Oscar Newman’s work continued through the 1980s, aligning with the shift in housing toward low-rise, high-density housing, and the views of the Congress for the New Urbanism.87 Newman continued to work with Henry Cisneros at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, resulting in a 1996 HUD publication Defensible Space: Deterring Crime and Building Community. Through the 1990s, local legislatures passed ordinances to deter crime through environmental design in Tempe, Arizona; Tucson, Arizona; Broward County, Florida; Orlando, Florida; Saint Petersburg, Florida; Dallas, Texas; Irvine, California; and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Defensible space has become a popular idea around the globe, and one can now get certified by the International Crime Prevention through Environmental Design Association, which has subgroups in the United States, Canada, Europe, South Korea, and Latin America.88 In 1978–1979, in a series of lectures on the Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault contextualized crime prevention through environmental design as part of a growing American neoliberalism and a tendency to govern through environment. He pointed out the roots of crime prevention through environmental design in the economic model of behavior where crimes are considered to be the act of an individual Homo economicus, an individual who freely and rationally evaluates options and makes the choice to commit a crime or restrain himself.

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4.19. A tenant monitors the grounds or her front door through a closed circuit television. Note that Newman claimed it would be the tenants themselves who would police the grounds. The environment would be designed such that action by the state is reduced and the population polices itself. Photograph by Oscar Newman in his Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 183.

This neoliberal theory abandons the attempt to improve the morality of the individual and instead tries to reduce crime through environmental controls— precisely what happens in defensible space theory. In the guise of freedom, the population’s mental health and welfare are left unaddressed. The ideals of defensible space provided a manifestation of the postwar dream of each family atomized into their own units, aggregating and balancing each other into a nation of collective privacies. Incentivizing good behavior through the environment, the city could be controlled through methods that seem to be open and free but that attempt to control through ambient tactics. Such architectural controls and the cameras that soon followed would be not quite invisible, not quite in the forefront of the mind. Safety would be assured through division, invocation of innate qualities, and mutual watchfulness.

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Newman’s book did not address the darker elements of his ideas; he avoided the question of surveillance as a negative by emphasizing that he was merely unlocking natural behavior. He did not discuss criminological theory, law, or his assumptions about environmental determinism, and admirers greeted his work as a simple “common sense.” 89 Such environmentally determinist thinking indicted architects for causing the problem of crime, but Newman also empowered them with a role in the solution. Even in existing housing projects, architects could intervene with the grounds of the project to make the interior safer. The subtext is that modern housing projects do not need to be demolished—that Newman’s rules would allow for such buildings to be saved through the territorial definition of the grounds. The search for a psychological solution to the problems of urban crime and unrest was of interest to the National Institute of Mental Health, whose Center for the Study of Metropolitan Problems did fund a number of studies to try to discern the basic principles by which the environment shaped behavior at the scale of a whole city. This work aimed to mend the rifts caused by urban renewal and urban unrest through urban form, behavioral control that would hide in plain sight.

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5.1. In 1950 Leon Festinger published his study of small-group formation and influence using the “ecology” of Westgate Housing, built in 1946 for married veteran students at MIT. Leon Festinger, Social Pressures in Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), 2.

5 PSYCHE INTO SYSTEM Psychological Functionalism in Architecture Research Institutions

In  1971  the  Museum  of  Modern Art organized a conference

looking at the state of architecture education, bringing sociologists Robert Gutman and Herbert Gans together with urbanists such as Denise Scott Brown and intellectual architects such as Peter Eisenman.1 Called Architecture Education USA, the conference was co-organized by the research and teaching institute that Eisenman had created outside of university contexts. The social scientists and the architects debated the growing irrelevance of architecture, which had advanced to such a degree that Gutman observed that universities like Columbia were considering closing their architecture departments. To Gutman, who himself taught in an architecture school, the problem was that architecture had not adapted to the social changes of a new mass democracy.2 He claimed that the schools of architecture had failed to show that they did more than serve the profession or the interests of the faculty and should instead address the larger questions facing society. The sociologist pointed out a few abstract problems: the place of architecture in a mass society, the relation between design theory and design method, and the one between design and history, to which could be added the cases presented in this book.3 Architecture’s engagement with community hospitals, community mental health centers, open prisons, and defensible space were clear attempts to address social problems, but they had achieved only partial success. By the 1970s many architects thought the solution was to continue the engagement with science further into abstract research—often on urban problems and often in research institutions—to show that their knowledge of form and behavior could have relevance.

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Sean Keller has framed the work of Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman as aspiration for an “automatic architecture,” an attempt to ground design choices in a more rigorous body of knowledge that can be applied through a set of rules.4 Similar to Theodore Porter’s mechanical objectivity, these systems of design traded freedom of choice and expression for solidarity and defensibility.5 The automatic or systematic quality of their work helped each architect engage with the diverse experts within the federal research economy, including the NIMH, which supported each at key times. Despite their shared drive for systematic approaches to design and their mutual academic origins studying at Cambridge in the early 1960s (though they did not meet there), the two also represent distinct approaches to architecture that would diverge in the late 1970s despite their mutual origins. The professional and accessible writings of Alexander became somewhat taboo in architecture education, while the critique of functionalism championed by Eisenman became dominant. For Eisenman, the problem was not that architecture was socially irrelevant but that architects’ attempts to make the field relevant had been misguided. Quoting his mentor Colin Rowe, Eisenman declared that the crisis itself was merely a side effect of “the need to see reality in terms of the ‘architect washing away his social guilt.’” Architects had tried to solve the problems of public housing using psychological insight, but they had failed or even made the problem worse. He chastised the advocates of urban renewal for perpetuating the same urban problems in lower income areas of the city. Like Rowe, Eisenman came to support a viewpoint that such efforts were always too complex and too much outside of architecture to be properly solved by architects, particularly before the discipline understood its own core domain of formal knowledge. Rather than continue their ineffective attempts to solve urban problems, he proposed to transcend them by calling for a new framework that would first build the discipline’s understanding of form.6 Despite his eventual claims to an autonomous and postfunctionalist position, his direction was not formed in ignorance of the social scientist’s view about psychological functionalism nor the apparatus of the social science research economy. The sides that later seemed to be opposite were at this time discussed together at, for example the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) events, with both the social and the postfunctional shifting toward systematic methods. Psychological functionalism (the idea that psyches can be incentivized to follow rule-based responses to their environments) was shared on both sides of this debate in the 1970s. Admittedly, Eisenman’s aims were far less tangible or practical, yet he still intended to have a impact on the occupant’s psyche. He was trying to change not behavior, but awareness. The temptation to control—or profit from claiming to be able to control— psyche through aesthetics was shared despite growing evidence that the phenomena was too complex to predict and too political to implement. Eisenman

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realized this complexity and set out instead to study the way form operated in the abstract realm of the viewer’s mind. He formed these views in dialogue with urban research, but he (and many others in the field of architecture) headed into a new phase of theoretical work.

Social Science R esearch and the Environment: The Other Space R ace If architecture as a field had failed to demonstrate its relevance, it was not because there had not been government-funded research with roles for architects. While the mixture of form and function, buildings, staffing, and funding was always complex and the failures overdetermined, architecture was at the edges of addressing core problems, and funding was there. As Jennifer Light and others have shown, much of this work took a techno-science model from wartime military research and used that for urban research.7 In the postwar period, government funding for scientific research increased and began to support investigations without a clear application—also known as “basic research”—particularly after the Manhattan Project had shown that basic research could have significant applied results. Historians like Avigail Sachs and Arindam Dutta have shown the value of more rigorous knowledge as architecture departments like that one at MIT adapted to the vast research economy growing around them after World War II.8 In 1957 the launch of Sputnik made it seem even more urgent to find the next big breakthrough, and universities seemed to be the right place for this work.9 In 1960 UC Berkeley Chancellor Glenn Seaborg echoed Vannevar Bush’s earlier calls for basic research, joining the many who felt passionately that such basic research was the responsibility of the federal government, as no other group would fund it adequately, risking the security of the nation in a Cold War nuclear age. In the 1960s, the problems in American cities triggered calls for social science research to find answers to a very tangible and visible problem for American influence abroad: the nation’s urban environments. As Thomas Park Hughes has discussed in his history of the project as the quintessential form for modern technology innovation, defense technology was comparatively less thorny than highway construction involving many social and ethnic groups.10 Through the 1960s, research on rocket science and other defense technologies started to seem like a tempting model for the nation’s urban and social problems. As with community hospital designs, community mental health centers, prisons, and public housing, architects and social scientists interested in urban problems looked at existing behavior research to understand how humans would react to new environments from cockpits to bunkers.11 The Office of Naval Research, who sponsored much psychological research before the creation of the NIMH, supported Leon Festinger’s groundbreaking work in

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the 1950s that charted the spatial component of social influence and contributed to a cold war era interest in organizations and groupthink.12 György Kepes, Kevin Lynch, and others in Cambridge, Massachusetts, undertook research on perception and urban form with philanthropic funding as well as government support. Kepes worked with the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at MIT, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and Lynch and many others were at the Ford Foundation–funded Joint Center for Urban Studies at MIT and Harvard University. Starting with a $5 million five-year grant in 1959, the center supported innovative urban research on the relationship of environment to behavior under the leadership of Martin Meyerson and Lloyd Rodwin.13 More than thirty influential books resulted including Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City in 1960. In subtle ways, the focus turned away from understanding organizational behavior in the context of totalitarianism (e.g., Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality in 1950) to the fear of the urban crowd and the unruly city, as we have seen in the LEAA’s support for Oscar Newman’s work. Looking at the success of the aerospace program, architects and urbanists suggested that urban problems might be solved through a similar approach via generous funding for scientific study. An interdisciplinary group studied the idea at the 1966 Summer Study on Science and Urban Development, organized by the White House Office of Science and Technology and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.14 For three weeks the group of physicists, mathematicians, sociologists, psychologists, medical doctors, businessmen, economists, attorneys, engineers, planners, and architects met in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. At the end, a biophysicist and communications specialist named Walter Rosenblith declared, “We have learned in the sciences to deal with complex systems indeed,” but those were largely univalent, meaning that they had a single purpose.15 By contrast, urban problems required many actors, many purposes, and many components. In response, the group proposed a range of solutions, including a series of new agencies: a federally funded Institute for Urban Studies, charged with studying the so-called software problems of urban development; a National Center for Advanced Urban Technology; and a Communications Satellite Corporation (Comsat) for Housing that would raise necessary capital for replacing or rehabilitating almost all urban housing. The group’s report urged government and business to understand that “this inefficient and inhumane slum system is maintained at exorbitant capital and operating costs.” The ethical and affordable solution would be to implement real changes. David Rockefeller, in his role as president of Chase Manhattan Bank, disagreed, stating, “if the analogy with the Comsat is to be valid, [the Comsat Corporation for Housing] must be an economically viable corporation” able to make a return on investment.16 The urban space program bumped against an additional obstacle: not only were the problems multivalent but they needed to

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adhere to the capitalist system of producing profit, unlike aerospace, which was seen as an investment that did not need to bear fruit right away.17 In 1969 the Department of Housing and Urban Development appointed Harold Finger, the man who had held the fourth highest position at NASA and guided the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office, to run urban research at HUD.18 The comparison between space sciences and urbanism was not lost on psychiatrist Leonard Duhl, who gathered a group of experts to work together using the informal name of the Space Cadets in the early 1960s. Duhl organized the group within the NIMH’s Professional Services Branch, which was created to advise the director of the NIMH. The Space Cadets met to study the relations between environment and psychology, and their members included some notable experts: sociologists Herbert J. Gans, John R. Seeley, and Robert Gutman; psychiatrist Erich Lindemann; urban planner Richard L. Meier; ecologist and psychologist of crowding at the NIMH John B. Calhoun; and Sir Geoffrey Vickers, chairman of the Mental Health Research Fund in the United Kingdom.19 The multidisciplinary group also included policymakers, journalists, public health researchers, biologists, future Housing and Urban Development secretary Robert Weaver, and landscape architect Ian McHarg. The work of the Space Cadets was published in 1963 under the title The Urban Condition: People and Policy in the Metropolis after the 1962 American Orthopsychiatric Association meeting and eight years of conversations among the researchers. Orthopsychiatry was a fitting precedent for the Space Cadets, as it had been devoted to the social context of psychiatry since 1923, when a group of experts in social work, psychiatry, nursing, law, and psychology came together in pursuit of a “simple but revolutionary idea: The mental health of individuals depends on their social context.” 20 In his introduction to the book, Duhl placed the problems of life in an urbanized society alongside two other issues, survival in an atomic age and international affairs.21 He argued that while these other problems are “more immediate, more basic, and more critical,” nevertheless the problem of the urban environment was no less central to the long-term survival of the nation, entwined as it was with issues of education, health, and “personal security.” This was the time of community mental health centers construction funding, the large federal program to enhance national security through improving the mental health of the population. It was also the time of the aftermath of another large government effort to improve cities through urban renewal, a slum clearance program that left psychological trauma in its wake. The Space Cadets’ book included Marc Fried’s oft-cited “Grieving for a Lost Home,” a piece chronicling the post-relocation experience of residents in Boston’s West End who had been evicted to make way for urban renewal.22 He described the intense grief, longing, and anger of the residents, calling for planners and policymakers to realize that planning could not limit itself to questions of “bricks and

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5.2. Cover of a collection of research by members of the self-named Space Cadets group within the NIMH Professional Services Branch, 1963. Leonard J. Duhl, ed., The Urban Condition: People and Policy in the Metropolis (New York: Basic Books, 1963).

mortar” because psychological, social, and somatic pathology could and often had resulted from federal urban renewal policies. But while Duhl was able to claim in 1963 that urban problems were comparatively less immediate than the problems of the atomic age, by the mid- to late 1960s, that had shifted. After high-profile riots in Detroit, Newark, and

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other major cities in 1967, the problems of the failing urban environment became more immediate for the government. To demonstrate his commitment to solving these problems, President Lyndon Johnson appointed commissions, most notably the National Commission on Civil Disorders chaired by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois and the Douglas Commission on Urban Problems, to study the issue. The commissions included policymakers, planners, business leaders, and architects, along with psychologists, most famously Kenneth Clark, who issued controversial statements blaming white America for the riots, citing the psychological damage of racism on the African American psyche.23 In 1965 the controversial Moynihan Report outlined a theory of “family pathology” produced by matriarchal patterns in African American families. Both reports attempted to argue that the psychological problems were produced by structural conditions of racism, but by spotlighting such intimate problems of African American families instead of the practices of white racism, it became easy to dismiss the complex causes and simply blame the problem on the individuals and families. Enthusiasm for space research was motivated by astonishing imagery and the same was true for social science research; the vivid imagery of the social environment of the city added an element no less emotional than that of the other kind of space exploration. The gritty photographs of the reality of modern, urban housing had more of an impact than had those with Oscar Newman’s defensible space and put a human face on these social problems, most often an African American face. These photographs showed the social injustice of minorities in cities plagued by the disruptions of urban renewal, widespread disinvestment, and flight of jobs and white Americans to the suburbs. The publication of the Kerner Report by President Johnson’s commission on the “causes of civil disorders” and its exclamation of social pathology were accompanied by Gordon Parks’s sensationalist photographs that were also in a 1968 issue of Life magazine showing African American mothers and children in decrepit homes (fig. 4.3). The imagery added an emotional layer, but in the discussions of architectural solutions the language was itself quite dry, at most using the numerical and rule-based language of social science. For example, in 1967 the National Commission on Urban Problems considered the physical environment through a dry accounting of the barriers to equitable housing supplemented with some of Parks’ same images. Chaired by Senator Paul Douglas, himself coming to regret his role in passing urban renewal legislation, the commission wanted to make a real, critical contribution, but the language available to talk about housing and construction was unemotional. Even the architects on this commission floundered and wrote about style and differences of reception in abstract terms. A systematic, quasi-scientific study of the urban environment was chosen by most architects (with government funding) as a way to address social problems.

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5.3. Gordon Parks’s photograph on the cover of Life magazine the week after the release of Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Report, after the commission’s chair. Life 64, no. 10 (March 8, 1968).

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Concerned about the urban crisis and seeking a solution that would avoid past mistakes and transcend personal and national priorities, designers turned to the more rigorous, more abstract tools of social science and systems research through new groups that were formed to share and develop this research. 24 Writing in 1968, Gary T. Moore introduced the proceedings of the first Design Methods Group (DMG) as a response to national urban and social problems: In the context of the current urban crisis, rapid international development, and the inability of architects to do little more than parry with these problems in the face of uncertainty about national and international goals, personal priorities, and changing human values, dissatisfied with our deteriorating cities and snarled transportation, yet shocked by others’ dissatisfaction, protest and riot over the same problems, and humiliated, finally, by our mistakes in understanding these problems, we must concede that the evidence is clear and distinct that our traditional ways of designing and planning the physical environment need serious and immediate revision. 25

Moore’s sentiment was typical: he expressed antagonism to design in an attempt to frame a new rigorous approach as separate from the traditional, discredited method. The first meeting of the Design Methods Group included research by L. Bruce Archer on the design process, by Brent Brolin and John Zeisel on the design of mass housing, by Christopher Alexander and Barry Poyner on environmental structure, and by Anthony Ward on therapeutic environments. Other similar groups also formed in the late 1960s with some overlap in membership, including the Design Research Society, founded in 1966, and the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) formed in 1968.26 The groups published new journals of Environment and Behavior, Architectural Psychology, the Design Methods Group Newsletter, the Design Research Society Newsletter, and the Journal of Architectural Planning and Research.27 As with the DMG, EDR A was not directly affiliated with any branch of the government, although author biographies in the conference proceedings credit National Science Foundation grants as well as the U.S. Department of the Interior and a Public Health Service grant. The first meeting of EDRA was held in June of 1969 and included the disciplines of planning, design, architecture, electrical engineering, sociology, computer services, psychology, and preventive medicine. The proceedings opened with excitement about interdisciplinary collaboration and echoes of Moore’s chastisement of designers. Papers from this first conference were published the following year, including, “An Approach to the Study of Environmental Quality,” by Amos Rapaport, Nicholas Negroponte, William J. Mitchell. In the introduction to the book, the editors Henry Sanoff and Sidney Cohn framed environmental design as a new interdisciplinary field,

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5.4. The first Environmental Design Research Association meeting held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, June 1969, EDRA 1/1970: Proceedings of the 1st Annual Environmental Design Research Association Conference, ed. Henry Sanoff and Sidney Cohn (Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, 1970), n.p.

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akin to cybernetics thereby repeating the technological comparison. Sanoff and Cohn explained that the multivalent nature of design problems became apparent in 1967, when designers realized their tools and methods were inadequate. Next, they turned to scientific research but were unable to find research that was directly related to the problems of environmental design. The young field was described as plagued with methodological and epistemological problems, among which was the very definition of the field itself, much less what was meant by “environment.” Sanoff and Cohn defined environment awkwardly as a “complex adaptive or internally as well as externally open system,” which is much more of a systems or technologists’ approach than a humanist or designers approach.28 The EDRA of 1969 was a mixture of designers tempted by the lure of rigor and those who cautioned against underestimating the complexity of the task that was to be done by architectural design. For example, Negroponte wanted enthusiasts to remember that “architecture, unlike a game of checkers (with fixed rules and a fixed number of pieces)” had more in common with “a joke (determined by context).” Instead, he said design “is the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland, where the Queen of Hearts (society, technology, economics) keeps changing the rules.” He and others felt the human mind would continue to be essential to understanding the human actions of occupants and those who write these changing social rules. But perhaps the rules would help to keep an eye on the architects who disregarded what little was known about functional design. One participant at the meeting suggested that the growth of these new organizations was “at least partly caused by a desire to avoid ill effects on society of thoughtless, unconsidered decisions by architects and other designers.” 29 Maybe computation and rules would not be enough to design for better psychological function of buildings, but maybe it would be enough to prevent the large failures of architecture.

Social Science in University Architecture Departments Schools of architecture also underwent changes to respond to the perceived failure of the field to address the social changes and scientific advancements of the postwar years. A Progressive Architecture survey found that twenty-three schools had new leadership and that 81 percent claimed to be planning or had recently instituted significant curriculum changes.30 Respondents to the survey cited “science,” “programming,” “curriculum,” “architectural expression,” and the architect’s role as key drivers of change. Schools were also shifting to include a research focus. Studies of building technology, building products, and the relation between environment and behavior were carried out by William Wurster at the College of Environmental Design at Berkeley, C. Theodore Larson at the

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Michigan Architectural Research Laboratory, the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, G. Holmes Perkins at the graduate school’s Department of Planning, William Caudill and the Architecture Division at Texas A&M’s Texas Engineering Experiment Station, and the Institute for Architectural Research at the University of Pennsylvania.31 Yet a survey of schools found that only a quarter had successfully completed government-funded research, and by the end of the 1960s, as funding began to decline, architects realized a need to more forcefully advocate for their own expertise.32 Under Robert Geddes’s leadership, Princeton University’s School of Architecture sought to create a model of interdisciplinary research by strengthening its connections with the rest of the university. As outlined in the 1967 Princeton Report, Geddes and Bernard L. Spring explained that designers should be involved in discussions of national and social issues. The school hired Gutman and framed his course, Architecture 101: Introduction to the Built Environment, as a popular class for a wider university audience, as it included the perspectives of anthropology, biology, social science, engineering, and planning, as well as architecture. As with the curriculum changes at Berkeley—described in chapter 3—Geddes made a number of changes at Princeton that were grounded in his own experiences at Harvard in the 1930s under Joseph Hudnut, much as the Berkeley changes were rooted in William Wurster’s experiences at Harvard. The goal was to reframe the discipline so that it would be able to respond to an era of rapid change and be able to serve a society, to be truly modern in the sense described by Hudnut. Looking back from 2001, Geddes described this as seeing architecture “addressed to serviceability,” indicative of the growing importance placed on audience and the people to whom architecture is addressed.33 But it was also a time at Princeton that would soon yield speculative work on psychology and psychoanalysis, with Eisenman, Anthony Vidler, and others of the IAUS teaching there. Looking back from 1977, with a new interest in urban and environmental questions, Gutman speculated on the waning model from L’École des BeauxArts, which had dominated since the nineteenth century, and the model’s replacement with science and policy.34 Gutman speculated: Perhaps the most significant change in the architecture curriculum throughout the industrialized nations over the last century has been the introduction of the social sciences. . . . Princeton, under Dean Geddes, has been a leader in this innovation. This is the explanation for my presence on the faculty, as it also accounts in part for the presence of Anthony Vidler, Carl Schorske, Suzanne Keller, and earlier, Kenneth Frampton. At Princeton, because of Geddes’ cast of mind but also because of the orientations represented by people just named, the social science emphasis is manifested in a primary concern for the role of the cultural and historical sciences in architectural education.35

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By the 1970s Geddes felt that the design studio as a place of education was under attack from many sides, among them proponents of technocratic “programming studies” and “design methodology” and those who would frame education around case studies like law and business schools. By contrast, Princeton faculty relied on design studios as a base from which to integrate with the rest of the university. Geddes sought strong but conventional connections with the other professional schools at Princeton: engineering and public affairs. With social science, they built connections that were “often brilliant, but full of tension—recognizing that architecture is both a social construction and a cultural expression.” 36 While the term “social construction” may be anachronistic—more germane to the language of 2001 than of 1967—Geddes’s position was that neither social determinism nor pure expression were adequate approaches to design. The goal was to have design studios that were informed by other disciplines, so that architecture could position itself as conducting research that would be “basic” in the sense of not having direct application yet relevant to those who would solve social problems. The School of Architecture maintained a strong connection to the history of art and created ties with philosophy and anthropology, leading to joint appointments as well as a reformulation of the doctoral program under an interdisciplinary committee grouped into three concentrations: history, social science, and technology. Geddes recalls that the doctoral program was an important bridge between “social planning and physical planning,” seeking to “expand the intellectual frontiers” and “to bring to bear the insights of many disciplines on the problems of urbanization and the quality of the human environment.” 37 Interdisciplinary discussions about the built environment happened at Friday brown-bag lunches with regular attendance by faculty members including William Baumol from economics, Gutman and Suzanne Keller from sociology, Thomas Kuhn from the history and philosophy of science, and Emilio Ambasz, Lance Jay Brown, Geddes, Michael Graves, and Bernard Spring from architecture. Describing what these conversations were like, Geddes recalls that the architects often felt the economists oversimplified the complexity of the built environment and that Kuhn cautioned architects from over-reliance on matrices to contain and structure ideas, as in the CIAM grids/grilles. Education and research overlapped, and the Princeton faculty pursued federal funding for sociological work on the environment. Geddes, Gutman, and Keller sought federal funding for research, receiving a grant from the NSF to evaluate architecture in terms of human use at the scales both of building and of community. Social research and social criticism were encouraged, with Geddes and Gutman noting the absence of post-occupancy evaluation as a barrier to truly rigorous research, objecting to the American Institute of Architects manual, The Architect’s Handbook of Professional Practice, and discussing the National

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Building Code’s pretense of being concerned with social and life safety while not dealing with the human-environment interaction.38 Under Geddes, it seemed, architecture could learn from the best of social science while remembering that design was—as Nicholas Negroponte had said—a croquet game governed by the queen of hearts. Architecture departments at Columbia University, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, the University of Pennsylvania, and other schools had social scientists teaching architecture students through the 1970s.39 Pressure to create a discipline for architecture meant that Princeton, like Berkeley, MIT, and other schools, became a place where architecture argued for its social relevance while supporting systematic research that showed architecture as its own field of knowledge able to engage the questions of the day. In this mix of relevance and autonomy at Princeton, Eisenman’s ideas found support while Alexander established a Center for Environmental Structure at UC Berkeley.

The NIMH and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies Discussion of architecture’s attempt to balance rigor with social relevance requires engagement with one of the largest dissenters from architecture’s pursuit of functionalism. Eisenman would eventually and vocally argue for an architecture that did not concern itself with messy externalities and publish an editorial against functionalism in 1976 following a piece on neo-functionalism by Mario Gandelsonas, his collaborator in receiving an NIMH grant.40 Eisenman collaborated with Gandelsonas, Kenneth Frampton, Anthony Vilder, and Diana Agrest, establishing the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in 1967 and publishing key texts laying out core ideas for architectural thought. They co-organized the Architecture Education USA conference, among others, and for the period between 1967 and 1973 they hosted many conversations about where architecture should intervene in the world. Perhaps best known for publishing the inf luential architectural theory journal Oppositions, the institute aimed to be a place independent of both office and university where pure research in architecture could be undertaken.41 The IAUS was an informal group with offices on West Fortieth Street in Manhattan; programs included sponsored study for undergraduates and visiting scholars, many of whom had taught or were teaching at American or European universities. It was to be a place for close formal analysis as well as theoretical and intellectual work, without being beholden to client concerns or the curriculum requirements of the academy. The interests of its members were diverse, but in general they shared a desire to revise some of the tenets of modernism and examine the reasons for its stalled progress. This desire included questioning the belief in functionalism and exploring the potential for extending the formal project past the limitations that they felt had arisen in the postwar years.

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Fellows at the IAUS pursued some early, if not entirely successful urban work. Eisenman, Anthony Eardley, and Graves had adapted Le Corbusier’s idea of the linear city to Newark, New Jersey, and its environs in a Jersey Corridor project, published in 40 under 40 in 1966.42 Then, during the summer of 1968, the IAUS attempted to work with one of the oldest civil rights organizations devoted to advocating for African Americans and fighting racial discrimination. The IAUS aimed to work with the National Urban League through a proposed expansion of the league’s successful Street Academy to include drafting and drawing.43 The Urban League project fell apart, partly due to particularly bad timing. The year 1968 was one of rising racial tensions, evidenced by demonstrations at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago and rioting over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which would have been close to home for the New York City–based IAUS. The failure of the partnership with the Urban League did not mark the end of the IAUS’s search for partners; it also completed a study as part of the HUD Model Cities demonstration project in Binghamton, New York, in 1972.44 The project involved mapping the streets of the city in hopes of preserving and growing the central business district. The project was informed by social science methods through the assistance of Robert Gutman, who advised on methodological and disciplinary practices, framing reports into formats that the sociologists on review panels might expect.45 The architects asked residents to agree or disagree with statements such as: “I want my street to bring people from downtown.” 46 Residents of Binghamton were asked how they saw their city, their neighborhoods, and their streets; then streets were interpreted as a means of circulation, both formally in terms of whether they were circular or linear, but also in symbolic and gestaltic terms. In this way, they presented a hybrid formal and social analysis, through the idea of “cognitive models” similar to those used by Lynch, Alexander, and others.47 Gutman reviewed the survey and maps, and recommended the proposal adopt a certain amount of methodological self-awareness and to declare their understandings of the faults of their study, sample bias, what the utility of each question was, and how the “experiment” could be improved. Such self-awareness is a critical part of the scientific method and its means of producing knowledge, refining repeated attempts and demonstrating that the experimenters know what they are up to and that they are not claiming results that are not commensurable with the experiment. The IAUS’s Urban League and Harlem work has been interpreted as purely opportunistic, and no doubt that was partly true. Historians have also analyzed the project as largely enabled by the research economy. Convincingly, historian Lucia Allais claims that “the Harlem plan reveals plainly why there was a ‘U’ in IAUS: because ‘urban’ was a crucial category of funding in 1968, essential to the operation of any architectural agency.” 48 The urban category did open

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5.5. Map of Binghamton, New York, from the Binghamton Streets study, circa 1972. Folder B3-4, Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture. Gift of Eisenman Architects.

avenues for funding opportunities. The archives of the IAUS at the CCA contain ample evidence that fund raising through grant writing was a significant endeavor. There are letters expressing anxiety over funding, scholars and students threatening to sue for back pay, and a conflict between Frampton and Eisenman over some inadequate design work that Frampton claimed was due to under-staffing, all of which indicates that the need for secure funding was a constant concern in the early 1970s. The archives contain correspondence with foundations, letters from Eisenman asking if he might speak with a member of the foundation to introduce his work, follow-up letters on both sides, and, in

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the case of the Graham Foundation, some quite warm and informal notes. The range of funding sources Eisenman and the institute considered is vast, and they wisely put together a mixture of private, corporate, and state donors including the NIMH, HUD, Exxon, AT&T, the National Endowment for the Arts, and architecture and construction firms. Before receiving the NIMH grant, Eisenman and his colleagues had met or corresponded with a few of the large social science research foundations, notably the Ford Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.49 Clearly, the NIMH grant allowed the IAUS to persist and to undertake broader and less immediately useful work than they would have been able to do with only “real” commissions for buildings. It also allowed them to occupy a place in between the profession and academia, where they were engaged directly with bureaucracy. While they might have simply appealed to Binghamton and HUD as a means for funding, the selection of this grant rather than others was certainly due to the fact that it would yield the aforementioned “fodder” for IAUS research. Their urban research did not ignore government-funded, quasi–social science theories as the IAUS members looked to Newman’s theory of defensible space at Marcus Garvey Park designed by Frampton and colleagues.50 The philosophy of the project shared many of the basic principles of Newman’s book Defensible Space.51 The lines of easy surveillance were called out in a compound drawing, extending from tiny figures located on axonometrics keyed into a site plan, showing how the volumetric surveillance worked with the different unit types to cover the major avenues of the site.52 Along with a similar housing project in Fox Hills, Staten Island, the project was also shown in the exhibition Another Chance for Housing: Low-Rise Alternatives at the Museum of Modern Art from June 12 to August 19, 1973. When plans for the project were published by Progressive Architecture in 1973, the magazine framed it as part of the interest in low-rise, high-density housing, constituting an alternative to the attempts to reproduce Le Corbusier’s towers in the park.53 The reception reinforced the idea that these behavioral rules were the best hope for mass housing, suggesting the potential for Newman’s psychological functionalism to save struggling cities. In addition to the influence of his ideas, Newman was literally present and part of conversations at the IAUS, giving lectures and participating in discussions.54 He participated in a transcribed but undated conversation that probably took place in the spring of 1973. The discussion between Stanford Anderson, Eisenman, Frampton, Gutman, Tony Eardley, Michael Graves, and others began with the topic of type in architecture.55 The group debated whether Eisenman’s houses departed from the idea of type in favor of a more functionalist idea of program. Newman pressed Richard Meier on a close reading of a few forms, beginning with the space around the fireplace in one of his houses. Newman

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5.6. Site plan with axonometric drawings showing surveillance in three dimensions. Catalog for 1973 exhibition Another Chance for Housing: Low-Rise Alternatives at Museum of Modern Art, 16. Folder B5-5, Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture.

asked Meier whether he felt it was a problem that the space did not allow one to sit in front of a fire as one might expect to do. Meier replied that he did not feel it was a problem because he only treated the house as a series of forms. Newman’s response was to accept the formal mode, and to offer a critique of a missed formal opportunity with the roof, which Meier accepted. With that, the sub-discussion between the two closed, and the painter Robert Slutsky interrupted to return the conversation to a debate with Eisenman about Kazimir Malevitch’s theory of objects. Newman offered a social critique and pushed the IAUS architects to discuss the failure of its social role, but when that broke down, he followed participants into formal analysis, albeit belligerently. The discussion of form could persist beyond such social objections because it was a common, if reduced, language.56

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But the social questions kept turning up, and social and psychological factors were also foregrounded when the group turned to the question of housing tailored to a more recent lifestyle rather than the archetypal fireplace, considered both at the urban and the residential scale. The conversation took up the question of whether despair about the social context and “lifestyle” issues would result in completely ruling out the human being. In response to that speculation, an unidentified voice complained about a friend whose architect started the design process by asking whether his client wanted an entertainment-oriented house or a family-oriented house. The group responded to this remark with laughter, after which another unidentified participant remarked that even so, “You know, you don’t throw the baby out with the bath.” 57 Whoever the speaker was, Eisenman responded to the objection that too much was being lost when one tossed out the idea of lifestyle as the origin of design. His response was to acknowledge that there will always be a social context, even if the architect reacts to the context in denial of it and the implication may well be that that is precisely what he was doing as he was pressed by Newman or Gutman or whoever was defending the importance of social context. Eisenman clarified that he was interested in working within that social framework, but only in the way that a speaker works within the constraints of language: “What I’m saying within that framework, as any language is limited by the fact that our tongue moves in a certain way, the, these linguistic philosophers were searching for something new, as it were, artificial languages to perhaps go beyond the limitations of language today.” 58 Eisenman’s call for transcendence is clear, echoing Noam Chomsky’s theory of deep structures as the basis of all language, able to transcend the particulars of any given language. In the same way, Eisenman hoped to find an architecture that would transcend the difficult conversation about lifestyle and social issues. Drawing on the authority and objectivity of science, he argued that his search for form types was not a full architecture, he called it “a fragment or an experiment,” a piece of research. Later, Eisenman elaborated and described the work as experiment, akin to dissection: “As it stands it’s a half, as one arm without the body . . . I mean, I’ve said to you I make no apologies for—only being half of—of a half of an architecture. I say it’s an experiment and I feel the right as an experimenter to take things and dissect them and pull them apart and make suspensions—that it is a suspension, only. It is not a complete work of architecture.” 59 As with scientific method, Eisenman worked to isolate one aspect of the phenomena, as a means of finding an answer to one problem. He was not trying to answer all the questions of humanity and architecture; instead, he was looking for the level of abstraction that could transcend the local details. Whether or not the final result would have any utility, being so far removed, is another question.

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NIMH Funding for Generative Design Eisenman’s search for a grammar of design was expanded with the arrival of Mario Gandelsonas and the assistance of a large research grant from the NIMH for a proposal called “Program in Generative Design.” The grant was sought out and brought in by the IAUS, mainly Gandelsonas, Eisenman, and Diana Agrest, in the era right before the institute began publishing Oppositions. The grant provided a significant amount of funding, allowing for two fellows to remain at work, the lights to be kept on, and a reduction in the time and energy expended by Eisenman and his cohort in search of funding. While it was just one among many funding sources, the NIMH grant was particularly large. To give a sense of what was at stake, the institute applied for $311,099 to be used for three years, 1973 through 1976.60 They did receive $40,000 on October 16, 1972, and $37,920 for indirect costs on August 27, 1973.61 Considering that a salary for one of the fellows was $20,000, this was projected to pay for two fellows, a pair of research assistants, the services of a secretary, and a minimal $300 a year in books, reproductions, and supplies.62 With this substantial funding from the NIMH, the institute was able to pursue the equivalent of “basic research” in architecture. It gave them the time outside of designing for clients to pursue intellectual work. Even so, the NIMH was a specific client and did have expectations of the institute that shaped the proposal if not the outcome. In the same way that preparing an exhibition or publication directs the project toward a disciplinary or popular audience, working on the NIMH grant directed the institute’s work toward the ends and procedures of the NIMH. The match is hardly an obvious one, even considering the NIMH’s expansive definition of its role and the understanding of its interest in solving urban problems. The NIMH may have been merely interested in the IAUS proposal to use linguistics as a model for urban design for its possible use in solving “urban problems,” not as a linguistic proposal, for when Gandelsonas and Eisenman went to meet with the NIMH in Washington, D.C., they were directed to the Center for the Study of Metropolitan Problems, from which they eventually received the grant.63 In describing the NIMH project to the Sloan Foundation, Eisenman and his cohort claimed to have received funding to put together a “model” and a “methodology” by which they could study “the analysis and the design of the physical environment as a means of communication.” 64 In addition to Eisenman’s much discussed interest in Chomsky’s work from his time at Cambridge, the comparative newcomer Gandelsonas brought an interest in Roman Jakobson, Julia Kristeva, and other European theorists from his years in France.65 Both Chomsky and Jakobson crossed between mental health and linguistics; for Chomsky, it was due to his belief that language acquisition is prepared by “deep structures” in the brain, and for Jakobson it may have been

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5.7. Postcard from NIMH confirming receipt of the IAUS grant application, January 15, 1973, Folder B6-2, Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture.

his interest in the experiences of aphasia and its impacts on language.66 Having heard that a few of the linguists they admired had done so, IAUS members sought out the NIMH as one of many funding sources. Gandelsonas, Eisenman, and Agrest submitted their proposal for “Program in Generative Design,” the genesis of which is preserved in drafts in the CCA archives. The proposal was a combination of the interests of all three, and perhaps others at the institute as well, blending Gandelsonas’s knowledge of semiology and communication with Eisenman’s interest in conceptual structures. They began with the observation that there is a gap between form and function, and proposed to look at the mechanism that mediates between. They wrote: “The main thesis of the proposal is that architects design and construct things which have meaning, and that in order to have meaning the ‘messages’ which are created must conform to some normative system of signs.” 67 The proposal was essentially to follow Chomskyian linguistics and find the deep structure of form, to better be able to predict user reaction to it.68 But the key contribution was their objection to functionalism. Instead, they emphasized the gap between program and form. They proposed to develop four models of the way that the environment is structured; these models could be used both for analysis and for design, hence the term “generative” in the title. This is what they felt was unique: it “cannot be accommodated in traditional functionalist theories.” The very separation of reading and writing architecture in two distinct moves made the project different from functionalism; there is a gap

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between what the writer intends and how it is interpreted by a reader. In other words, as the proposal states elsewhere, there is a gap between program and form, between the human and the environment.69 Form A might cause behavior B, but it might not, so the aim of form was not to cause actions in the world. In July 1972 Gandelsonas opened his working paper on generative design with the idea that the big change in social science at the time was the introduction of linguistics, and that this had impacted anthropology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and philosophy as well.70 Gandelsonas recalls that at the time, he and Eisenman were in search of a way to frame the study of form in more “scientific” grounds and Gandelsonas was interested in the way linguistics could serve as a “pilot science.” He wanted to shift the focus from practice to theory in order to revitalize architecture. He sought to deduce first principles rather than catalog or prescribe them as Alexander was doing in his pattern language where various aspects of design were codified into a type of recipe to be followed. Indeed, Gandelsonas recalls feeling that Alexander was quite unscientific in the way he refused to acknowledge historical or social contingency in his patterns. Moreover, Gandelsonas suspected that language was not quite the right model, and this is reflected in the proposal’s descriptions of language as an analog for architecture, a guiding metaphor rather than a literal study of language. The linguistic model was largely being used as a provisional framework to study the gap between architect and occupant. The architects hoped to answer the urgent questions: how was the architect’s message received and where were the failures that caused such rejections of the modern project?71 Eisenman, Gandelsonas, and Agrest were essentially investigating the failure of the environment to communicate with the public in the desired way, as seen in the diagrams they submitted along with the proposal, which made use of the Saussurian motif of two disembodied heads. The diagrams propose quite clearly that architecture mediates communication between speaker and listener. They split the “process of use” and the “process of design” into two spheres of work (fig. 5.8). And then, in a subsequent step, they split all of that communication off from the built environment—with the intermediary of “form” akin to the alleged deep structure of language (fig. 5.9). A sketch, which is a similar and most likely earlier version of the idea, deals more with the translation from within the mind of the architect to the real, inhabitable world of the “built environment,” though it still has implications for intersubjective communication (fig. 5.10).72

5.8 (opposite page). Diagram showing the two heads representing user and designer above the loop of the “process of use” and the “process of design,” with the built environment as an intermediate step in communication. IAUS application to the NIMH for “Program in Generative Design,” Folder B6-2, Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture.

5.10 (above). “Examination of Transitional Grammars.” Folder B6-3, Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture. 5.9 (opposite page). In a subsequent diagram, Eisenman, Gandelsonas, and Agrest further separated users from the built environment through the intermediary of “form.” IAUS application to the NIMH for “Program in Generative Design,” Folder B6-2, C Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture.

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These diagrams (and others showing the ABA type of relationships typical of Colin Rowe) present the steps by which deep structures relate to the built environment in a visual and self-aware manner that they hoped would be clear to an audience that included behaviorists, linguists, and others on the reviewing board. From left to right, the diagram (fig. 5.10) shows the production of the built environment. At the far left, the “generator” influences the “ideal alternative,” in terms of the “arbitrary” and “complex nature since there are various generators, codes, elements.” A side path suggests the potential for a truly ideal alternative result from the generator, though the diagram speculates that this might be outside the realm of architecture and in language instead. Next, the “ideal alternative” is processed by what is most likely a translating machine, which in turn makes the built environment. This diagram thus shows the generation of form, but the grant was most likely a search for the reverse: the authors were trying to tell the NIMH they could read the built environment for what it might indicate about the “ideal alternative” the systematic “generator” of form. In choosing linguistics, Eisenman and his colleagues were following others who had used the linguistic metaphor for architecture, from the idea of architecture parlante in the work of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée in the eighteenth century—a body of work that was being revived by Vidler, one of the editors of Oppositions. The linguistic metaphor continues in architecture, appearing more recently in Kazys Varnelis’s reading of the Bauhauslers’ attempt to erase students’ preconceptions and install a new visual grammar, or Raphael Moneo’s depiction of James Stirling, or the legacy of the so-called Texas Rangers in the 1950s.73 As Varnelis reads it, the Texas Rangers moved past the Harvard-based critiques of the function of the building and whether a critic “liked it” to a more rigorous base in L’École des Beaux-Arts and an emphasis on architecture as an idea. In the transcribed discussion earlier in the chapter, Eisenman had been careful to distinguish his approach from that of Venturi, whom he saw as also setting up a language of design elements and then flouting it.74 Eisenman frequently defended himself against the idea that he was himself being mannerist, saying that he was instead trying to reinvigorate the field.75 The impact of the NIMH grant was complex. It allowed Gandelsonas and Agrest to remain at the institute for two years, performing a kind of basic research apart from a particular task. This was critical because the original Graham Foundation funding that had brought Gandelsonas there was running out, and Agrest was splitting her time between teaching and research. In Gandelsonas’s estimation, the grant allowed for the genesis and publication of Oppositions 1. It is unclear from the archives what was submitted as the final report to the NIMH, but Gandelsonas recalls that the papers published in Oppositions formed the meat of the report. These include his “Semiotics and Architecture: Ideological Consumption or Theoretical Work” and Eisenman’s analysis of Alison and Peter

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Smithson’s Golden Lane project, whose resonance with Newman’s theory of habitat was discussed in chapter 4. In a progress report, they listed these articles and a forthcoming publication from MIT—likely Oppositions, but perhaps another publication—as the result of the grant.76 Moreover, they were able to use the fact of the grant as a feather in their cap when communicating with the Sloan Foundation, with whom they were still in dialogue by May 31, 1972, when Eisenman forwarded the list of experts on the NIMH review committee to Sloan.77 Interfacing with these large granting institutions no doubt had a number of impacts on the institute. The relationship-building aspect of fund-raising included tours of the institute offices, getting together for drinks, and trading book recommendations; in the case of the discussions with the Sloan Foundation, the latter included Peter Marler and William John Hamilton’s Mechanisms of Animal Behavior (1966).78 While this certainly doesn’t mean Eisenman read the book, it does mean that he was aware of its existence and that, in discussion with social science funding sources, the bureaucrats felt that a book on animal behavior was relevant. It can be tempting to frame one’s work in terms of the literature that appeals to a granting organization or to alter the proposal to suit the organization’s expectations. No doubt the granting process also produced an increased self-awareness as the group tailored its projects to fit an agency’s expectations. The applicants were asked to produce documents that presented the institute as fundable, an image that may have been speculative if not fictional. Even so, by producing these documents, the applicant becomes more self-aware. One example is the chart of the financial organization the IAUS made, most likely at the request of HUD for the Binghamton Streets Study (fig. 5.11). The chart visualizes funding coming in and—at least conceptually—being filtered through an “R + D Fund.” The money could then be used for overhead or just filtered back into salaries, or, as indicated by a pasted piece of paper, when the fund exceeded twenty-five thousand dollars, some funds could be used for “special uses.” 79 The self-awareness—and indeed the naming of what was most likely a multipurpose segment of the institute as “R + D”—were probably the result of working with a large bureaucracy like HUD. The IAUS expressed its bureaucratically induced self-awareness in a statement prepared for the National Endowment for the Arts, framing itself as performing basic research: The Institute is largely dependent upon funding provided by commissions, usually from public agencies. However, the Institute would be severely limited in its postulative and pure research activities if it were to undertake only those projects which can attract public funds. Such commissions tend to be determined by the limitations of funded programs already in existence, thereby severely restricting the Institute’s capacity to suggest new programs for public action.

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5.11. IAUS Financial Project Structure, 1972–1973. Folder B3-4, Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture.

Therefore the Institute seeks to combine resources in an imaginative way which will reflect its concern for both public and private interest in education and planning.” They describe how they sought a mix of funding in order to “carry out independent pure research or to conduct its applied research, free from the constraints which sometimes accompany commissioned work. Only in this manner will the Institute be free to develop a general critical attitude and to contribute to the evolution of new urban design methods. In this prospective role the Institute is distinguished from both the professional office and from the profit-based research corporation.80

The statement emphasizes that the group wants to avoid commissioned work and search instead for more critical, basic research. The IAUS had experience trying to fit its abstract research on communication of urban form to the categories of an agency. A few failures may be illuminating here. In the case of the Ford Foundation, the IAUS presented a scheme for university housing. The Ford representative was interested and said that

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if the scheme were changed to low-income housing, it would be within Ford’s mission of fighting poverty, and the foundation would consider giving $50,000 to $80,000 per year over a three-year period.81 Similarly, a month before the IAUS received funding for its urban streets study, the Sloan Foundation rejected Emilio Ambasz’s application “Institutions for a Post Technological Society” because Sloan did not fund “the fields of architecture or physical design.” 82 By contrast, Eisenman’s correspondence with Kenneth Klivington at Sloan over several years indicates that Sloan was more concerned with behavioral or urban affairs, even while that distinction may not be made by the historiography at a greater degree of remove. The process of applying for the grant also generated a number of crossdisciplinary encounters, including conversations with the sociologist Gutman within the institute. As part of the grant review process, the NIMH sent a group of experts to the IAUS, where they met with Gandelsonas. The IAUS’s NIMH Review Committee was itself interdisciplinary, comprised of experts from architecture, anthropology, social psychology, linguistics, and animal behavior.83 The NIMH and other granting institutions required the IAUS to write progress reports evaluating its own work, and to state the heuristic used to evaluate its success, preferably with data, stating which populations were served, how others might be able to pick this work up and go forward, and how the work should be disseminated. Lastly, the NIMH asked the IAUS to reflect on the NIMH’s role with regard to consultants and administrative services.84 There clearly was a dialogue, and through subsequent drafts the language was clarified, as Allais has pointed out regarding Eisenman’s clarification of what it means to be an architect and what it means to be a theorist. After several stages of revision Eisenman’s statement became “First, as an architect and theoretician, I believe in the inseparability of ideas and form.” 85 Thus Eisenman firmly placed form in the arena of intellectual work and not only of practice or design. In his first progress report, Eisenman opened by responding to the comments made by the visiting NIMH review committee. According to Eisenman’s formulation, the committee had objected to three things: “1. Over reliance on linguistic terminology. 2. No explicit methodology. 3. No model which was directly related to architecture.” The report describes how these major objections meant that the first quarter had been used to address these “deficiencies,” resulting in a major restructuring. In the first case, Eisenman explained that the linguistic terms were indeed vague because they did not clarify whether it was a linguistic, mathematical, or spatial register being implied, and hence they would begin by deriving specifically spatial “notations.” Addressing the charge of methodological weakness, he claimed that with better terminology, it became possible to clarify their working mode and laid out a series of steps: “1. analysis 2. development of a model 3. development of the rules for the application of the

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model 4. application of the model.” 86 Further, to answer the charge of having no clear relation to architecture, Eisenman boasted that “my preliminary work has revealed a link between the elements of the deep structure and the individual’s capacity to conceive of a physical environment.” He claimed that this link was documented in the “Notes on the Conceptual Architecture” he included with the progress report.87 In Eisenman’s rebuttal, one can see his construction of a self-conscious methodology and a self-conscious declaration of thesis and the ways that work would proceed; these are important tools in theoretical work. While I am not saying that Eisenman would not have been a theorist without this support, I do want to present the grant process as something that pushed him to have a clearly defined methodology that would seem reasonable to the social science bureaucracy. His work was produced alongside an institutional interlocutor, including behaviorists and linguists at the NIMH. One can argue that the work would have been undertaken anyway, even without federal funding through the NIMH and other sources. But this is not quite the same as the common argument that lacking commissions, architects like Eisenman pursued paper or cardboard architecture. For while commissions were scarce, Eisenman and others were not working in a financial vacuum. They sought out—and tried to please—clients such as the NIMH, the LEAA, and other agencies that made up a historically specific environment of the social science research economy, which worked within and alongside the larger project of extending technoscience into the domestic and urban environment in the 1960s and 1970s. This research economy was hardly neutral, having its own priorities and procedures, as far as reducing urban unrest, fighting the Cold War, and promoting consumption and stability at a time of great social change. In this time of upheaval and dissent, work that traded humanistic richness for rule-based rigor was appealing in that it could gain the support of divergent groups and mask the human hands—and the partiality—of its authors.

Conclusion Many false dichotomies could be drawn between Eisenman with Alexander, but in a 1982 debate the two figures themselves resisted these easy comparisons while exposing their fundamental disagreement. The pair found and rejected such comparisons as West Coast versus East Coast and popular versus intellectual at the start, digging in more deeply on a psychoanalytic notion that their real difference was one of personality. Borrowing the theory of Carl Jung, Eisenman claimed he was the thinking type in contrast to Alexander’s feeling type. Eisenman was unmoved and even avoidant, while Alexander found the former’s reaction of “psychiatric” interest suggesting that the response was pathological.

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Eisenman was not offended and embraced his cerebral response in psychological terms as “the panicked withdrawal of the alienated self.” 88 He explained this withdrawal as the result of the nineteenth-century turn of humanity to the study of man; citing Michel Foucault he explained that this meant a displacement of man from the center of cosmology to a new status as just another animal. In other words, Eisenman argued his avoidance was a sensitive response to a zeitgeist characterized by the study of humanity as though human behavior were a natural phenomenon to be studied and governed, an approach many of the environmental psychologists had been taking. He claimed his response was a resistance to reducing irrational humanity, the spirit, to grist for behavioral conditioning by environment. Instead, he advocated architecture in Le Corbusier’s terms as an environment in which a window is too small or too large but not the right size; this misfit was considered necessary to call attention to the alienation between humanity and the machine or the gap between psyche and form. Alexander, offended, declared that architecture must create comfort and that to do otherwise is to mess up the world, employing a curse word. The audience indicated its approval with applause. To that Eisenman cautioned, “The need to clap worries me because it means that mass psychology is taking over.” He argued that architecture’s social role is to resist the architecture of comfort because discomfort is a way to deal with the shared problem of anxiety of life in the context of Cold War and environmental mess: “My children live with an unconscious fear that they may not live out their natural lives. I am not saying that fear is good. I am trying to find a way to deal with that anxiety.” He asks, “What is a person to do if he cannot react against anxiety or see it pictured in his life?” Instead, Eisenman wanted a psychologically functional environment, but one that prompted resistance to the status quo through discomfort. He sought to produce this discomfort through cerebral display of the formal elements of the design. He proposed a different impact on the viewer than the architecture of these new institutions that attempted to look like anything but institutions and to exert influence on behavior without an appeal to consciousness, an approach that would make such resistance difficult. Open prisons, welcoming mental health centers, and housing grounds designed for territorial behavior are all means of addressing anxiety and fear, but unlike Eisenman’s postfunctional architecture, occupants might not know the intent behind the design. While the encounter with the NIMH certainly had an impact on Eisenman, he was fundamentally against the kind of architecture normally produced by social science and by Newman and Alexander. There was a very obvious misfit of the IAUS proposal within the NIMH and social science funding and a very real oddity about the IAUS’s claim to be furthering behaviorist science.89 This oddity and misfit is further evidence of the expansion of the NIMH, as well as the IAUS’s desire for a theory of architecture able to transcend disciplinary

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boundaries and be transferred across the built environment. And yet the NIMH funding provided Gandelsonas and Agrest with the time to produce the journal Oppositions containing humanist, formalist urban research ushering in a new intellectual era for architecture. Through the late 1970s, theoretical approaches to architecture’s problems gained popularity, and as Gutman recalled, the personal often replaced the political. Architects continued to use visual tools to influence an audience’s emotion, but increasingly, as in Eisenman’s projects, this audience was other architects. Moreover, the functional and behaviorist goal of changing what the audience would actually do was abandoned in favor of irony, play, and critique. Some sociologists remained, such as Gutman at Princeton and Galen Cranz at Berkeley, but others left. Environmental psychology remained strong for fifty years or more. Alexander remains one of the best-known architects, and his books are often given by parents to would-be architecture students. But once they arrive at schools, students find Alexander is also disdained by many educators whose work has diverged from such practical and professional concerns and who attempt to convey that social science is a quasi-taboo in the studio, something to be left to shopping designers, hospital designers, and maybe urban planners.

CONCLUSION Disappearance in Plain Sight

In  the  1990s  Colin  Rowe produced an influential account of

modern architecture’s attempt to build a better society that he described as the Architecture of Good Intentions. He declared that modern architecture floundered in the 1960s. The movement lost its way as it was absorbed into commercial and government architecture with only a few worthwhile structures built as private residences by experimental practices. Rowe was a British transplant best known for analysis of form and his teaching. In his discussion of the architecture of good intentions, Rowe diagnosed an impulse to morality as core to the modern movement in architecture. He wrote, “modern architecture embodied a vital, inner impulse, an obligation to disclose and to reveal, without varnish and camouflage, the essentials and the fundamentals of the problem—and the social problem—to be solved.” 1 The ambition to use form to solve social problems animated efforts at housing reform and the design of nonresidential institutions such as libraries and museums able to express the ideals of a modern, rational, democratic global order after the war. But Rowe and many of his students have since cautioned that architecture may not be the best path to utopia because it is not possible to influence society so forcefully through form. Indeed, as Karl Popper has suggested, it might be dangerous to try.2 Decades before Rowe’s analysis, architects had tried, however, through many typologies of architecture. They designed legible, affordable community hospitals that used color and clear arrangement of program to assist the postwar hospital expansion. Public relations expertise guided the study of population desires, encouraging communities not only to use the hospital but to participate in fund-raising to match the federal program. The comprehensive national

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Hill-Burton program was the model as well as, paradoxically, the counterexample for the 1963 Community Mental Health Act and its construction program, which also used architecture to encourage people to use institutions. Clyde Dorsett took on the role of specialist architect, guiding the design of hundreds of psychiatric facilities that aimed to use design to express their attention to patients. Despite their mixed success in creating a more liberated architecture for mental health care, including the disappearance of the CMHC program’s distinct avant-garde design ambition, these field stations for the management of the mental health of the population were seen as a model for the idea of open prisons. Architects were challenged by the idea that architecture might be to blame and wondered what it meant if the very institutional walls were what made a prison inhumane. It would be no simple matter to build a better society if the buildings were to blame. In response, architects and psychologists worked together to support the idea of a new environmental expertise that went beyond any individual building. This expertise in design and human behavior was supported by the federal interest in security; with Law Enforcement Assistance Administration funding for open prison research and for crime prevention through environmental design, architects such as Oscar Newman developed a role for themselves as purveyors of an idea. Newman’s influential book was key to his success, and it inspired other architects to take architecture’s impact on psyche as core to the discipline and pursue further expertise beyond any particular social application. With NIMH funding, the architectural thinkers of IAUS crafted a means of systematically studying the impact of formal grammars on the viewer, writing and exploring the personal side of a politics of environment. Architects took the opportunity to explore their contribution to population management through programs and grants from the U.S. franchise state. With collaboration from psychologists, they employed a combination of diagrams, data, aesthetics, and theories such as territoriality to exert influence through persuasion that was often neither rational nor conscious but ambient and emotional. The architects in this study took up positions of influence because of their declared mastery of the relationship between form and psyche with little discussion of the ethics of covert influence through form. The social project of government-funded institutional architecture was perhaps not the brave vision Rowe had in mind, providing well-designed rational housing for the masses, even with the avant-garde designs that architects contributed during the Kennedy-era launch of the CMHCs. But architects’ efforts to solve social problems through built form place Rowe’s concerns in a new light. If architecture is to have a role in building a better society, then the subtle use of aesthetics to improve mood seems a useful component, even as the covert influence on a population has the hallmarks of power through

CONCLUSION

surveillance. The theory of psychological functionalism is both promising and dangerous, and this history of its contribution and missteps may help to keep an eye on an idea that has tended to disappear in plain sight. Perhaps less than actual building designs, the legacy of psychological functionalism may be in the skill set of concepts, diagrams, and paperwork that enabled these architects to exert influence in the middle of complex institutional logics and at times of great social change. Historians of social science have suggested that at times of fracture and dissent, the use of rigorous data- and rule-based methods of research are valuable because they foster consensus, even if they are not particularly rich ways of accessing truth.3 These quasi-scientific research methods are, in other words, “technologies of truth.” Trying to evaluate whether architecture’s engagement with environmental psychology was “true” or even helpful to institutional design misses that these ways of thinking were socially and politically useful to a field seeking greater relevance and acceptance within the universities but also in American society: Where a consensus of experts is hard to reach, or where it does not satisfy outsiders, mechanical objectivity comes into its own . . . , it has a powerful appeal to the wider public. It implies personal restraint. It means following the rules. Rules are a check on subjectivity: they should make it impossible for personal biases or preferences to affect the outcome of an investigation. Following rules may or may not be a good strategy for seeking truth. But it is a poor rhetorician who dwells on the difference. Better to speak grandly of a rigorous method, enforced by disciplinary peers, canceling the biases of the knower and leading ineluctably to valid conclusions. 4

The search for functionalist understandings of psyche was helpful for the field as it navigated complex social changes. Architects saw social science methods as very different from their own but still wanted to claim the objectivity and funding for research into architectural knowledge. The shift from studying the urban environment itself to studying abstractions of the environment may appear to be a flight from engagement with social issues, but the retreat was itself a social act. It was an attempt to create a type of “mechanical objectivity” in Theodore Porter’s terms, a restoration of the authority of the designer through adherence to a system of rules, trading in texture and receiving credit for rigor. Ian Hacking, Dan Bouk, and others have written about what is lost when humans become numbers and diagnoses.5 At a much longer time scale, Bruno Latour has described this jettisoning of the less rational and quasi-religious sides of humanity as the turn which made modern science so powerful.6 Modern architecture may have found a similar strength in its turn to science, one stream of which is certainly its embrace of the social science of psychology in psychological functionalism. In doing so, these institutional designs often discarded

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just those idiosyncratic elements that Robert Sommer marked as missing in his discussion of “hard architecture and how to humanize it.” 7 Sommer was of course not the only one to rebel against the rigidity that was so difficult to remove from institutional designs; Rowe’s objections to such well-intentioned projects lived on through Eisenman and others. Through the late 1970s and 1980s, the field of architecture gained an intellectual authority and a body of knowledge of its own that was greatly enhanced through the growth of PhD programs in architecture and increasingly divergent from art history and the profession of architecture. Such scholars developed an interdisciplinary but distinctly architectural theory, blended with historical research. Gutman described the field in the 1970s and 1980s as wounded by failures of key protests such as those in France in May 1968 and at Kent State in May 1970, choosing instead to make the personal political. Avigail Sachs demonstrates that architecture became a discipline where psychology is used abstractly, noting Mark Jarzombek’s chronicle of modern architecture’s engagement with the personal and psychoanalytic side of the concepts that might also be used in a social, mechanically objective way as in institutional reforms of the postwar.8 Through writings and drawings, such as Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York (1978) or the work of Bernard Tschumi and Anthony Vidler, architects retained a political orientation but turned away from earnest solutions to social problems, though social issues of housing and urbanism and the very psychological concerns of alienation and anxiety remained key for Koolhaas, Tschumi, and Vidler. Their texts were unlike the institutional reforms in this book in that they largely ignored the “mechanical objectivity” needed for solidarity across difference—and for success in operating in a bureaucratic context of large federal construction programs—in favor of a more playful and often more insular engagement. The contribution of a critical voice that resisted governance and management pushed the field to be even more self-aware, yielding, for example, the training that then allowed the production of this study. But the larger social problems and the need for solidarity, agency, and criticality need further attention and resources in architecture design and discourse. This volume has been selective, focusing on four institutional reforms and a few researchers to analyze a moment when architects were in a position to do good; they were engaged with their context, enabled and constrained by the mechanism of mass democracy as the American welfare state shifted further to the franchise state or submerged state. Many other engagements between architecture and the politics of the second half of the twentieth century could inform larger or later studies, while at the same time the figures in these chapters merit their own further micro-study. Dorsett, Newman, Isadore Rosenfield, E. Todd Wheeler, Robert Sommer, Leonard Duhl, Robert Gutman, and others had complex careers than could each fill a volume.

CONCLUSION

This book has also left largely unaddressed the perspective of the occupants of the buildings, placing architects instead at the center of the story. This decision was not made out of a belief that the patients, prisoners, and residents are unimportant nor that their views are uninteresting but because the architects rarely discussed their buildings’ users or talked with these users. At times a few accounts were available, and where they were, they have been included. In cases such as the Planning Aid Kit, some architects sought occupant input, albeit in reduced form. The reasons for the collection of such survey data and the question of whether it trickled into the buildings remains for a future study. Histories of participatory design, such as the work of John F. C. Turner in the 1970s, and discussions of whether or not such efforts are truly participation would be valuable but remains beyond the scope of this attempt. A larger study of the intersection of social research and architectural design could enlarge to include a study of the urban research of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s 1968 studio at Yale University, Learning from Las Vegas, or Form Analysis as Design Research (eventually published in 1972 as Learning from Las Vegas), and their later effort to learn from Levittown. Venturi and Scott Brown’s work is often cited as an early hybrid of urban research and studio education. The architects and their students gathered information through observation of the popular landscape to create organized representations of that knowledge. Using the grid format from earlier CIAM meetings, Venturi and Scott Brown produced semi-systematic knowledge about methods for visual communication in the sensational environment of the Las Vegas strip. Their work is also often seen as postmodern, using ironic engagement with a pop culture that could be “almost all right” to discuss problems such as the design of institutional housing for the elderly in the Guild House project. Instead of criticizing, they were observing a variant of psychological functionalism as a challenge to the ethos of modernism, celebrating the opportunity for play offered by signs on casinos and car washes where color, light, and symbol persuaded consumers to enter and spend their money. Such a study would most likely yield interesting intersections of the broader ideas of social science and architecture as it turned from the era of good intentions to formal play. A larger or longer study could also expand to include a global focus, as the United States was not unique in its excitement over the potential of environmental psychology to solve problems of population management. Discussions of race and gender would also be important extensions, knitting together the reluctance of architects and bureaucrats to address explicitly the extreme segregation in the community hospitals and the preponderance of minorities in other institutions such as prisons. The possibility of arguing that environmental psychology also used its mechanical objectivity to avoid such injustices is worth pursuing as those inequalities have not gone away. If anything, the need to describe the

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global phenomena of psychological functionalism, its influence and its tendency to hide behind the enduring innocence of architecture, has only grown in the time of this book’s writing. The era of governing through environment has not ended; in the retail and surveillance sectors, spaces are designed to produce certain behaviors. In the early 2010s, there are hospitals that look and operate like hotels and mental health centers that have returned to presenting themselves as these hotelhospitals.9 The CMHC dream of a new typology of a welcoming mental health center in each community never came true, but outpatient mental health care has become widespread in mundane offices. Indeed, the failure of the program to close psychiatric institutions and its impact on cities and crime is much discussed. Similarly, the project to open the prisons was also clearly a failure. We live in an era of mass incarceration that shows little sign of slowing and little sign of allowing even small-scale psychological and social science research into prisons, much less allowing for the proposal of a softer alternative. By contrast, Oscar Newman’s program for crime prevention through environmental design has spawned a successful career path for many consultants, even if the installation of security cameras has somewhat altered the importance of having literal eyes on the street.10 The intersection of technology, for surveillance and communication, with psychological functionalism is yet another avenue for future study. The attempts to influence psyche through aesthetics may have their most profitable and pervasive influence on the many screens that shape movement, work, emotion, and behavior in the twenty-first century. Competing platforms take various approaches: the naturalistic skeuomorphism of Apple, the flat design of Microsoft, and the material design of Google each have corporate design guidelines potentially suited to sorted types of the population, as did institutional designs.11 A growing field of interface studies, which intersects with architecture scholarship in the work of Brandon Hookway and John Harwood, traces the impact of these interfaces on user subjectivity, starting with World War II cockpits and IBM computers.12 These scholars also argue for the “unobtrusiveness” of these interfaces, and Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, a pair of architectural thinkers, have presented designers as the source of this seamlessness.13 The work of Le Corbusier and Charles and Ray Eames presents the architect as a designer helping to remove the pain of humans pushed to work at ill-considered machines. Design, they claim, is now everywhere removing the pains of modernity. And what principles would they be using today but psychology, human factors, and ergonomics? A critical history of ergonomic design—one that builds on Anson Rabinbach’s classic history of the human motor—would be a most vivid addition to the history of the power of interface design.14

CONCLUSION

The policy aims of postwar programs may not have been achieved, but the idea that behavior can be altered through environment remains big business. With evidence-based design, hospital administrators and hospital architects continue to design for patient and public relations using quasi-scientific data, and they have grown much more dexterous at collecting and deploying that data. There is ample ongoing research on the way institutional environments in hospitals influence patients’ well-being and recovery.15 The search for connections between environment and behavior to help predict and guide population behavior continues as hospitals triangulate data on patient well-being with the requirements for nursing and medical labor. The latest findings remain the same as some of the thinking in the CMHC era,: the first thing to do in determining a hospital design is to ask the community what type of aesthetic it wants and what would match the current conditions. It is hardly surprising that the new hospital down the road mimics the large, corporate offices along the same highway. The practice lives on with the hospital environment with the current trend toward evidence-based studies such as Cynthia McCullough’s recommendation for “positive distractions,” most notably art. However, the recommendation to include art is at once combined with an injunction against abstract art, defined as art the viewer can appreciate without sitting down. Yet any human figures should remain somewhat abstract, lest, for example, the presence of hair distract and discourage a cancer patient. Conclusions as far as the influence of colors indicates that specific color associations exist but are idiosyncratic and tied mainly to personal history, so specific recommendations are rarely useful.16 However, the brightness of colors and the amount of contrast are thought to have an effect on perception of spaciousness leading to a clear benefit in managing the challenges of confinement. The era of large federal construction programs and rapidly growing science research seems to be ending. Bold concrete forms, complex circulation patterns, and other avant-garde institutional designs have not become common. The support for design thinking has declined, with most news articles since the 1970s simply rehashing older ideas such as the suggestion that allowing patients, inmates, and students to move furniture around can help with socialization, something Sommer had suggested as early as 1958. But if the radical forms of psychological functionalism are uncommon, the thinking remains common. The 1960s CMHC designs give a glimpse of an architecture that disappeared because the larger project of psychologization succeeded; community mental health centers are now mostly no different from offices and hospitals, as there is no longer a need to be otherwise. The number of Americans being treated for mental and behavioral health has grown. Americans have accepted psychological ideas, drugs, and reimbursements from the franchise state, yet the

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role played by architecture is no longer a source of innovation. Even though intellectual development plateaued after the era of social science in architecture, environmental psychology has had an impact on everyday environments in the spaces produced by market research: retail environments and mass-produced, mass-customized houses. Psychological functionalism remains inf luential, albeit domesticated in the unobtrusive designs of corporate space in brick and mortar and increasingly on screens.

NOTES

Introduction: An Opportunity for Architects, Psychology, and Institutional Architecture after World War II 1. Ada Louise Huxtable, “New Prison Designs Stress Human Elements,” New York Times, September 21, 1971, 39. Michel Foucault also commented on the Attica prison riot. 2. Wolf Von Eckardt, “New Design Helps Point the Way to Prison Reform; Physical Plants to Match Philosophy,” Washington Post, October 7, 1971, A22. 3. Sommer, Personal Space, 9. 4. Forty, Words and Buildings. 5. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 2, 3, 259. 6. George A. Miller, “Psychology as a Means of Promoting Human Welfare,” American Psychologist 24 (1969): 1063–75. 7. Rose, Governing the Soul; Alla Vronskaya, “The Productive Unconscious: Architecture, Experimental Psychology and the Techniques of Subjectivity in Soviet Russia, 1919–1935” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014). 8. Kenny Cupers, The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 9. Rohde, Armed with Expertise; Isaac, Working Knowledge. 10. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 129. 11. Antoinette J. Lee, Architects to the Nation: The Rise and Decline of the Supervising Architect’s Office (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 12. Sachs, Environmental Design; Cohen, Architecture in Uniform. 13. Shanken writes that architects had “thrown in their lot with a cultural force of national and international dimensions” (Shanken, 194X, 10). 14. Cuff, Architecture. 15. Dutta, A Second Modernism, 9. 16. Shanken, 194X, 26; William Caudill, Space for Teaching, 1941, cited in Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram. 17. Matusow, Unraveling of America; Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement; Rodgers, Age of Fracture, about the 1970s and 1980s. 18. Gordin, The Pseudoscience Wars. 19. Graham and Diamond, Rise of American Research Universities, 28–33; England, A Patron for Pure Science. 20. Gutman, Architecture from the Outside In. 21. Eugene F. Magenau, ed., “Research for Architecture: Proceedings, AIA-NSF Conference on Research for Architecture” (Washington: American Institute of Architects, Documents Division, 1959), 3.

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22. Attendees included Oscar Newman, George Rand, Henry Ruth of the LEAA, John Zeisel (sociologist at Harvard), Lee Rainwater (of the Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard), Goffman, George Hall (director of research of the New Jersey State Law Enforcement), John Pace (consultant to the New York Housing Authority), R. D. Ames (executive assistant to Larry Cox, assistant secretary of HUD), Albert Walsh (chairman of NYCHA), and Lieutenant Hunt of the New York City Housing Authority Police (“Stenographic Transcript of Proceedings, Design for Improving Safety in Residential Environments,” Meeting at the Columbia University Faculty Club, November 13, 1969, manuscript from George Rand). 23. Goffman quoted in “Stenographic Transcript of Proceedings,” 157. 24. Nye, Bound to Lead, 188. 25. Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front. 26. Herman, Romance of American Psychology; O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge; Haney, The Americanization of Social Science 27. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 126. 28. Marc Fried, “Grieving for a Lost Home: Psychological Costs of Relocation,” in Wilson, Urban Renewal; Lee Rainwater, “Fear and the House-as-Haven in the Lower Class,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 32 (January 1966): 23–37; Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls. 29. Mott and Roemer, Rural Health and Medical Care. 30. Anthony Flint, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City (New York: Random House, 2009), 11. 31. Howard A. Rusk, Chairman of the Department of Rehabilitation and Physical Medicine, New York University, Dedication Ceremony—June 2, 1956, Beckley, W.Va. (Letters of Appreciation from Guests, Preparation), Series IV: Miners Memorial Hospital Association, Box 3, FF 1. A similar statement was made at the groundbreaking at Man, though with a domestic audience. Warren Draper, Address at Man Groundbreaking, October 31, 1953, Folder 2: Press Releases, Regional History Center, West Virginia University. 32. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 1st American ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 140–41. 33. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 260–61, cited in Manuel Shvartzberg, “Foucault’s ‘Environmental’ Power: Architecture and Neoliberal Subjectivization,” in Deamer, The Architect as Worker. 34. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1927). 35. To borrow architectural theorist Sven-Olov Wallenstein’s words, “The body politic becomes a living entity that must be attended to, not just a source of disturbances that must be repressed” (Wallenstein, Biopolitics, 10). 36. Kenneth Keniston, “How Community Mental Health Stamped Out the Riots (1968–1978)” in Denner and Price, Community Mental Health. There were of course, earlier critiques of psychiatry, such as One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and Titicut Follies (1967), but the critiques mentioned here are targeted particularly at the community mental health program. 37. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State, 23. 38. Martin, Utopia’s Ghost, 64–65. 39. See Brian Lonsway on Kevin Lynch and commercial environments in “Spatial Experience and the Instruments of Architectural Theory” in Cupers, Use Matters; Easterling, Enduring Innocence; Paco Underhill, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999).

NOTES TO PAGES 21–29

Chapter 1. Creation of Community: Hospitals as Interfaces with the Public 1. Perry Bennet, “Changes in Hospital Architecture,” Chester (PA) Times, August 31, 1957, 4. 2. Hacker, Divided Welfare State. 3. Adams, Medicine by Design. 4. Rosenberg, Care of Strangers. 5. Kisacky, Rise of the Modern Hospital. 6. Sloane and Sloane, Medicine Moves to the Mall, 54–55. 7. David C. Sloane and Allen A. Brandt, “Of Beds and Benches: Building the Modern American Hospital,” in Buildings and the Subject of Science: Introduction to the Architecture of Science, ed. P. Galison and E. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 8. M. R. Grey, “The Medical Care Programs of the Farm Security Administration, 1932 through 1947: A Rehearsal for National Health Insurance?,” American Journal of Public Health 84, no. 10 (October 1, 1994): 1678; Grey, New Deal Medicine. 9. Rosenberg, Care of Strangers, 248–49. 10. Leonard Engel, “The Bingham Plan,” Scientific American 179 (October 1948), 128. 11. Mott was chairman of the Saskatchewan Health Services Planning Commission. He later worked to coordinate hospital construction with union constituencies in West Virginia and in Detroit (Mott and Roemer, Rural Health and Medical Care). 12. Mott and Roemer, 5–7. 13. Engel, “Bingham Plan,” 128. 14. See Stevens, “Case for Cooperative Medicine,” in Stevens, In Sickness and in Wealth, 80–104. 15. A. M. Fauntleroy, Editorial, “Hospital Lessons of War,” Figure 4, Ambulant Splint, Modern Hospital, April 1916, 274. 16. Starr, Social Transformation of American Medicine, 283. 17. Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 23–24. 18. Boychuk, National Health Insurance, xxii, 234. 19. Starr, Transformation of American Medicine, 286. 20. World Health Organization Expert Committee on Organization of Medical Care (1957) Role of Hospitals in Programmes of Community Health Protection, Geneva, 4, in Llewelyn-Davies and Macaulay, Hospital Planning and Administration, 9. 21. Llewelyn-Davies and Macaulay, Hospital Planning and Administration. 22. Stevens, In Sickness and in Wealth, 86, 225. 23. “Hospital Survey and Construction Act,” New England Journal of Medicine 235, no. 13 (1946): 498; Starr, Social Transformation of American Medicine, 349. 24. New Hampshire (4.2 beds per 1,000 people), Rhode Island (3.4), and Massachusetts (3.4) in New England were close to the standard, as were central states such as Minnesota (4.1) and Wisconsin (4.1). On the other end of the scale, Maine (2.2), New Jersey (2.9), Arkansas (2.7), Mississippi (2.9), and others were considerably lower. Abbe et al., Nation’s Health Facilities, 112. 25. Mott and Roemer, Rural Health and Medical Care, 221. 26. Karen Kruse Thomas, “The Hill-Burton Act and Civil Rights: Expanding Hospital Care for Black Southerners, 1939–1960,” Journal of Southern History 72, no. 4 (November 1, 2006): 825. 27. Kisacky, Rise of the Modern Hospital, 338.

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28. Howell, Technology in the Hospital; Stevens, In Sickness and in Wealth; Adams, Medicine by Design. 29. Howard A. Rusk, “Hill-Burton Program Raises Country’s Hospital Facilities: Moreover, Work of Medical Commission Assures Maintenance of Standards,” New York Times, September 21, 1952. 30. Commission on Hospital Care, Hospital Care in the United States: A Study of the Function of the General Hospital, Its Role in the Care of All Types of Illness, and the Conduct of Activities Related to Patient Service, with Recommendations for Its Extension and Integration for More Adequate Care of the American Public (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1947), xi. 31. Butler and Erdman, Hospital Planning. See also “New York Hospital: Cornell Medical College, N.Y.C.,” Architectural Record 77 (1935): 373. 32. Julian Smariga, One Story Hospital Construction (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Public Health Service, Division of Hospital and Medical Facilities, 1951). 33. Hill-Burton Publications: An Annotated Bibliography, U.S. Public Health Service publication no. 930-G-3 (Washington, D.C., 1962). 34. Alden B. Mills, The Modern Small Hospital and Community Health Center (Chicago: Modern Hospital Publishing, 1946), 50. 35. The 40-bed hospital in Poudre City, Colorado, was a typical rural hospital designed to serve three populations: 4,381 city folk, 10,120 farmers and small townspeople, and 5,499 mountain people. Erikson, the technical advisor, noted that the unusual circumstances of the postwar period and the regional differences in labor and material costs would make such figures obsolete very quickly (Mills, 36). 36. Rosenfield and Rosenfield, Hospital Architecture and Beyond, 85. Isadore Rosenfield was hired to prepare a similar plan for Puerto Rico at the request of the Department of Health in 1945. The plan included nursing homes as well as a biomedical facility for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The plan was not implemented until Puerto Rican health authorities and the University of Puerto Rico came together with a Rockefeller Foundation grant. 37. Thomas, “Hill-Burton Act and Civil Rights,” 826. 38. Shanken, 194X. 39. “The Challenge of the Housing Crisis,” Progressive Architecture, 1946, 74. 40. “Who Should Take Part in Planning Our Hospitals?” Modern Hospital 70, no. 3 (March 1948): 93. A conversation between Alfred L. Aydelott, hospital architect in Memphis Tennessee; Herman Smith, Chicago hospital consultant; Ray Brown, superintendent of the University of Chicago Clinics; Robert T. Sherman, president of the board of directors of the Evanston Hospital; and moderator Everett W. Jones, vice president of the Modern Hospital Publishing Company. 41. Rosenfield, Hospitals, Integrated Design, 42. 42. Rosenfield, 43. 43. Rosenfield, 43. 44. Rosenfield, 284. 45. “An Argument for the One Story Hospital,” Architectural Forum, 1956, 119. 46. Adrian Forty, “The Modern Hospital in France and England,” in Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built Environment, ed. Anthony D. King (London: Routledge, 1980). 47. Winfred Rhoades, “Can Hospitals Be Humane?,” The Survey 54 (June 1925): 303, cited in Sloane and Sloane, Medicine Moves to the Mall, 56.

NOTES TO PAGES 42–49

48. “Psychology in Hospitals: Dr. Goldwater Writes on the Importance of Using It,” New York Times, August 3, 1930, 27. 49. Rhoades, “Can Hospitals Be Humane?,” 303. The article shares the issue with an article on the Klu Klux Klan, Hull House, and Partick Geddes’s piece on “The Valley Plan of Civilization,” proposing that the study of peaceful civilization, not just the study of war, is crucial. 50. G. Harvey Agnew, “Personality and Psychology in the Hospital,” in Bachemeyer and Hartman, The Hospital in Modern Society, 1943, 100–110, 112, adapted from Hospitals 11 (December 1937). 51. Don Whitehead, “Public Relations Becomes New Industry: Vast Propaganda Mill Seeks to Influence the American ‘Moss Mind,’” in Lubbock (TX) Avalanche Journal, March 20, 1955, 8. 52. A. C. Bachemeyer, “An Administrator and His Public,” in Bachemeyer and Hartman, Hospital in Modern Society, 678 from 1943. Biographical information from the Finding Aid for the Arthur C. Bachmeyer Archival Collection at the University of Cincinnati, Health Sciences Library, Henry R. Winkler Center for the History of the Health Professions, http:// rave.ohiolink.edu/archives/ead/OhCiUWC0037. 53. Bachmeyer, “An Administrator and His Public,” 678, 679, 682. 54. “A Good Hospital Never Stops Growing,” Kittanning (PA) Simpson Leader Times, June 22, 1957. 55. “Hospitals Use Television,” Modern Hospital 70, no. 2 (February 1948): 146. 56. “Hospital Day Programs,” Modern Hospital 70, no. 6 (June 1948): 118. 57. “Dr. S. S. Goldwater Is Dead Here at 69: Ex-Commissioner of Hospitals,” New York Times, October 23, 1942, 21; S. S. Goldwater, “On Humanizing the Hospital,” in Bachemeyer and Hartman, The Hospital in Modern Society, 675, 673, 677. 58. “Light Up the Truth,” Modern Hospital 70, no. 3 (March 1948): 49. 59. “Light Up the Truth,” 49, 50. 60. Caitjan Gainty, “‘Going after the High-Brows’: Frank Gilbreth and the Surgical Subject, 1912–1917,” Representations 118, no. 1 (April 2012): 1–27. 61. Elizabeth Laura Lewis, “The Division of Nursing Labor in the Hospital: The Role of ‘Scientific Management,’ New York State, 1900–1940” (Columbia University, 1990). See also Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990) on the distinctions between Frederick Winslow Taylor and the European science of work, regarding their origins in different labor contexts. 62. Hookway, Interface; John Harwood, “The Interface, Ergonomics and the Aesthetics of Survival,” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Daniel M. Abramson, Arindam Dutta, Timothy Hyde, and Jonathan Massey (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 70–92. 63. Forty, Words and Buildings, 174. 64. Butler and Erdman, Hospital Planning, 1. 65. Arthur G. Anderson, Industrial Engineering and Factory Management (New York: Ronald Press, 1928), 93 cited in Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram, 86. 66. Phyrne Squire, “Pastel Shades Add to Beauty Of Hospital: Subtle Use of Color Psychology Revealed in Institution Here,” Washington Post, April 7, 1940. 67. “An Advanced Small-City Hospital,” Architectural Record 100 (August 1946); “Hospitals by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill,” Architectural Forum 96 (April 1952), 123. Other hospitals include one in Greenwich, Connecticut, the seventy-two-bed Gouverneur

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Hospital in New York, and the six-hundred-bed New York University–Bellevue Hospital Center. 68. “Hospitals by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill,” 125. 69. “Hospitals by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill,” 121. 70. Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram. 71. Arthur Drexler, “Introduction,” in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Axel Menges, Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1963–1973 (London: Architectural Press, 1974), 10. 72. See also Isidor Chein, “The Environment as a Determinant of Behavior,” Journal of Social Psychology 39, no. 1 (February 1, 1954): 115–27. 73. Robert Sommer and Robert Dewar, “The Physical Environment of the Ward,” in Freidson, Hospital in Modern Society, 325 from 1963. 74. Norbett Mintz, “Effects of Esthetic Surroundings: 11. Prolonged and Repeated Experience in a ‘Beautiful’ and an ‘Ugly’ Room,” Journal of Psychology 41 (1956), 459–66; Abraham Maslow and Norbett Mintz, “Effects of Esthetic Surroundings: 1. Initial Short Term Effects of Three Esthetic Conditions upon Perceiving ‘Energy’ and ‘Well-Being’ in Faces,” Journal of Psychology 41 (1956): 247–54, cited in Sommer and Dewar, “Physical Environment of the Ward.” 75. Sommer and Dewar, 319. 76. George E. Ruff and Edwin Z. Levy, “Psychiatric Research in Space Medicine,” American Journal of Psychiatry 115 (1959): 793–97; George Ruff, “Classics in Space Medicine,” Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine 81, no. 2 (February 1, 2010): 156–57. Sensory deprivation research such as Donald O. Hebb’s work at McGill University was conducted by the United States and Canada over concerns with brainwashing as well as space exploration. 77. Marcel O’Gorman, Necromedia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 78. Robert Sommer and Hugo Ross, “Social Interaction on a Geriatrics Ward,” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 4, no. 2 (September 1, 1958): 128–33. 79. Wheeler, Hospital Design and Function , 5, 3. 80. Sommer and Dewar, “Physical Environment of the Ward,” 319, 321. 81. Julius A Roth, “The Control of Contagion,” unpublished MS, 1959, 23, cited in Sommer and Dewar, “Physical Environment of the Ward,” 320. 82. Hudenburg, Planning the Community Hospital, 17, 70. Hudenburg consulted with Frederick Mott; F. D. Mott and R. Hudenburg, “Labor’s Influence on Health Care Developments, Part III,” Hospital Management 88 (December 1959): 52–53.

Chapter 2. Better Living through Psychobureacracy? 1. Robert H. Felix, “The Community Mental Health Centers: A New Concept,” Architectural Record 133 (November 1963): 162–64. 2. Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement; Matusow, Unraveling of America; David R. Farber, and Eric Foner, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994). 3. James G. Kelly, “The National Institute of Mental Health and the Founding of the Field of Community Psychology” in Pickren and Schneider, Psychology and the National Institute of Mental Health, 234. 4. Jones, Community Mental Health Center, 1:11. 5. Topp, Moran, and Andrews, Madness, Architecture, and the Built Environment. 6. Denner and Price, Community Mental Health; Grob, From Asylum to Community; Jones, Asylums and After.

NOTES TO PAGES 61–69

7. Leigh M. Roberts, Seymour L. Halleck, and Martin B. Loeb, eds., Community Psychiatry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966); Dumont, The Absurd Healer. 8. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 223, 226. 9. Szasz, The Therapeutic State; Nolan, The Therapeutic State; Polsky, Rise of the Therapeutic State. 10. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic. 11. Levine, History and Politics of Community Mental Health, 63. The growth of the program slowed considerably after 1970. 12. The term “catchment area” appears to be common within the field of human geography, with the Oxford English Dictionary including the usage “catchment area” under “catchment” in a sentence from 1970 that refers to the area from which a primary school draws its students. 13. Knoblauch, “The Permeable Institution,” 216–40. 14. Letter from Caudill Rowlett Scott, Box G6, Clyde H. Dorsett Papers, Avery Drawings and Archives Collections, Columbia University, New York, New York (hereafter Dorsett Papers). 15. Ryburn Community Hospital Submittal by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, Box 6, Folder 16, Project Records, Dorsett Papers. 16. Professional association membership grew from 3,634 in 1945 to 18,407 by 1970 (Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 259). 17. Even then, the mental health organization was a subset of the public health effort (Levine, History and Politics of Community Mental Health, 42). 18. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 248. 19. O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge. Specifically, NIMH sponsored sociologist Lee Rainwater’s study of Pruitt-Igoe and its Center for the Study of Metropolitan Problems gave grants to Christopher Alexander’s Center for Environmental Structure as well as Peter Eisenman’s Institute for Urban and Architectural Studies. 20. Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, Committee on Social Issues, “The Social Responsibility of Psychiatry,” GAP Report 13 (July 1950), quoted in Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 250. 21. Chu and Trotter, Madness Establishment, 14. 22. On the history of chlorpromazine see Healy, Creation of Psychopharmacology, especially p. 97, on the introduction of Thorazine. Chlorpromazine was initially used for surgery, and later, doctors applauded the drug as able to calm mental patients enough to get them awake and talking for the first time in years. In a Freudian-dominated paradigm in the 1950s, getting a patient talking would have been the first and necessary step to curing him or her. 23. Caudill Rowlett Scott’s design for the Maimonides Hospital of Brooklyn Community Mental Health Center, Box 11, Folder 5, Dorsett Papers. 24. See Sheppard G. Kellam and Sheldon K. Schiff, “An Urban Community Mental Health Center,” in Duhl, Mental Health and Urban Social Policy . 25. Daniel M. Abramson, Obsolescence: An Architectural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 26. Arthur Drexler, “The Disappearing Object,” Saturday Review, May 23, 1964, 15, cited in Jones, Community Mental Health Center, 1:46. 27. Jones, Community Mental Health Center, 2:37. 28. It is worth comparing these drawings with Newman’s territorial diagrams, discussed in chapter 3. Osmond and Izumi’s work with psychedelics and design deserves more space

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than can be given to them here. For more discussion on the subject of hallucinations and design, see Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry. See also “LSD as a Design Tool?,” Progressive Architecture, August 1966: 147–53; Bernard Seymour Aaronson and Humphrey Osmond, Psychedelics: The Uses and Implications of Hallucinogenic Drugs (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1970). 29. Jones, Community Mental Health Center, 1:43. 30. Clyde Dorsett, “New Directions in Mental Health Facilities,” American Institute of Architects Journal, November 1964: 43. 31. The idea that an architect should adopt the tailor’s role was expressed by Le Corbusier in his “Type Needs,” Decorative Art of Today (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 72, quoted in Beatriz Colomina, “Le Corbusier and Photography,” Assemblage 4 (October 1987): 20. 32. Kahn contrasted this form drawing from the strategy of “design” (Louis Kahn, “Louis Kahn,” Perspecta 7, quoted in Jones, Community Mental Health Center, 1:43, 45). Jones also quoted from Kevin Lynch, Peter Blake, Caudill, Drexler, and John E. Buchard. 33. James Stirling, “The Functional Tradition and Expression,” Perspecta 6, quoted in Jones. 34. For a history of the Kirkbride type, see Yanni, Architecture of Madness. 35. Isaac Ray, “The Butler Hospital for the Insane, Providence R.I.,” American Journal of Insanity 5 (July 1848): 1–22. 36. Spivack, Institutional Settings, 96. 37. Spivack, 98. 38. Herbert McLaughlin, “Evolution and Evaluation of Environment for Mental Health,” Architectural Record 158, no. 1 (July 1975): 105–10; Wheeler, Hospital Design and Function; Wheeler, Hospital Modernization and Expansion. 39. The “zone” concept was an Illinois state plan to produce mental health centers for each area, using community mental health center funding. The idea was developed by Francis Gerty as a more distance-based than population-based idea. The goal was to have a facility within an hour and a half ’s drive of every Illinois resident. See John P. Reidy, Zone Mental Health Centers: The Illinois Concept (Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1964). Reidy credits Wheeler with developing the functional needs of the program. 40. Good, Siegel, and Bay, Therapy by Design, 21. 41. Bruno Zevi, Architecture as Space: How to Look at Architecture, trans. Milton Gendel (New York: Horizon Press, 1957). 42. Neutra emphasized that this meant a connection to nature, served by the plants in the scheme, as well as the need to understand human nature. Rather than split biological and psychological needs, he emphasized the importance of a “psychosomatic unity,” a concept that he traced to the fifth century BC and the ancient Greeks, such as Protagoras. Neutra explained his particular interest in the problem of redesigning institutions as related to having a son in a similar institution. Good, Siegel, and Bay, Therapy by Design, 64. 43. Good, Siegel, and Bay, 78. 44. Dorsett, “Request for a Sabbatical Position,” September 28, 1972, 15, Box A2, Dorsett Papers. 45. The brochure says, “The hexagonal cottage plan permits efficient space allotment into triangular segments, each opening onto the central core which contains washroom and toilet facilities.” The brochure describes the cottages as good for breaking the numbers down into smaller, fifty-person groups segregated by sex, age, and disability. “Woodbridge State School” brochure, Box A2, Dorsett Papers.

NOTES TO PAGES 83–95

46. The scheme was one of Dorsett’s patterns, developed with supporting quotes from Mayer Spivack, Osmond, and others (undated report for a VA in Massachusetts, Box A3, Dorsett Papers). 47. “Vertical Stacking,” Maimonides Hospital of Brooklyn Community Mental Health Center, Box 11, Folder 5, Dorsett Papers, Dorsett Papers. 48. Dorsett, “Request for a Sabbatical Position,” 10. 49. Obituary, “Clyde H. Dorsett; Architectural Consultant,” Washington Post, August 11, 2007. 50. Photocopies of curriculum from Columbia University Archives. Courses in the Hospital program included “Administrative Medicine 203, Organization and financing of medical care.” 51. James Falick, Hospitals 38 (February 1, 1964): 90–92. 52. Dorsett, “Request for a Sabbatical Position,” 10. 53. Michael Brill and Richard Krauss, “Planning for the Community Mental Health Centers: The Performance Approach,” Proceedings of the Annual Environmental Design Research Association Conference, 1969, 46. 54. Brill and Krauss, 46. 55. Grabow, Christopher Alexander, 58. 56. Author’s correspondence with Wittman, July 9, 2009. 57. Report from Wittman to Robert Wakefield, “Evaluation of Environmental Pattern Language for Use in the Community Mental Health Center’s Construction Program,” October 14, 1970, courtesy of Fried Wittman. 58. “Reception Welcomes You,” Box 17, Folder 6, Dorsett Papers. 59. Dorsett’s comments, and one whole pattern, eventually found their way into Alexander’s book when it was published seven years later. And indeed, Dorsett and NIMH are thanked in the acknowledgments of A Pattern Language. In a footnote to Lucy Ozarin’s 1980 piece on architects’ collaboration with psychology, she cites a 1978 Selection of Environmental Patterns by Dorsett. 60. “Free Waiting,” 1968–1970, Box A3, Dorsett Papers. The other report cited is Scott Briar, “Welfare from Below: Recipients’ Views of the Public Welfare System,” in The Law and the Poor, ed. Jacobus Tenbroek (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1966), 52. 61. See also Ellen Herman, “The City as Patient,” in Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 222–26. 62. Keniston, “How Community Mental Health Stamped Out the Riots.” 63. Chaim Shatan, “Community Psychiatry—Stretcher Bearer of the Social Order?,” International Journal of Psychiatry 7 (May 1969): 317, 319. 64. James W. Stockdill, “National Mental Health Policy and the Community Mental Health Centers, 1963–1981,” in Pickren and Schneider, Psychology and the National Institute of Mental Health; Jones, Asylums and After. 65. In 1968 Congress made the transition explicit by stipulating that 1 percent of the funds from an alcohol and drugs program would be used for treatment of such patients at the CMHCs (Levine, History and Politics of Community Mental Health, 63). 66. Dorsett, “Request for a Sabbatical Position,” 13. 67. Dorsett, 1. 68. Levine, History and Politics of Community Mental Health, 63.

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Chapter 3. Open Prisons 1. “Certainly the profession has lost its credibility at present both with the social scientist-planners and with the public” (Richard Hatch, “The Museum of Modern Art Discovers Harlem,” Architectural Forum, March 1967: 39–47). 2. Carriere, “Between Being and Becoming,” 26; Jon Dieges, “Editorial: A Summary of the Debate,” Journal of Environmental Design 1, no. 3 (May 1966): 2; Sachs, Environmental Design. 3. Suzanne Stephens, “Pushing Prisons Aside,” Architecture Forum 138, no. 2 (March 1973): 29. 4. Robert Sommer, “The Security State of Mind: The Frightening Life Fear Creates,” Chicago Tribune, February 25, 1973. 5. Sommer, Tight Spaces, 3. 6. Sommer, End of Imprisonment. 7. Jones, Cornes, and Stockford, Open Prisons. 8. Robert L. Davison, “Prison Architecture,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 157 (September 1, 1931): 33–39. 9. Blomberg and Lucken, American Penology, 123. 10. “Advantages of Open Prisons: U.N. Recommendations.” Manchester Guardian, August 30, 1955, 7. 11. The Auburn prison itself was planned in 1816, the paradigmatic North Wing opened in 1825 and another large wing was added in 1835 (Johnston, Forms of Constraint, 75). 12. Johnston, 78. 13. Johnston, “Recent Solutions: The Criminologist’s View,” American Institute of Architects Journal 36 (July 1961): 66, 69. 14. Howard B. Gill, “Correctional Philosophy and Architecture,” American Institute of Architects Journal 36 (July 1961): 71. Gill named the type of penology he advocated “professional penology” in contrast to the custodial and progressive theories of penology. 15. Georges Teyssot, “Norm and Type: Variations on a Theme,” in Picon and Ponte, Architecture and the Sciences, 140–73. 16. Johnston, “Recent Solutions,” 70. 17. Volker Janssen, “From the Inside Out: Therapeutic Penology and Political Liberalism in Postwar California,” Osiris 22 (January 1, 2007): 120. Their overall numbers were small, with 133 of 8,000 such experts working in all U.S. prisons. Making up the balance, some corrections officers were pulled in to conduct the group sessions. 18. Janssen, 126, 132. 19. Lou Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 174. 20. The claim is plausible, even if incorrectly cited as being in Ronald M. Berkman, Opening the Gates: The Rise of the Prisoners’ Movement (PhD diss., Princeton, 1977), 61, cited in Janssen, “From the Inside Out,” 120. 21. Cummins, Rise and Fall, 253. Cummins dates the change to the “Determinate Sentence Law” passed in California in 1976, which killed the “philosophical underpinnings” of the therapeutic model. 22. Martin Meyerson, “Comments to the Faculty, December 1963,” Journal of Environmental Design 1, no. 3 (May 1966), 15–17. 23. Gerald McCue, “The 1966 Architecture Curriculum,” Journal of Environmental Design 1, no. 3 (May 1966): 30. McCue took over as chairman of the department of architecture

NOTES TO PAGES 106–114

after Charles Moore departed for Yale. Daniel Barber, “Making Design Environmental,” Pidgin 10 (Spring 2011): 32. 24. Van der Ryn was the chairman of the Chancellor’s Committee on Housing and Environment, which discussed the best types of housing to teach students to live independently, set up their own rules, and so on. See “1968 Report, UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Committee on Housing and Environment,” manuscript at Berkeley College of Environmental Design Library. 25. Shahidullah, Crime Policy in America, 134. 26. Sim Van der Ryn, “Searching for a Science of Design: Problems and Puzzles,” American Institute of Architects Journal 45 (1966): 39, 41, 38. 27. Van der Ryn, Design for Life, 15–18. 28. Van der Ryn developed his interest in Fuller’s geometries through a migrant worker housing scheme built of a single folded surface. “People in Plastic Houses: Pre-fabricated Temporary Houses of Hirshen/Van der Ryn Architects,” Fortune 73 (April 1966): 170. The project was a result of a grant of $3,485,000 from the Office of Economic Opportunity presented to the State of California to study the problem of inadequate housing for migrant farm workers. The state hired Sim Van der Ryn and Sanford Hirshen, who then worked with Herbert Yates of Plydom Corporation to design a temporary plastic house that would cost five hundred dollars to make. 29. Van der Ryn and Reich, Notes on Institution Building, 1. Prepared with NIMH funding, MH16285-01. 30. Van der Ryn and Reich 1. Nonstandard capitalization in original. 31. One group worked with the Northern California Youth Center in Stockton. Within Berkeley, they collaborated with Dean Joseph Lohmann and professors Richard Korn, David Fogel, and Wilmont Smith of the School of Criminology. They also worked with the director of the Model Treatment Center at the Institute for the Study of Crime and Delinquency. 32. Acknowledgments, in Menashe et al., Three Proposals, n.p. 33. Michael Thomas and Garry Smith, “Urban Rehabilitation Center,” in Menashe et al., Three Proposals, 8. 34. Lym had previously published a case study of the impact of a public housing project on the surrounding neighborhood in Oakland, studying the way a population responds to the introduction of a struggling group in its midst, a typical topic for community psychology (Glenn Robert Lym, “Effect of a Public Housing Project on a Neighborhood: Case Study of Oakland, California,” Land Economics 43, no. 4 [November 1, 1967]: 461–66). 35. Van der Ryn, “Searching for a Science of Design,” 41. 36. Keller, Automatic Architecture, 42. 37. Howard Menashe, Michael Thomas, Garry Smith, Glenn Lym, William Burnham, and Sim Van der Ryn, “A Prototype Hostel Program for Unsettled Teenagers,” in Menashe et al., Three Proposals, 10. 38. Glenn Lym, William Burnham, and Sim Van der Ryn, “A Prototype Hostel Program for Unsettled Teenagers,” in Menashe et al., Three Proposals, 8. The authors listed different and somewhat contradictory recommendations on subsequent pages, but it appears that those on the later pages are more developed, so I have leaned on these for my descriptions. 39. Lym, Burnham, and Van der Ryn, “A Prototype Hostel Program for Unsettled Teenagers,” in Menashe et al., Three Proposals, 14. 40. Robert K. Merton’s work is a most notable example, and Daniel Rodgers comments on this characteristic in Rodgers, Age of Fracture.

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41. Van der Ryn, “Searching for a Science of Design,” 38. 42. Van der Ryn, 39. 43. Examples of the work were published in “Natural Architecture” in Architectural Design 44, no. 1 (1974): 9–10; and “Architecture Douce/Soft Architecture” in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 179 (May–June 1975): 1–68. See also Van der Ryn, “Extracts from the Coming Age of Natural Design” in the same issue of the latter. 44. Sim Van der Ryn, Architecture, Institutions, and Social Change (unpublished ms., Berkeley Calif., 1968), 1. 45. See also chapter 14, “‘Return the Park to the People’: People’s Park and the End (?) of the 1960s” in Carriere, “Between Being and Becoming”; and Daniel Barber, “People’s Park; Or the Crisis of Humanist Architectural Environmentalism” (Master’s thesis, Yale University, 2005). 46. Clyde H. Dorsett and Constantine J. Karalis, Activity Program Document. Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services Treatment Center at Gainesville, July 20, 1973 (n.p., courtesy of Constantine Karalis). 47. P. G. Zimbardo, C. Haney, W. C. Banks, and D. Jaffe, “The Mind Is a Formidable Jailer: A Pirandellian prison,” New York Times Magazine, April 8, 1973, 36; Teresa C. Kulig, Travis C. Pratt, and Francis T. Cullen, “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: A Case Study in Organized Skepticism,” Journal of Criminal Justice Education 28, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 74–111; Maria Konnikova, “The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment,” New Yorker, June 12, 2015. 48. Stephens, “Pushing Prisons Aside.” 49. Author’s interview with Karalis, April 4, 2012. 50. Author’s correspondence with Karalis, July 8, 2012. 51. Constantine Karalis, “Prisoners Are People,” Adult Correctional Facilities, State of Rhode Island, September 6, 1972. In 1976 Karalis produced another report, called “Inside Out,” for Rhode Island at the direction of Governor Philip W. Noel, proposing a strategy for reducing the population in maximum security. 52. Karalis, “Prisoners Are People,” 145. 53. Nicholas C. Chriss, “Open Prison: Warden Happy with Results of His ‘Love-in’ Prison.” Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1974. 54. Gilbert L. Ingram, “Butner: A Reality,” Federal Probation 1 (March 1978): 34. 55. Keve, Prisons and the American Conscience, 219–22; Tom Wicker, “Can the Prisons Be Re-Made?,” South China Morning Post, January 16, 1973. 56. Mark Pinksy, “Butner, the Jinxed Prison,” Nation 225, no. 2 (July 9, 1977): 41–44. 57. Sommer, End of Imprisonment, v. There was, and still is, an anti-prison movement, and figures such as Angela Davis remain active in trying to put an end to prisons entirely. The movement has not been successful in ending imprisonment as psychology has reduced involuntary patients for reasons that remain outside of the study of architecture. The reasons may include racism, the economic incentives to maintain the prison-industrial complex, or some Puritan American impulse to punish, but the scope of this chapter includes only how design expertise became involved in the effort to end prisons. The explanation for the persistence of prisons and the entanglement of prisons and political economy can be found in such works as Gilmore, Golden Gulag. Gilmore observes that the apparent marginality of these places is misleading, and that in fact they are central to the economies of formerly irrigated agricultural land in California. She also writes of the connection between reformers who advocated removing physical punishment and the rise of the idea

NOTES TO PAGES 124–136

of freedom, which led to a situation where depriving someone of his or her freedom was the optimal punishment. 58. J. Asher, “Behavioral Modification,” APA Monitor, 1974, cited in Sommer, End of Imprisonment, 125. 59. Groder quoted in Sommer, End of Imprisonment, 136. 60. Sommer, End of Imprisonment, vi. 61. In her more recent explanation of similar ideas, Angela Y. Davis has similarly observed that films of such spaces such as Cool Hand Luke and Escape from Alcatraz continue to play this role (Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? [New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003], 18). Sommer, End of Imprisonment, 16. 62. Stephens, “Pushing Prisons Aside,” 29, 41. 63. Stephens, 31, 33. 64. See more on this in chapter 5.

Chapter 4. In Defense of Space 1. See also Joy Knoblauch, “The Economy of Fear: Oscar Newman Launches Crime Prevention through Urban Design (1969–197x),” Architectural Theory Review 19, no. 3 (2015): 336–54. 2. Katz, Price of Citizenship. 3. O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, 196–210. 4. Cronin, U.S. v. Crime in the Streets, 11, 25. Despite the increase in crime rate, many crimes were minor crimes, such as vandalism or auto theft for juvenile joyriding. 5. Those blaming the Supreme Court included J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI and Orlando W. Wilson of the Chicago Police Department, while the latter claim was made by William Menninger of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, as discussed in chapter 2. Cronin, Crime in the Streets, 5, 16. 6. Marion, A History of Federal Crime Control Initiatives, 9. See also appendix in Marion, which shows reported crime rates from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports rising from 1,861,261 in 1960 to 10,192,034 in 1974. 7. Lee, Inventing Fear of Crime. 8. National Emergency Number Association, http://www.nena.org/. 9. Feeley, The Policy Dilemma. 10. Author’s conversation with George Rand, April 9, 2010. Similarly, in a November 1969 conference, Newman claimed to have been working on the project for six months. 11. Author’s conversation with Rand, April 9, 2010. 12. Duhl, The Urban Condition; Proshanksy, Ittelson, and Rivlin, Environmental Psychology. 13. Wood, Housing Design. For background on Wood’s seventeen years with the Chicago Housing Authority, see J. S. Fuerst, When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 3–4. 14. Angel, Discouraging Crime. 15. Newman, Defensible Space, xvi. In an article in the New York Post in 1972, he pointed out that he was not the first to make a connection between architecture and crime in public housing but that he was the first to “document” it. Lindsay Miller, “Daily Close Up: ‘Defensible Space,’” New York Post, December 20, 1972, Chairman’s Files, Box 0088B4, Folder 03, New York City Housing Authority Collection, La Guardia and Wagner Archives, Queens, NY

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16. Martin Gansberg, “37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police,” New York Times, March 27, 1964, 1–2; John M. Darley and Bibb Latane, “Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: Diffusion of Responsibility,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 8 (April 1968): 377–38; Bibb Latane and John M. Darley, The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn’t He Help? (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1970); Rachael Manning, Mark Levine, Alan Collins, “The Kitty Genovese Murder and the Social Psychology of Helping: The Parable of the 38 Witnesses,” American Psychologist, September 2007: 561. 17. “Display Ad 539—Unmeltable Ethnics . . . Drowning Cities . . . Screwed-Up Planning . . . Wasted Dollars . . . What’s Happening on the Urban Scene?” New York Times, February 11, 1973, 376. 18. “Display Ad 539,” 376. 19. Each volume contained around sixty articles and was intended to be a basic introduction to the theme (Eleanor Goldstein Project Director at Social Issues Resources Series, Inc. to Lydia Zelya, Permissions Department at Macmillan Publishing Co., August 26, 1977, Oscar Newman Papers, Hensonville, NY, in the care of Kopper Newman). The reprint included some of Newman’s diagrams as well as the Time Life images of Pruitt-Igoe’s demolition, this time with the caption “Hailed as ‘ideal’ public housing when it was built in 1955, Pruitt-Igoe in Saint Louis is being leveled—a victim of crime, vandalism, and finally abandonment” (Intellectual Digest, 1973, n.p., Oscar Newman Papers). 20. Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls; Rainwater, “Fear and the House-as-Haven,” 23. Rainwater may have been their connection with NIMH. 21. The first buildings were demolished in March of 1972, and large photographs were published in Life magazine on April 14, 1972. Defensible Space appears to have been published in the fall, as the earliest reviews are from October and November of 1972. 22. Ada Louise Huxtable, “A Prescription for Disaster,” New York Times, November 5, 1972. 23. Jencks, Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 9. 24. Henry Cisneros, Defensible Space: Deterring Crime and Building Community (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, 1995). 25. Oscar Newman, “Defensible Space: Alternatives to Fear,” Progressive Architecture 53 (October 1972): 92–97, 100–101, 104–6. 26. “Environment: Housing without Fear,” Time 100, no. 22 (November 27, 1972). The team of researchers that he refers to could well be Lee Rainwater’s team. 27. David Burnham and Paul Montgomery, “Design of Housing Related to Crime,” New York Times, December 22, 1970, 39–49; Newman, Defensible Space, 39. 28. Newman, 42. 29. Newman, 25. And he made a similar statement in Oscar Newman, “Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design,” Ekistics 36, no. 216 (1973): 325–32. 30. Newman, Defensible Space, 189. In a government report in 1980, Newman used statistics to argue that the amount of crime in a project was closely correlated with the proportion of the population who were single mothers receiving aid under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. The very existence of the AFDC program made tracking single mothers far easier. Newman and Franck, Factors Influencing Crime, 28. 31. Newman, Defensible Space, 195. 32. Newman, 25. 33. Jeffery, Crime Prevention. See also Joy Knoblauch, “Better Living through Psychobiology?” Pidgin 3 (2007): 92–103.

NOTES TO PAGES 146–147

34. After Jeffery received his PhD in sociology from Indiana University in 1954, he went on to serve as the book review editor at the Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science from 1963 to 1969 and as the president of the American Society of Criminology in 1978. He was also the founding editor of Criminology: An Interdisciplinary Journal. C. Ray Jeffery, Biology and Crime (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979), 160. 35. Author’s correspondence with Matthew B. Robinson, January 16, 2007. See also Robinson, “The Theoretical Development of ‘CPTED’: 25 Years of Responses to C. Ray Jeffery,” in Advances in Criminological Theory, Vol. 8, ed. William Laufer and Freda Adler (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1999), accessed January 21, 2007m http://www.acs.appstate.edu/. 36. Jeffery, Crime Prevention, 53–54. 37. R. Buckminster Fuller, “Utopia or Oblivion,” in Jeffery, Crime Prevention, n.p. 38. C. Ray Jeffery and Diane L. Zahm, “Crime Prevention through Environmental Design, Opportunity Theory, and Rational Choice Models,” Routine Activity and Rational Choice: Advances in Criminological Theory, Vol. 5, ed. R. V. Clarke and M. Felson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993), 342. 39. Miller, “Daily Close Up: ‘Defensible Space.’” 40. Newman, CIAM ’59; author interview with Kopper Newman, May 11, 2012. The Otterlo conference marked the formal death of CIAM and the birth of the Team 10 group. The name change implies more discontinuity than was the case. The Otterlo conference was fraught with questions about the state of the field, such as whether the vision of the early modern movement might be obsolete. 41. His early work was published in the Progressive Architecture Tenth Annual Design Awards, Progressive Architecture 44 (January 1963); and “Schools, Canada,” Architecture Canada 45 (March 1968): 39–61. Newman’s résumé lists other awards: The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada medal, 1959; Urban Design Award, Progressive Architecture Annual Design Awards, 1963; the Berlin Prix-Futura Film Festival Award, 1974, for documentary on housing; U.S. Federal Design Council Award of Excellence, Design Response Exhibit, National Endowment for the Arts, 1975; United Nations Conference on Human Habitat Award of Excellence, 1976 (Oscar Newman, Résumé and Bio, Defensible Space, http://www. defensiblespace.com/author/resume.htm). He was also published in Robert A. M. Stern ed., 40 under 40: An Exhibition of Young Talent in Architecture (New York: Architectural League of New York and American Federation of the Arts, 1966). 42. Oscar Newman, Park-Mall: Lawndale Report of Stage Two of the Park Mall Study (Saint Louis, 1968), n.p. 43. Centre Canadien d’Architecture, Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies Archives, Series 2, Folder B1-4 includes an undated seventy-page manuscript that opens with a discussion of type in architecture. Newman defends the relevance of the architect’s role in the question of mass housing on pages 56–59. George Rand also recalls meeting with Kenneth Frampton and Eisenman (author’s conversation with Rand, April 9, 2010). 44. The board game involved a series of lots assessed at certain values, with each player taking turns to choose which lots they will start with. Empty blocks become parks. Each player has a starting net worth of $10,000 and can defend his property by purchasing walls or guards. Guards, police, and criminals are all represented by pieces on the board. Hiring a guard costs $50 a turn, and hiring a police officer costs $100. Criminals cost $1,000, which Newman explains goes toward the criminal’s hideout. The winner is the one who defends his property from the other players’ criminals at the least cost. Oscar Newman, “The Defensible Space Game,” n.d., Folder: “The Defensible Space Game,” Oscar Newman Papers.

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45. “Architect Criticizes High-Rise Public Housing Trend,” Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge), March 30, 1973; Burnham and Montgomery, “Design of Housing Related to Crime.” 46. “Stenographic Transcript of Proceedings,” 55. 47. Goffman, Asylums; “Stenographic Transcript of Proceedings,” 141. Later he also stated that like mental hospitals and prisons, the public housing has the problem of what to do with those who won’t “shape up.” In all cases these are the last places to go, he said; “public housing, like the wards in a mental hospital, have that special and beguiling quality and that is, this is the last place, there is no further place to go; at which time our fundamental view of social organization and social control breaks down” (“Stenographic Transcript of Proceedings,” 146). 48. “Stenographic Transcript of Proceedings,” 139. 49. Goffman quoted in “Stenographic Transcript of Proceedings,” 157. 50. “Stenographic Transcript of Proceedings,” 158, 169, 185. 51. Rand mentioned the names Barry Hirsh and Sally Fellsey as staff (author’s conversation with Rand, April 9, 2010). 52. Author’s conversation with Rand, April 9, 2010. 53. George Rand, “What Psychology Asks of Urban Planning,” American Psychologist 24, no. 10 (October 1969): 933. 54. Rae Downes, “How to Make Housing Projects Safe,” Jersey Journal, February 9, 1973 . Newman continued this consulting through the 1980s, including acting as a consultant on the matter of locating public housing in Yonkers. See Lisa Belkin, Show Me a Hero, 1st Back Bay paperback ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000). 55. “Stenographic Transcript of Proceedings,” 31. 56. Newman, Defensible Space71. He puts quotes around the word “number” again on pages 72 and 75. 57. Kenny Cupers, “Human Territoriality and the Downfall of Public Housing,” Public Culture 29, no. 1 (2017): 165–90. 58. Hadas A. Steiner, “Life at the Threshold,” October 136 (2011): 133–55. 59. Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, “Collective Housing in Morocco,” Architectural Design 25 (January 1955): 2–7, cited in Goldhagen and Legault, Anxious Modernisms, 56. See also Risselada, Team 10. 60. Alison and Peter Smithson, “ The Built World: Urban Re-identification,” originally published in Architectural Design in June 1955, reprinted in Smithson and Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, 104. 61. Mumford, CIAM Discourse, 218. 62. On the legacy from Le Corbusier, note that the Charter of Habitat conference, CIAM 9, had concluded with a visit to the Unité in Marseilles, where participants saw the building’s internal streets. The building had been completed in 1952 (Mumford, CIAM Discourse, 237). For his part, Eisenman argued for the immeubles villas versus the maisons à redents as the precedent in his 1972 review of the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens (Eisenman, “Robin Hood Gardens, London E14,” Architectural Design 42 [September 1972]: 558). 63. Newman, CIAM ’59, 70. Schemes with “habitat” in the title include “Scheme for Subarctic Habitat” by Ralph Erskine of Stockholm and “Habitat in Moraine Landscape” by A. Korsmo of Oslo. 64. Risselada, Team 10, 118. 65. Lionel March and Neave Sinclair Brown, “Housing Primer: Low and Medium Rise Housing,” Architectural Design 37 (September 1967): 398.

NOTES TO PAGES 159–167

66. Newman, Community of Interest, 310–11, 305. 67. Modern Architectural Research Group response to the proposed charter of habitat, in Mumford, CIAM Discourse, 222. 68. Aldo Van Eyck, “Kaleidoscope of the Mind,” Via 1 (1968): 95. See also Aldo Van Eyck, Paul Parin, and Fritz Morgenthaler, “Miracle of Moderation,” Via 1 (1968): 96–124; Aldo Van Eyck, “Image of Ourselves,” Via 1 (1968): 125–29. 69. Mark Crinson, “From Haifa to Stevenage,” keynote address, Architecture and the State, 1940s to 1970s, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, April 2, 2010. One can easily see how Tom Harrisson’s Mass Observation approach would appeal to the Smithsons. 70. Mumford, CIAM Discourse, 234. 71. Intriguingly, the Oxford English Dictionary also lists an early twentieth-century use of the word “territory” to refer to a salesman’s jurisdiction. Much of this sketched history was produced with the Oxford English Dictionary and a library catalog, which shows the earliest few works using the word “territory” from the turn of the twentieth century, and those mainly have to do with national territory. By the 1940s there are a few zoological uses. The idea was not applied to individual humans until the 1960s. I briefly consulted Sack, Human Territoriality. Sack takes the idea of territoriality as granted and looks backward with it as a lens, versus writing a history of the very idea of territoriality as a thing to be studied. 72. Ardrey, Territorial Imperative; Ardrey, African Genesis. 73. Ardrey, African Genesis, 29, 34. 74. Ardrey, Territorial Imperative, 5. 75. Ardrey, 210–12. 76. Ardrey, African Genesis, 18. Ardrey argued that the only reason this finding remained obscure in the 1930s was that a world divided by the hope for a socialist future, the German pursuit of Lebensraum, and the fear of a socialist future had no interest in hearing that territoriality and private property were innate characteristics. 77. Torgovnick, Gone Primitive. 78. Newman, Defensible Space, 5, 1, 51, 5–7. The demonstration of universality over time was common. For another example see Alison Margaret Smithson and Peter Smithson, “Signs of Occupancy,” Architectural Design 43 (1972): 91–97. 79. George A. Theodorson, Studies in Human Ecology (Evanston: Row, Peterson, 1961). 80. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places; Goffman, Interaction Ritual. 81. David Stea, “Space, Territory, and Human Movement,” Landscape 15, no. 1 (Autumn 1965): 13–16. 82. Sommer, Personal Space. 83. Park was quoting from Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells, and G. P. Wells, The Science of Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1931). He acknowledged that Ernst Haeckel was the first to use “ecology” to refer to the study of relations between species in 1878. Robert Ezra Park, “Human Ecology” in Theodorson, Studies in Human Ecology, 27. 84. Newman, Defensible Space, 51. 85. Newman, 19. He cites unspecified interviews as his source for this observation about what the middle class wants. From the conference transcript, we know that Newman and his group did interview residents. 86. Newman, 19, 13, 3. 87. Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk spearheaded a movement toward walkable, low-rise, often nostalgic urban design from their practice in Miami, Florida, in

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the 1980s following their time at Princeton University. They published a Charter of the New Urbansim and founded a Congress for New Urbanism in 1993. 88. See also Joy Knoblauch, “Do You Feel Secure?,” in Urban Omnibus: A Publication of the Architecture League of New York, March 28, 2018, https://urbanomnibus.net/. 89. John Morris Dixon, Editorial, Progressive Architecture 53, no. 10. (October 1972): 65.

Chapter 5. Psyche into System 1. Robert Gutman, “The Architectural Educator—Ostrich or Phoenix,” in Peter Eisenman, Denise Scott Brown, Herbert J Gans, and Robert Gutman, Architectural Education USA: Issues, Ideas, People: A Conference to Explore Current Alternatives (New York, 1971): 12–13. See also Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Gift of Eisenman Architects, Centre Canadien d’Architecture holdings of the IAUS papers (CCA/IAUS), Series 4, Subseries 4: “Conference: Architectural Education USA, 12-13 November, 1971” folders of correspondence with participants and guests along with records of expenditure. 2. Gutman taught at Rutgers, where he was tenured, and later taught at Princeton, where he held the title of visiting professor and lecturer (Gutman, Architecture from the Outside In, 24). Eisenman lists the IAUS founders as Robert Gutman, Stan Anderson, Robert Slutsky, and Arthur Drexler in an interview with Beatriz Colomina and Urtzi Grau in Beatriz Colomina, Craig Buckley, and Urtzi Grau, eds., Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196X to 197X (Barcelona: Actar, 2010), 262. 3. Gutman was trained as a sociologist but took up a position teaching within architecture with the aid of a Russell Sage Foundation grant (Gutman, “Introduction,” in Gutman, Architecture from the Outside In). 4. Keller, Automatic Architecture; see also Molly Wright Steenson, Architectural Intelligence: How Designers, Tinkerers, and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). 5. Porter, Trust in Numbers, 4. 6. Eisenman et al., Architectural Education USA, 9. 7. Light, From Warfare to Welfare, 2003. 8. Anthony W. Schuman, “Community Engagement: Architecture’s Evolving Social Vocation,” in Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America, ed. Joan Ockman and Rebecca Williamson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 252–59; Avigail Sachs, “The Postwar Legacy of Architectural Research” Journal of Architectural Education 62, no. 3 (2009): 53–64. 9. Graham and Diamond, Rise of American Research Universities, 34. 10. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus. 11. See Light, From Warfare to Welfare; Herman, Romance of American Psychology; Colomina, Brennan, and Kim, Cold War Hothouses. 12. Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, Kurt Back, Social Pressures in Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967). There is a small-run 1950 version published by Harper at Oxford. Theodore Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality, 1st ed. (New York: Harper, 1950). See also Brandon Hookway, “Interface: A Genealogy of Mediation and Control” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2011). 13. Eugénie L. Birch, “Making Urban Research Intellectually Respectable: Martin Meyerson and the Joint Center for Urban Studies of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University 1959–1964,” Journal of Planning History 10, no. 3 (August 1, 2011): 219–38;

NOTES TO PAGES 174–181

Eric Mumford, “From Master Planning to Self-Build: The MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies, 1959–1971,” in Dutta, A Second Modernism, 288–309. 14. “The City Meets the Space Age,” Architectural Forum 126, no. 1 (January 1967): 60–63, 140. 15. Rosenblith went on to be the acting director of the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies between 1969 and 1971 (“City Meets the Space Age,” 61). “Retired MIT Professor Rosenblith Dies at 88; Pioneered Use of Computers to Study Brain,” MIT News Office, May 3, 2002, http://web.mit.edu/. For more on the joint center, see chapter 2 of Alise Upitis, “Nature Normative: The Design Methods Movement, 1944–1967” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008). 16. “City Meets the Space Age,” 63. 17. Matusow, Unraveling of America, 37; Lloyd D. Musolf, Uncle Sam’s Private Profitseeking Corporations: Comsat, Fannie Mae, Amtrak, and Conrail (Lexington Books, 1983). 18. Light, From Warfare to Welfare, 119. 19. James G. Kelly, “The National Institute of Mental Health,” Pickren and Schneider, Psychology and the National Institute of Mental Health, 243. 20. “About Ortho—Ortho Past and Present,” American Orthopsychiatric Association, aoatoday.com. Context, social or environmental, is not mentioned as key to orthopsychiatry in another account of the history of the subfield by David Shakow, “The Development of Orthopsychiatry: The Contributions of Levy, Menninger, and Stevenson,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 38, no. 5 (October 1968): 804–9. 21. Duhl, Urban Condition, vii. 22. Fried, “Grieving for a Lost Home,” in Duhl, Urban Condition, 151–71. 23. For more on the psychology of race in the Kerner Report, see chapter 8 in Herman, Romance of American Psychology. For a more recent assessment of the impact of the Kerner Report, see Bill Barnhart, “When Rage Bursts: The Lessons of the Kerner Report,” Chicago Tribune, March 2, 2008: 1. 24. Nigan Bayazit, “Investigating Design: A Review of Forty Years of Design Research,” Design Issues 20, no. 1 (2004): 16–29. Bayazit includes a quote from Horst Rittel, a German theorist in the area of “science of design,” making the link explicit: “The reason for the emergence of design methods in the late ’50s and early ’60s was the idea that the ways in which the large-scale NASA and military-type technological problems had been approached might profitably be transferred into civilian or other design areas.” 25. Gary T. Moore, “Introduction,” in Emerging Methods in Environmental Design and Planning; Proceedings of the Design Methods Group First International Conference, Cambridge, Mass., June 1968, ed. Gary T. Moore (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), viii. The introduction is dated January 15, 1969. 26. Bayazit, “Investigating Design,” 20. 27. Bayazit, 24. 28. Henry Sanoff and Sidney Cohn, “Introduction,” in EDRA 1/1970: Proceedings of the 1st Annual Environmental Design Research Association Conference, ed. Henry Sanoff and Sidney Cohn (Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, 1970), v. The volume also included an evaluation of the Planning Aid Kit developed by Clyde Dorsett and Constantine Karalis for the NIMH Community Mental Health Centers program in partnership with the National Bureau of Standards. Michael Brill and Richard Krauss, “Planning for Community Mental Health Centers: The Performance Approach,” in EDRA 1, 45. 29. Nicholas Negroponte, “Environmental Humanism Through Robots,” in EDRA 1, 14–15.

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30. “Revolution in Architectural Education,” Progressive Architecture 48 (March 1967): 36. 31. Sachs, “Research for Architecture.”. 32. Brendan Moran, “Research: Toward a Scientific Architecture,” in Ockman and Williamson, Architecture School, 386–91. 33. Geddes cites Joseph Hudnut in Architecture and the Spirit of Man: “That architect is modern which, addressed to serviceability in a modern world, penetrates through to that pageantry, health, wealth and grandeur which lie beneath its outward confusions and dissonances” (Robert Geddes, “Architecture: The Humanities Model” part of a lecture series jointly between Harvard Graduate School of Design and Cornell University called “The 70s: The Formation of Contemporary Architectural Discourse,” available online at www.robertgeddesarchitect.com). 34. Joseph Bedford, “Disciplinary Crisis: From Integration to Autonomy, Princeton School of Architecture (1965–1974)” (PhD diss., Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, August 2011). 35. Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, Princeton’s Beaux Arts and Its New Academicism: From Labatut to the Program of Geddes, An Exhibition of Original Drawings over Fifty Years, January 27 to February 18, the Institute for Architecture (Princeton Junction, NJ: PDQ Press, 1977), 28. 36. Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. 37. Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. 38. Robert Geddes and Robert Gutman, “The Assessment of the Built-Environment for Safety: Research and Practice,” in The Effect of the Man-Made Environment on Health and Behavior: A Report of the Inter-university Board of Collaborators (Atlanta: Centers for Disease Control, 1977), 146. 39. Robert Gutman, “Discipline Building,” in Gutman, Architecture from the Outside In. 40. Mario Gandelsonas, “Neo-Functionalism and the State of the Art,” Oppositions 5 (Summer 1976), 8; Peter Eisenman, “Post-functionalism,” Oppositions 6 (October 1976): 1–3. 41. Joan Ockman, “Resurrecting the Avant-Garde: The History and Program of Oppositions,” in Architectureproduction, ed. Beatriz Colomina and Joan Ockman (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 181–99; Lucia Allais, “The Real and the Theoretical, 1968,” Perspecta 42 (April 2010): 27–41. Gandelsonas and Agrest arrived in early 1971. 42. Stern, 40 under 40, 7. 43. Allais, “The Real and the Theoretical.” See also Hatch, “Museum of Modern Art,” 39–47; agenda for the think tank meeting, Series 2: Activities: Conferences, Research, Lectures, Subseries 2: Consultant Activities in Urban Studies, Folder B2-2, CCA/IAUS. 44. Stanford Anderson, ed., On Streets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978). 45. CCA/IAUS contains a Subseries 3 on the Binghamton Streets project; Folders B3-2 through B3-4 deal with the HUD-funded research. 46. Meeting minutes, February 8, 1972, Subseries 3: Street Studies, Folder B3-4, CCA/ IAUS. 47. “HUD Streets Report,” 1, Subseries 3: Street Studies, Folder B3-2, CCA/IAUS. 48. Allais, “The Real and the Theoretical,” 31. 49. The IAUS received a staffing grant for $12,500 for “research on urban street systems” from the Sloan Foundation in 1969 and was looking for a second in 1970 and a third in 1972 (Charles E. Hewitt to Peter Eisenman, October 24, 1969, Folder A3–3, CCA/IAUS). 50. Author’s nterview with Mario Gandelsonas, January 6, 2012.

NOTES TO PAGES 187–190

51. Anthony Pangaro and Kenneth Frampton, “Low Rise High Density: Issues and Criteria,” in the catalog for “Another Chance for Housing: Low-Rise Alternatives,” 13, Subseries 5: Urban Development Corporation (UDC)/Low Rise High Density (LRHD), Folder B5-5, CCA/IAUS. “Defined territoriality” is quoted from “UDC/IAUS Publicly Assisted Housing: Low-Rise, High-Density,” Progressive Architecture 54 (December 1973): 58. The connection between Newman’s theories and Marcus Garvey Park also appears in Gwendolyn Wright, USA: Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion, 2008), 212. 52. Located in Brooklyn, the housing project was a joint venture with the New York State Urban Development Corporation with Ted Lieberman, its chief of architecture (Ted Lieberman, “The UDC and Evolution of a Housing Policy,” catalog for “Another Chance for Housing: Low-Rise Alternatives,” Subseries 5: Urban Development Corporation (UDC)/ Low Rise High Density (LRHD), Folder B5-5, CCA/IAUS). The Urban Development Corporation was a recent creation, from 1968, that aimed to construct low-income housing, using better design, that would be an asset to a community. 53. “UDC/IAUS Publicly Assisted Housing,” 56. 54. As noted in chapter 4, he lectured in the fall of 1974, along with Colin Rowe, Vincent Scully, Peter Blake, Christopher Tunnard, Charles Jencks, James Fitch, sociologist William H. Whyte, Jaquelin Robertson, Robert Stern, “and many others” (“Display Ad 169—No Title,” New York Times, October 2, 1974, 100). 55. The finding aid for the CCA/IAUS lists the participants as Peter Eisenman, Stanford Anderson, Kenneth Frampton, Robert Slutzky, Michael Graves, Joseph [Rykwert?], John Hejduk, Ted [?], Gusty, Henderson, Oscar Newman, Richard Meier, Tony Eardley, Robert Gutman, Arthur Drexler, John Hejduk, Richard Henderson, and Richard Meier. Some of these figures need no introduction, particularly Eisenman, Frampton, Hejduk, Meier, and Graves. Drexler was the curator and director of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. 56. Transcript from Tape #1, 2 pages handwritten transcripts, 7, Folder B1-4, CCA/IAUS. Newman’s interrogation of Meier happens on and around pages 35–37. His discussion of the role of architects in mass housing is on page 58. 57. Transcript, 14. 58. Transcript, 15. 59. Transcript, 16, 52–53. 60. Grant Application, Department of Health Education and Welfare, Public Health Service, December 20, 1972, Subseries 6: Subseries 6: Program in Generative Design, Folder B6-3, CCA/IAUS. 61. There are two notices in Subseries 6: Subseries 6: Program in Generative Design, Folder B6-3, CCA/IAUS: “Notice of Grant Awarded,” October 16, 1972, for $40,000 for the period September 1, 1972 to August 31, 1973; and Grant 1 R01 MH21896-01, “Notice of Grant Awarded,” August 27, 1973, for the same period. While the second notice has a different grant number, it has the same Public Health Service transaction number and seems to just be a reissue of the document to resolve the incorrect address for the IAUS. If it is a second grant, that only makes the event more significant, so I have chosen to err on the conservative side. A brochure in the archive defines indirect costs as “those costs of an institution which are not readily identifiable with a particular project or activity but nevertheless are necessary to the general operation of the institution and the conduct of the activities it performs.” 62. Grant Application, Folder B6-2, CCA/IAUS. 63. Richard Wakefield was head of the Center for the Study of Metropolitan Problems

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at the NIMH when Center for Environmental Structure received. Untitled document dated October 14, 1970, courtesy of Fried Wittman. 64. “Research Proposal: Submitted to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,” n.d., Folder B6-2, CCA/IAUS. 65. Author’s interview with Mario Gandelsonas, January 6, 2012. For more background on Eisenman’s interest in Chomsky and the architect’s attempt to “design with a tool meant to analyze language,” see Peggy Deamer, “Structuring Surfaces: The Legacy of the Whites,” Perspecta 32 (January 1, 2001): 90–99; Thomas Patin, “From Deep Structure to an Architecture in Suspense: Peter Eisenman, Structuralism, and Deconstruction,” Journal of Architectural Education 47, no. 2 (November 1, 1993): 88–100. 66. See Roman Jakobson, Child Language, Aphasia and Phonological Universals (The Hague: Mouton, 1968). 67. “Program in Generative Design, description (no date) Mario Gandelsonas: ‘The Architectonic Process: The Development of Two Grammars’, with budget (no date) Draft of the Grant application to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 29 December 1972,” Folder B6-2, CCA/IAUS. 68. Specifically, the proposal cites Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965). 69. “Introduction,” n.d., 17, Folder B6-2, CCA/IAUS . 70. “Introduction.” 71. Author’s interview with Mario Gandelsonas, January 6, 2012; Mario Gandelsonas, “On Reading Architecture II: Linguistics, Social Sciences and Architecture,” July 1972, 1, Folder B6-1, CCA/IAUS. In the piece, Gandelsonas evaluates the merits of Eisenman’s Chomskyian project and concludes that it’s primarily useful for rejuvenating the field by allowing certain formal studies. 72. “Examination of Transitional Grammars,” n.d, Folder B6-3, CCA/IAUS. 73. Varnelis, “Spectacle of the Innocent Eye,” 64; Moneo, Theoretical Anxiety. 74. Transcript, 25, Folder B1-4, CCA/IAUS. 75. Specifically, “mannerism” refers to an age of Italian architecture roughly 1530 to 1600, but Eisenman and his group used it in a more general sense to describe the deliberate breaking of an established order for no real purpose outside of communicating the artist’s or architect’s will. Eisenman and his colleagues seem to have felt that mannerism was not a source of originality or future styles, so they tried to avoid association with it. 76. “Statement of Project for a Research to develop a rational approach to urban design (early document),” Folder D4-5, CCA/IAUS. 77. Peter Eisenman to Dr. Kenneth Klivington, May 31, 1972, Folder A3–3, CCA/IAUS. 78. Peter Eisenman to Kenneth Klivington of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, November 19, 1970, Folder A3–3, CCA/IAUS; Kenneth Klivington to Peter Eisenman, May 11, 1972. The letter is a follow-up from a meeting in which Klivington had recommended the book. 79. IAUS Financial Project Structure, 1972-1973, Folder B3-4, CCA/IAUS. 80. Draft of letter to be sent to the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Stern Family Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Aspen Institute, 1968, 3, Folder A3-1, CCA/IAUS3. 81. Notes from a meeting between Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, and William Pendleton of the Ford Foundation, July 23, 1971, Folder B1-3, CCA/IAUS. 82. Robert N. Kreidler to Emilio Ambasz, associate curator of Design and member of the IAUS, September 15, 1969, Folder A3-3, CCA/IAUS.

NOTES TO PAGES 199–209

83. Peter Eisenman to Kenneth Klivington, May 31, 1972, Folder A3-3, CCA/IAUS Archives. 84. “Grant application to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for Program in Generative Design [over 100 pages, including project description and 4 curriculum vitaes],” Folder B6-3, “Cost Control Sheets—NIMH,” CCA/IAUS Archives. 85. Allais, “The Real and the Theoretical,” 35. Allais cites Folder D4-3, CCA/IAUS. 86. I say Eisenman because the report is written in the first person, referring to “my work” and in his handwriting. “Progress Report,” Folder D4-3, CCA/IAUS. 87. Previously published as Peter D. Eisenman, “Notes on Conceptual Architecture: Towards a Definition,” Design Quarterly 78/79 (January 1, 1970): 1–5. 88. Peter Eisenman and Christopher Alexander, “Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture” November 17, 1982, first published in Lotus International 40 (1983): 60–68, reprinted in Harvard University, Studio Works 7 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000): 50–57. 89. “Introduction,” n.d., 17, Folder B6-2, CCA/IAUS Archives.

Conclusion: Disappearance in Plain Sight 1. Rowe, The Architecture of Good Intentions. 2. R. E. Somol, “Still Crazy after All These Years,” Assemblage 36 (August 1998): 84–92; Joan Ockman, “Form without Utopia: Contextualizing Colin Rowe,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57, no. 4 (December 1998): 448–56. 3. Porter, Trust in Numbers, 4. 4. Porter, 4. 5. Dan Bouk, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 6. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). He has also written of the larger stakes of this modern pretense to universality via globalization in Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity, 2018). 7. Sommer, Tight Spaces. 8. Robert Gutman, “Discipline Building”; Mark Jarzombek, Psychologizing Modernity; Sachs, Environmental Design, 157. 9. Sloane and Sloane, Medicine Moves to the Mall. 10. Knoblauch, “Do You Feel Secure?” 11. Florian Hadler, Joachim Haupt, Tara L. Andrews, and Universität der Künste Berlin, eds. Interface Critique (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2016.) 12. Hookway, Interface; Harwood, The Interface; Liam J. Bannon, “From Human Factors to Human Actors: The Role of Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction Studies in System Design,” in Readings in Human Computer Interaction, 205–14 (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1995). 13. Joy Knoblauch, “Toward a Critical Ergonomics: Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley’s Are We Human?” Avery Review 23 (April 2017), http://averyreview.com. 14. The Human Factors Society was formed in 1957 and is now called the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. Rabinbach, Human Motor. 15. The field of evidence-based design arose from evidence-based medicine and the work of David Sackett and colleagues circa 1996. Another early variant was the theory of “supportive design or psychologically supportive design,” circa 1991, called “A Theory of Supportive

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Design.” A canonical early study was done by Roger Ulrich, who had been initially trained in environmental psychology. His 1984 study linked health outcomes to architecture, declaring that patients recover faster from surgery when they have a view through a window. See Roger S. Ulrich, Robert F. Simons, Barbara D. Losito, Evelyn Fiorito, Mark A. Miles, Michael Zelson, “Stress Recovery during Exposure to Natural and Urban Environments,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 11, no. 3 (September 1991): 201–30. 16. Cynthia McCullough, Evidence-Based Design for Healthcare Facilities (Indianapolis: Sigma Theta Tau International, 2009), 27.

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Archival Sources Dorsett, Clyde H. Papers. Avery Drawings and Archives Collections, Columbia University, New York. Karalis, Constantine. Personal Files. New York. Kaestle, John A. “Criminology and Architecture: A Prototype Criminal Therapy Community.” Master’s thesis, Princeton University School of Architecture Archives, Princeton, NJ. Newman, Oscar. Papers. Avery Drawings and Archives Collections, Columbia University, New York. Newman, Oscar. Faculty Records. New York University Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York. Newman, Oscar. Personal Files. Hensonville, NY. Newman, Oscar, Peter Eisenman, and Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. Fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. New York City Housing Authority Archives. LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, LaGuardia Community College/CUNY, Long Island City, Queens. Rand, George. Personal Files. Los Angeles. The United Mine Workers of America Health and Retirement Funds Archives (A&M 2769). West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University, Morgantown. Van der Ryn, Sim. Manuscripts. College of Environmental Design Library, University of California, Berkeley. Wittman, Friedner. Personal Files. Berkeley.

Selected Sources This list includes sources that provide background material as well as recommendations for further reading. Abbe, Leslie Morgan, Anna Mae Baney, and United States Public Health Service, Division of Hospital and Medical Facilities. The Nation’s Health Facilities: Ten Years of the Hill-Burton Hospital and Medical Facilities Program, 1946–1956. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service, Division of Hospital and Medical Facilities, Program Evaluation and Reports Branch, 1958. Adams, Annmarie. Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893–1943. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Alexander, Christopher. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

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Sommer, Robert. Tight Spaces: Hard Architecture and How to Humanize It. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Sommer, Robert. The End of Imprisonment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Spivack, Mayer. Institutional Settings: An Environmental Design Approach. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1984. Starr, Paul. The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Stevens, Rosemary. In Sickness and in Wealth: American Hospitals in the Twentieth Century. 1st ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Szasz, Thomas. The Therapeutic State. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1984. Topp, Leslie, James E. Moran, and Jonathan Andrews, eds. Madness, Architecture, and the Built Environment: Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context. New York: Routledge, 2011. Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Van der Ryn, Sim. Architecture, Institutions, and Social Change. Berkeley: S. Van der Ryn, 1968. Van der Ryn, Sim. Design for Life: the Architecture of Sim Van Der Ryn. 1st ed. Salt Lake City: G. Smith, 2005. Van der Ryn, Sim, and Robert B. Reich. Notes on Institution Building. 1st draft. Berkeley: S. Van der Ryn, 1968. Varnelis, Kazys. “The Spectacle of the Innocent Eye: Vision, Cynical Reason, and the Discipline of Architecture in Postwar America.” PhD diss., Cornell University, 1994. Wallenstein, Sven-Olov. Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009. Wheeler, E. Todd. Hospital Design and Function. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Wheeler, E. Todd. Hospital Modernization and Expansion. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971. Whitfield, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Wilson, James Q., ed. Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966. Wood, Elizabeth. Housing Design: A Social Theory. New York: Citizens Housing and Planning Council, 1961. Yanni, Carla. The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Zeisel, John. Sociology and Architectural Design. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1975.

241

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate illustrative material. Abbe, Leslie Morgan, 30 Abramson, Daniel, 67–69 acoustics in hallways, 75 ACS. See Architectural Consultation Section (ACS) of NIMH Action for Mental Health, 66 Adams, Annmarie, 23, 29 Addison, Eardman, 48 Adorno, Theodor W., 174 aesthetics as therapeutic tool, 51, 54–55 affordable design, 40, 42 agencements concrets, 14–15 Agnew, G. Harvey, 43–44 Agrest, Diana, 184, 192 Aid to Families with Dependent Children, 132 Alexander, Christopher: and automatic architecture, 172; and Center for Environmental Studies, 184; and cognitive models, 185; contrasted with Peter Eisenman, 19, 172, 200–201; and Design Methods Group, 179; influence of, 202; and language of social science, 10; NIMH funding, 134; A Pattern Language, 88, 89; and patterns, 75, 86, 89, 92, 128, 192; systematization as threat to design knowledge, 88–89; and Van der Ryn’s design variables, 112 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 187 Allais, Lucia, 185, 199 Ambasz, Emilio, 183, 199 American Hospital Association, 45 American Institute of Architects, 11, 36, 183 American Medical Association, 26–28 American Psychiatric Association, 7 American Psychological Association, 7 Anderson, Stanford, 187 Angel, Shlomo, 134 animal behavior studies, 100, 164–66 Another Chance for Housing: Low-Rise Alternatives, 187, 188

anthropological research and architecture, 160–63 anti-communist sentiment, 26–27 anti-prison movement, 124–25, 129, 222n57 apartment culture, 167 Archer, L. Bruce, 179 Archigram, 155 The Architect’s Handbook of Professional Practice, 183 Architectural Consultation Section (ACS) of NIMH, 18, 62, 86, 88, 95 architectural firms: Butler and Cohn and York and Sawyer, 31, 32; Caldwell and McCann, 41; Caudill Rowlett Scott, 64, 67, 68, 70, 84; Coolidge, Sheply, Bulfinch and Abbott, 31, 32; Curtis and Davis, 40, 41; Eliel and Eero Saarinen, 54; Francisco and Jacobus, 49; Frank L. Hope and Associates, 127; Gruzen and Partners, 2, 4, 5; Howard, Nielson, Lyne, Batey and O’Brien, 126; Kahn and Jacobs, 84; Kemp, Bunch and Jackson, 118; Middleton, Wilkerson, McMillan, 122; Nacht and Lewis, 88; Perkins and Will Partnership, 54, 77; Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, 31, 49–50, 50; Van der Broek and Bakema, 147 “Architectural Man,” 9 Architectural Psychology, 179 “Architecture, Institutions and Social Change” (Van der Ryn), 116 Architecture Education USA conference, 171, 184 Architecture of Good Intentions, 203 architecture parlente, 196 Ardrey, Robert, 134, 161, 163, 164 Armstrong, Matthew, 30, 36 Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, 103, 149–50 Attica prison riots, 3–4

243

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INDEX

Auburn model, 101–3, 102 Augusta Area Mental Health Center, 89, 90 Bachmeyer, Arthur Charles, 44–45 Baik Slotermeer Urban Study, 159 Bakema, Jaap, 147, 157, 158, 159 Baker, Roger, 108 Baney, Anna Mae, 30 Barber, Daniel, 7 bathroom mirror design, 83–84 Bauer, Catherine, 8, 105 Bauhaus tradition, 69, 196 Baumol, William, 183 Bay, Alfred Paul, 78, 81, 82 Beard, George Miller, 8 beauty as therapeutic tool, 51, 54–55 behavior: animal studies, 100, 164–66; and design, 209; influence of form on, 103; primate, 166 Bentham, Jeremy, 103 Berkeley, University of California at, 8, 88, 97, 105–6, 115–16, 181, 184 Bernays, Edward L., 44 Bingham Plan, 23, 24 Binghamton Streets Study, 185, 186, 197 block-style hospital design, 38–39, 73 Brandt, Allen, 23 broken windows theory, 138 Brolin, Brent, 179 Brooklyn Community Mental Health Center, 64 Brown, Denise Scott, 171, 207 Brownsville Houses, 141, 142, 143, 144 bubble diagrams, 10, 92, 93 building codes, 84–86, 116, 183–84 building height and crime rate, 140–43, 153 Burnham, William, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114 Bush, Vannevar, 173 Butler, Charles, 32, 48 Butler and Cohn and York and Sawyer, 31, 32 Butner, NC forensic psychiatric center, 9, 121–24 bystander effect, 136 California, Correctional Research Division, 104–5 camouflage, as architectural technique, 9, 67 Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), 186, 191, 196 catchment areas, 35, 62, 63, 69, 217n12, 217n22

Caudill, William, 9, 10, 62, 92, 93, 182 Caudill Rowlett Scott project, 64, 67, 68, 70, 84 census data, 63–64 Center for Behavioral Research, 123 Center for the Study of Metropolitan Problems, 13, 66, 88, 169, 190 Charles F. Read Zone Mental Health Center, 77, 80 Chicago Housing Authority, 134 Chomsky, Noam, 17, 189, 190 CIAM. See Congrés International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) circulation of people within structures, 79–84, 92, 112, 114 Cisneros, Henry, 138, 167 Civil Rights Act, 58 Clason Point housing project, 150 classification of prison inmates, 104–5, 111 class values and property rights, 137, 167 A Clockwork Orange, 123 cluster prisons, 122–23, 125 CMHCs. See community mental health centers (CMHCs) Cohen, Jean-Louis, 9 Cohn, Sidney, 179, 180, 181 Cold War, 14, 27 collaboration. See interdisciplinary communication Colomina, Beatriz, 208 color, lighting, and mood, 49–50, 209 Columbia University, 84, 134, 184 Community Mental Health Center Construction Act (1963): criticism of, 94; and federal social priorities, 13; and history of open institutions, 7, 17–18, 66; map, 63; opportunities for architects, 57–59, 204 community mental health centers (CMHCs), 57–96; ambulatory nature of, 85–86; census data, 63–64; Clyde Dorsett on architect’s role, 84–86; decline of, 94–96; demographics, to determine location of, 62–64, 65; design, 59–61; exterior facades, 67; form and function, relationship between, 67–73; geographical distribution, 61–66; hallway design, 73–79; patient movement through institutional space, 79–84, 92; pattern design solutions, 87–93; Planning Aid Kits, 86–87; programmatic transparency, 71

INDEX

community psychiatry, 61 competition, hospital design, 31–33, 35, 39–40, 42 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 69 Comsat (Communication Satellite Corporation for Housing), 174 confinement and mood, research, 52–53 Congrés International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), 19, 147, 157, 207 Congress for the New Urbanism, 167 Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch and Abbott, 31, 32 Cornell-New York Medical Center, 31, 32 Correctional Environments, 2, 4, 5, 122 Correctional Research Division, California, 105 corridors. See hallway design Cranz, Galen, 202 crime: and building height, 153; demographics, 152, 154; fear of, 132–33; prevention and environmental design, 131, 146, 167–68, 168 Crime Prevention through Environmental Design, 146 “Criteria for Mass Housing,” 159 Crow Island School, 54 Cuff, Dana, 9 cultural lag, 13, 18, 25 culture of poverty, 12–13, 132 Cupers, Kenny, 7 Curtis and Davis, 40, 41 Dart, Raymond, 161 The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 136 defense technology, as model for urban problem-solving, 173–74 Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design: “A Tale of Two Projects,” 141, 142, 144, 145; book cover, 130; illustrations from, 153, 155, 156, 162, 168; influence of, 187; message and audience, 151–52; reception upon publication, 136–38; Safe Streets Act and research for, 131; and territoriality, 164–67 defensible space theory, 19, 187; board game, 147, 225n44; spatial diagram of, 154–55. See also Newman, Oscar deinstitutionalization, 16, See also Community Mental Health Center Construction Act (1963). See also forensic psychiatric centers

Delirious New York, 206 demographics and crime, 152, 154 Department of Defense, 8, 11 Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 167, 197; and defensible space, 138; and urban research, 174, 175 design: and crime prevention, 131, 146, 167–68, 168; ergonomic design, 47, 48, 208; generative, 190–96; grammar of, 190; hallways, 73–77, 85–86, 108, 111, 140; human factors in hospital design, 47–56; impact on mood, 49–50; impact on social interactions, 53–54; influence on behavior, 103; legibility of, 38, 42, 45; and lifestyle, 189; and psychology, 59; as restraining device, 61, 66, 94; as therapeutic tool, 54–55; and visual clarity, 40; and worker efficiency, 48 Design Methods Group, 87, 179 Design Methods Group Newsletter, 179 Design Research Society, 179 design variables, 112, 113 Dewar, Robert, 52, 55–56 Dewey, John, 8 diagrammatic displays, 10, 111–12 divided welfare state, 22 Dorsett, Clyde: Architectural Consultation Section (ACS), 18; bathroom mirror design, 83–84; bubble diagrams, 92, 93; and Gainesville forensic psychiatric center, 116–19; illustrations from Clyde Dorsett’s papers, 79, 90, 91, 118, 119; and PAK (Planning Aid Kit), 87; and patient movement through institutional space, 77; and patterns, 88–89; psychology of institutions, 119–20; role as specialist architect, 84–85, 129, 204; role in NIMH, 9, 61–62, 69, 95, 116 Douglas Commission on Urban Problems, 177 Drexler, Arthur, 51, 69 Duhl, Leonard, 95, 134, 175, 176 Dumont, Matthew, 61 Dutta, Arindam, 10, 173 Eames, Charles and Ray, 208 Eardley, Anthony, 185, 187 Easterling, Keller, 7 ecological architecture, 116

245

246

INDEX

ecological theory of institutions, 108 economic theories of ecology, 166 EDR A. See Environmental Design Research Association Ehrenkrantz, Ezra, 11 Eisenman, Peter: Architecture Education USA conference, 171; contrasted with Christopher Alexander, 19, 172, 200–201; generative design, 128, 190–97, 199–200; IAUS, 184–89; influence on Newman, 147, 171; NIMH-funded research, 19; Princeton University, 182; and social relevance, 172–73 Ellenberger, Henri, 52 Elmcrest Psychiatric Institute, 77 The End of Imprisonment, 125 entrance patterns, 89, 90 environment: and behavior, 209; and behavior modification, 124; and criminal behavior, 146; and psychology, 175 environmental design, 124, 179, 181; College of Environmental Design, Berkeley, 8, 106, 181; and crime prevention, 131, 167–68 Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), 87, 179, 180, 181 environmental psychology, 4–6; crime prevention through design, 131, 134–36; as a soft science, 11–12 Environment and Behavior, 179 Erdman, Addison, 31, 32, 48 ergonomics, 47, 48, 208 evidence-based hospital design, 209, 233–34n15 Existenzminimum theory, 159 “expertise seeking,” 10 exterior to interior, transition in buildings, 67, 89 Facilities Engineering and Construction Agency, 95 Farm Security Administration, 23–25 Fauntleroy, A. M., 26 fear of crime, 132–33 Federal Bureau of Prisons, 13 federal construction programs. See Community Mental Health Center Construction Act (1963); Hill-Burton hospital construction program Felix, Robert, 57, 59, 61 Festinger, Leon, 170, 173–74

Flintstone Modernism, 6 Foley, A. R., 67, 68 Ford, Gerald, President, 94, 96 Ford Foundation, 11, 174, 187, 198–99 forensic psychiatric centers, 9; Butner, NC facility, 121–24; Gainesville, FL facility, 116–17, 118, 119 Form Analysis as Design Research, 207 form drawing, 73 forms, immediate, 111–12 Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture, 101, 102 Forty, Adrian, 6, 42, 48 40 Under 40, 185 Foucault, Michel, 14, 15, 167, 201 Fox Hills housing project, 187 Frampton, Kenneth, 182, 184, 186, 187 franchise state model, 98 free waiting, 91, 92 Freud, Sigmund, 164 Fried, Marc, 13, 175 Fuller, Buckminster, 107, 146, 221n28 function: as defined in architecture, 47–48; impact on hospital design, 49–50; role in planning, 54 functional analysis, 101 functionalism, 54, 205; criticism of, 184, 191– 92. See also psychological functionalism functional modernism, 47–48 furniture: design as therapeutic tool, 53–54, 80–81; influence on behavior, 100 The Future of Imprisonment, 122 Gainesville, FL, forensic psychiatric center, 9, 116–17, 118, 119 Gandelsonas, Mario, 19, 128, 184, 190–96 Gans, Herbert, 171, 175 GAP. See Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry Geddes, Robert, 182 generative design, 128, 190–96, 191 Genovese, Kitty, 136 Gilbreth, Frank and Lillian, 47 Gill, Howard B., 103–4 Goffman, Erving, 12, 103, 117, 149, 150–51, 165 Golden Lane housing project, 147, 159, 160, 196–97 Goldwater, Barry, 94, 133 Goldwater, S. S., 36, 42, 45–46

INDEX

Goldwater’s Welfare Island Hospital, 31, 36 Good, Lawrence, 78, 81, 82 Graduate School of Design, Harvard, 182, 184 Graham Foundation, 187 grammar, transitional, 195 grammar of design, 190 grant application process, 61–62 graphic representations of behavioral information, 10, 152–54 Graves, Michael, 183, 185, 187 Great Society, 12, 17, 57–58, 64, 66, 96, 132 grid format, 207; CIAM grids, 183 “Grieving for a Lost Home” (Fried), 175 Groder, Martin, 124 Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP), 66 Gruzen, Jordan, 97 Gruzen and Partners, 2, 4, 5 Gutman, Robert: architecture and social unrest, 206; Architecture Education USA conference, 171; HUD Model Cities project, 185; IAUS, 187–89, 199; NIMH Space Cadets, 175; Princeton University, 182, 183, 202 habitat, housing as, 157–63 Hacking, Ian, 205 Hall, Edward T., 108, 165 Hall, G. Stanley, 8 hallway design: in community health centers, 73–77, 85–86; in correctional facilities, 108, 111; in housing projects, 140 Harlem Plan, 185 Harvard University, 8, 174. See also Graduate School of Design, Harvard Harwood, John, 7, 208 health insurance, national, opposition to, 26–28 Heidegger, Martin, 134 Henderson, Nigel, 161 Herman, Ellen, 13, 61 hexagon, as design element, 82, 83 Hickman County, TN correctional facility, 125 Hidden Dimension, 108 hierarchy of linked hospitals, 35 high-rise v. low-rise housing, 140–43 Hill-Burton hospital construction program: and federal social priorities, 13, 59, 62, 204; and hospital architecture, 6–7, 9; and human/machine interaction, 47;

opportunities for architects, 29–42; and rural hospitals, 21–23 Hirshen, Sanford, 107 The History of Sexuality, 14 Hoge, V. M., 35–36 Hookway, Brandon, 208 hospital architecture, 21–56; architectural opportunities resulting from Hill-Burton, 29–42; Hill-Burton Act, 21–23; horizontal v. vertical design, 38, 40, 41; human factors in design, 47–56; and public relations, 42–46; rural hospitals, 22–28; as specialty, 36. See also Hill-Burton hospital construction program; hospitals Hospital Architecture and Beyond, 34 Hospital Design and Function, 54 Hospital Planning, 32 hospitals, 21–56; affordable design, 40, 42; architectural opportunities from Hill-Burton, 29–42; architecture as specialized field, 36, 49; beds per capita, 29–30, 30; block-style design, 38–39, 73; building facades, 13; communitybased, 25; and concern with contagion, 55–56; demographics of use, 30–31; design competition, 31–33, 35, 39–40, 42; facade design, 13–14; federal spending by region, 36; financial burden of hospital charges, 46; hierarchy of linked hospitals, 35; Hill-Burton Act, 21–23; human factors in design, 47–56; impact of function on design, 49–50; increasing acceptance postwar, 28, 29–30; legibility of design, 38, 42, 45; patient reaction to hospital experience, 42–44, 54–55; postwar construction boom, 17, 22–23; psychology and patient cooperation, 42; public objections to, 45–46; and public relations, 42–46; racial segregation in, 29, 35; regionalization plans, 34, 35; religious model of care, 42; rural hospitals, 22–28; Southern traditional design, 33; windows in, 38–39, 40. See also hospital architecture Hospital Survey and Construction Act (1946). See Hill-Burton hospital construction program Housing and Urban Development, Department of. See Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)

247

248

INDEX

Housing Design, 135 “Housing Primer,” 160 Howell, Joel, 29 HUD. See Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Hudenburg, Roy, 56 HUD Model Cities Demonstration Project, 185, 186 Hudnot, Joseph, 182 Hughes, Thomas Park, 173 human ecology, 9, 166 Huxtable, Ada Louise, 3–4, 12, 55, 97, 137–38, 165–66 IAUS. See Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies Image of the City, 174 Industrial Engineering and Factory Management, 48 Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing, 170 Institute for Architectural Research (University of Pennsylvania), 182 Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), 184–89; debates within, 147; interdisciplinary nature of, 201–2, 204; NIMH funding, 190, 191, 193–95; Peter Eisenman, 184; Princeton University, 182; and structuralist theory, 14; urban streets study, 199 Institute for Defensible Space, 152 Institute for Urban Studies, 174 Institute of Correctional Administration, 103–4 Institute of Planning and Housing, 149 institution, as tool for power, 100–101 institutional dysfunction, 108 Institutional Settings, 75, 76 interdisciplinary communication, 55, 61; architecture, psychology, and animal behavior, 100; architecture and anthropology, 160–63; architecture and politics, 16–17; architecture and psychology in Newman’s work, 131, 149–57; architecture and science, 106; conference on prison design, 103; design and psychology, 6, 9, 10, 18, 61–62; hospital administration and psychology, 43; as part of EDRA, 179, 181; in university architecture departments, 182–83

International Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design Association, 167 International System of Typographic Picture Education (ISOTYPE), 10 introstatic spaces, 80 isolation, 52–53 ISOTYPE. See International System of Typographic Picture Education Ittelson, William, 11 Izumi, Kiyoshi, 9, 69–71, 70, 92 Jacobs, Jane, 13, 134, 136 Janssen, Volker, 105 Jarzombek, Mark, 206 Jeffery, C. Ray, 146 Jencks, Charles, 128, 138 Jersey City Housing Authority, 152 Jersey Corridor Project, 185 Johnson, President Lyndon Baines: 1964 election and fear of crime, 133; 1968 election, 94; CMHC funding, 18; and funding priorities, 15; Great Society and social programs, 12, 17, 57–58; Great Society under reduced funding, 96, 132; task force on criminal justice, 98; and urban issues, 177 Johnston, Norman B., 101, 102, 103, 104 Joint Center for Urban Studies, 88, 174 Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health, 66 Jones, Coryl La Rue, 58, 60, 65, 68 Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Control Act (1968), 106 juvenile offenders, 106 Kafka, Franz, 89 Kahn, Louis, 62, 71, 73 Kahn and Jacobs, 84 Karalis, Constantine, 119–20, 121 Katz, David, 52 Keller, Sean, 111, 172 Keller, Suzanne, 182, 183 Kellogg Foundation, 23 Kemp, Bunch and Jackson, 118 Keniston, Kenneth, 94 Kennedy, President John F., 17, 18, 57 Kepes, György, 9, 10, 174 Kerner, Otto, 177 Kerner Report, 177, 178

INDEX

Kirkbride-type mental hospitals, 73 Kisacky, Jeanne, 6–7, 23, 29 Klivington, Kenneth, 199 Know Your Hospital Month, 45 Koolhaas, Rem, 2006 Korling, Torkel, 50 Kubrick, Stanley, 161 Kuhn, Thomas, 183 Lakewood Hospital, Morgan City, LA, 41 Landscape, 165 Larson, C. Theodore, 181 Latour, Bruno, 205 Laurinburg, NC, hospital, 21, 22 Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), 13, 15–16, 98, 133–34, 149, 204 Learning from Las Vegas, 207 LeCavalier, Jesse, 7 L’École des Beaux-Arts, 182 Le Corbusier, 147, 157, 159, 185, 201, 208 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas, 196 Leesburg Medium Security Prison, 2, 4, 5, 18, 97 legibility of hospital design, 38, 42, 45 Leicester University Engineering School, 73 Lewiston Central Maine General Hospital, 24 Light, Jennifer, 173 lighting: color and mood, 49–50; importance of natural, 39, 40 Lindemann, Erich, 175 linguistics, 190–92; linguistic metaphor for architecture, 196; linguistic model for urban design, 190 Lippman, Walter, 14 Little Traverse Hospital, Petosky, MI, 49 Llewelyn-Davies, Richard, 27, 28 Lombroso, Cesare, 104 London Roads study, 159 low-rise v. high-rise housing, 140–43 Lym, Glenn, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114 Lynch, Kevin, 9, 62, 128, 147, 174, 185 The Magic Mountain, 15, 61 Maimonides Hospital, 64, 67, 68, 70, 84 Malevitch, Kazimir, 188 Mann, Thomas, 15, 61 March, Lionel, 160 Marcus, Clare Cooper, 10 Marcus Garvey park, 187

Marler, Peter, 197 Martin, Reinhold, 16–17, 19 Masco, Joseph, 6 Maslow, Abraham, 51 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 10, 174, 184 McCarty, Roni, 63, 83 McCullough, Cynthia, 209 McHarg, Ian, 175 McKinley, David, 67, 68 McLaughlin, Robert W., 11 mechanical objectivity, 172 Mechanisms of Animal Behavior, 197 Medicaid, 58 Medicare, 58 medicine, socialized, opposition to, 26–28 Meier, Richard L., 175, 187–88 Menashe, Howard, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114 Menninger, William, 66, 132 Menninger Clinic, 78 mental illness and poverty, 59 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 134 Meyerson, Martin, 174 Michigan Architectural Research Laboratory, 182 middle-class values and property rights, 137, 167 Middleton, Wilkerson, McMillan, 122 migrant workers’ shelter, 107 milieu therapy, 61 Miller, Frank Lotz, 41 Miller, George A., 8 Mills, Alden B., 31, 33, 43 Mine Memorial Hospitals, 13 Mintz, Norbett, 51 mirrors, design of, 83–84 Mitchell, William J., 179 Mittal, Nishant, 30, 36 mobile surgical units, 26 Modern Hospital, 31, 45, 46 The Modern Small Hospital and Community Health Center, 33, 43 Moholy-Nagy, Lazlo, 9 Moneo, Raphael, 196 mood: color and lighting, 49–50, 209; and design, 51; effect of confinement on, 52 Moore, Gary T., 179 Morgan City, LA, Lakewood Hospital, 41 Morris, Desmond, 161

249

250

INDEX

Morris, Norval, 122 Morris, William, 27 Mott, Frederick Dodge, 13, 18, 24, 25, 56 Mount Zion Hospital, 49 Moyer, Frederick, 2, 4, 5, 98, 122 Moynihan Report on African American Families, 132, 177 mud house, Sudan, 162, 165 Münsterberg, Hugo, 8 Museum of Modern Art conference (1971), 171 Museum of Modern Art Harlem Show (1967), 97 Nacht and Lewis, 88 Nagel, William, 126, 128 The Naked Ape, 161 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 178 National Building Code, 183–84 National Bureau of Standards, 86, 88, 119 National Center for Advanced Urban Technology, 174 National Clearinghouse for Correctional Programming, 98 National Commission on Civil Disorders, 177 National Commission on Urban Problems, 177 national health insurance, opposition to, 26–28 National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH): Clyde Dorsett, 61–62; employment of architects, 9; formation, 64, 66; funding, 190–200; grant application process, 190; grants to IAUS, 187; Robert Felix and architecture, 57, 61–62; Space Cadets, 175–76. See also Center for the Study of Metropolitan Problems; Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) National Institutes of Health, 11 National Science Foundation, 8, 11 National Urban League, 185 natural lighting, importance of, 39, 40 Negroponte, Nicholas, 179, 181, 184 Nehamow, Lucille, 151 neo-functionalism, 184 neoliberalism, 14 Neolithic settlement, Turkey, 162 Neurath, Otto, 10 Neutra, Dion, 78 Neutra, Richard, 52, 78, 81

Newman, Oscar: 1969 conference, 12; comparison with C. Ray Jeffery’s work, 146; crime prevention through environmental design, 131, 141–45, 150, 153; Defensible Space book, 130, 131, 136–38; defensible space research, 132; diagrammatic display of information, 10, 154–57; early research, 133–34; education and development, 147–48; and Erving Goffman, 150–51; funding sources, 133, 148; good city/bad city parable, 138–45; housing as habitat, 157–63; IAUS, 187–89; legacy of, 167–69, 204, 208; and research on animal behavior, 164–65; research with George Rand, 134, 149, 151–52; and territoriality, 166–67; territoriality in housing, 139–40; theory of defensible space, 19 The New Red Barn, 126 New Urbanism, 167 New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), 133, 138, 149, 151 New York University, 149, 151 Nightingale ward, 37, 38 NIMH. See National Institute of Mental Health Nixon, President Richard: and environmental legislation, 16–17; and federal funding, Vietnam era, 15; and funding priorities, 18–19, 94, 96, 132; inaugural parade, 100 Nolan, James L., Jr., 61 Noli plan, 77, 78 Norval Morris Model, 122 Nuffield, Lord, 27 Nuffield Foundation, 27, 28 Nye, Joseph S., Jr., 12, 13 O’Connor, Alice, 66 Office of Naval Research, 8, 173–74 Ogburn, William Fielding, 25 Omnibus Crime Control Act (1970), 98 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 67 “On Humanizing the Hospital” (Goldwater), 45 onlooker columns, 77–78, 112–14 open facilities, 3–4, 15 Oppositions, 184, 190, 196 orthopsychiatry, 175 Osmond, Humphrey, 9, 53, 69–71, 70, 72

INDEX

Ottawa, IL, Ryburn Community Hospital, 64 Otterlo Conference, 147, 157, 159, 160 outpatient institutions, 9 outpatient mental health care, 9, 208 Owings, Nathaniel, 31, 49–50, 54 Pai, Hyungmin, 50 PAK. See Planning Aid Kit Park, Robert Ezra, 9, 166 Parks, Gordon, 177, 178 patient movement through institutional space, 79–84, 92 patient reaction to hospital experience, 42–44, 54–55; in community mental health centers, 92 pattern design solutions, 87–93 pattern language, 192 A Pattern Language, 88, 89 patterns, entrances in buildings, 89, 90 Pennsylvania model of rehabilitative prison, 101, 103 People’s Park, Berkeley, 115–16 performance characteristics in PAK, 87 Perkins, G. Holmes, 182 Perkins and Will Partnership, 54, 77, 80 permeable institutions, 67–69 personal space, 69, 165; and hospital patients, 52–53 Personal Space (Sommer), 100, 166 Perspecta, 71 persuasion, 10, 12–17, 44 Petosky, MI, Little Traverse Hospital, 49 photographic evidence of urban breakdown, 177, 178 Pilot Rock forest labor camp, 105 Pine Hall forest labor camp, 105 Planning Aid Kit (PAK), 86, 87, 207 polio vaccine, 26 Popper, Karl, 203 Porter, Theodore, 172, 205 poverty, 132; and mental illness, 59; rural, 25 poverty knowledge, 12–13, 66 power, institution as tool for, 100–101 Prevention and Control of Mobs and Crowds, 61 primate behavior, 166 Princeton Report, 182 Princeton University, 97, 182, 183 prison architecture, 97–129; architect’s role, 125–29; Butner NC facility, 121–24;

circulation within the structure, 112, 114; cluster design, 122–23, 125; Gainesville FL facility, 116–21; history of prison design, 101–5; open prison design, 3–4, 5, 97–101, 122–23; Sim Van der Ryn’s influence, 105–16 The Prison Community, 103 “Prisoners Are People,” 120, 121 prisons: anti-prison movement, 124–25, 129, 222n57; Auburn model, 101–3, 102; classification of inmates, 104–5, 111; juvenile offenders, 106; need for, 101; rehabilitative (Pennsylvania) model, 101, 103; riots, 3–4, 101 prison studios, 106–8, 111 private space, 149–50, 154, 155 privatization of mental health services, 95 programmatic transparency, 40, 71 Project for Security Design in Residential Areas, 149 propaganda. See persuasion proxemics, 108 Pruitt-Igoe housing project, 13, 137–40, 145, 147, 159 psychological functionalism, 171–210; and generative design, 190–200; in historical context, 5–6; and hospital design, 47–48; and hospital facades, 13–14; IAUS, 184–89; legacy of, 203–10; psychological functionalism defined, 6, 172; social science research, 173–81; in university architecture departments, 181–84 psychology: applied psychology, 8; collaboration with architecture, 6; and environment, 175; government funding for research, 8; growth of discipline postwar, 7–11, 64; industrial psychology, 8; influence in postwar period, 4–5; military applications, 8; and military funding, 13; and patient cooperation in hospitals, 42; as a soft science, 11–12; and urban housing design, 149–57. See also environmental psychology psychotropic drugs, 9, 66, 94; and design, 59, 61 public health, 8 Public Health Service Act. See Hill-Burton hospital construction program public relations, hospitals, 42–46 public v. private space, 149–50, 154, 155 Public Works Administration, 8

251

252

INDEX

Rabinbach, Anson, 208 racial issues: and community mental health centers, 58; and IAUS, 185; and Johnson’s Great Society, 12–13; Moynihan Report, 132, 177; open prisons and behavioral research, 123; segregation in hospitals, 16, 29, 35 Rainwater, Lee, 12, 13, 134, 137, 149 Rand, George, 131, 134, 149, 151, 152, 167 Rapaport, Amos, 179 Ray, Isaac, 74 Reagan, President Ronald, 94, 105 regionalization plans, hospitals, 34, 35 rehabilitative (Pennsylvania) prison model, 101, 103 relevancy of architecture, 97–98, 171–72 Resettlement Administration, 8 restraint, 61, 94; biological v. physical, 66 Rhode Island School of Design, 120, 165 Rice Design Fete, 60, 69–71, 78 Rice University, 62 Ridgeview Institute, 77, 79 Rieff, Philip, 61 Rigs ward, 37, 38 Risselada, Max, 158, 159 Robin Hood Gardens housing project, 147, 159 Rockefeller, David, 174 Rockefeller Foundation, 174 Roemer, Milton Irwin, 13, 24, 25 Roosevelt, President Franklin D., 26 Rosenberg, Charles E., 22–23 Rosenfeld, Isadore, 13, 34–39, 40 Rowe, Colin, 19, 172, 196, 203, 206 Ruff, George E., 53 rural health, 21–23, 25, 28 Rural Health and Medical Care, 25 rural poverty, 25 Russell, Bertrand, 45 Russell Sage Foundation, 11 Ruth, Henry, 134 Ryburn Community Hospital, Ottawa, IL, 64 Saarinen, Eero, 54 Saarinen, Eliel, 54 Sachs, Avigail, 6, 9, 173, 206 Safe Streets Act (1968), 98, 131, 133, 134 San Francisco, CA: community mental health center, 65; Mount Zion Hospital, 49 Sanoff, Henry, 10, 179, 180, 181

Saskatchewan Hospital (Weyburn), 53–54 Saskatchewan Model, 71, 72 Saussurian motif, 192, 193 Schorske, Carl, 182 science: basic research, 172; funding for research, 174; hard science v. soft science, 11–12 science of influence. See persuasion scientific management, 47 Scotland County Health Center, 21, 22 Seaborg, Glenn, 173 security cameras. See surveillance “Security State of Mind” (Robert Sommer), 100 Seeley, John R., 175 semipublic space, 149–50 sensory deprivation, 52–53 Shanken, Andrew, 9, 10, 35 shared space, 143, 154–55 Shatan, Chaim, 94 Shoitz Memorial Hospital, Waterloo, IA, 49, 50 Show Me a Hero, 147 Sing Sing (prison), 101, 102 Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, 31, 49–51, 50, 64 Skinner, B. F., 8, 146 Sloane, Beverlie, 23 Sloane, David, 23 Sloan Foundation, 197, 199 Slutsky, Robert, 188 Smith, Garry, 109, 110, 113, 114 Smithson, Alison and Peter, 147, 157, 158, 160–61, 196–97 The Snake Pit, 67 soap-bubble model of territoriality, 165, 166 social interactions, effect of furniture arrangement, 53–54 socialized medicine, opposition to, 26–28 Social Pressures in Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing, 170 Social Science Research Council, 11 The Society of Captives, 103 sociology, influence in postwar period, 4–5 soft materials, 77 soft power. See persuasion soft prison cells, 3–4, 5, 14 SOM. See Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill Sommer, Robert: anti-prison movement, 124–25, 129, 222n57; open prisons, 98, 100,

INDEX

101; Personal Space, 166; psychological functionalism, 5–6; rigidity in institutional design, 206; territoriality and personal space, 52; ward geography in hospitals, 53–56 Southern Nevada Psychiatric Facility admissions process, 92, 93 Southern traditional design, hospitals, 33 space: personal, 52–53, 69, 108, 165; public v. private, 149–50, 154, 155, 157–61; semipublic, 149–50; shared, 143, 154–55 Space Cadets (NIMH), 175, 176 space medicine, 52–53 space science and urbanism, 175 spandrel beams, 38–39 spatial bubbles, 93 spatial diagram of defensible space theory, 154–55 Sperry Gyroscope Company, 39 Spivack, Mayer, 75–77, 76 Spring, Bernard L., 182, 183 Stanford Prison Experiment, 117 Stanislaus County Hospital, 88 Starr, Paul, 42 Stea, David, 165 Stephen, Judith, 161 Stephens, Suzanne, 98, 99, 119, 123, 125–28 Stevens, Edward F., 36 Stevens, Rosemary, 22–23, 29 Stevens, Sara, 7 Stirling, James, 62, 71, 73, 196 Stone Treatment Building, Topeka, KS, 78, 81 Street Academy, 185 street crime, 132 street layout, 185, 186 street photos, 165 streets in the air, 147, 157, 159 structuralist theory, 13–14 Studies in Human Ecology, 165 studio on open prisons, 106–8, 111 Summer Study on Science and Urban Development (1966), 174 Supervising Architect’s Office, 8 surfaces, glossy v. soft, 75–77 surveillance, 128, 187, 188, 208; in correctional facilities, 111, 128; criticism of, 169; at Gainesville forensic psychiatric center, 117–19 Survival Through Design, 52 Sykes, Gresham, 103

Taft, Robert, 26 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 47 Team 10, 156, 159, 160 terraced housing, 157–59 The Territorial Imperative, 161, 163, 166 territoriality: and animal research, 164; and anthropological research, 160–63; and Defensible Space, 165–67; and hospital patients, 52; in mass housing, 139, 154–59; in Newman’s “Tale of Two Projects,” 143; Robert Ardrey’s research, 134, 161–65; and sex drive, 164; soap-bubble model, 165, 166; and Sommers’ Personal Space, 166 Texas A & M University, 182 Texas Rangers, 196 “The Disappearing Object” (Drexler), 69 Theodorson, George A., 165 therapeutic design, barriers to understanding, 55 therapeutic penology, 104–5 therapeutic state, 61 Therapy by Design: Implications of Architecture for Human Behavior, 81, 82 Thomas, Michael, 109, 110, 113, 114 Thorazine, 9, 66 Three Proposals for Innovative Correctional Facilities, 108, 109, 113, 114 Tight Spaces: Hard Architecture and How to Humanize It, 100, 124 The Timeless Way of Building, 88 Titicut Follies, 66 Topeka, KS, Stone Treatment Building, 78, 81 Topeka case study, 86 Torgovnick, Marianna, 164 “total design,” 10 “total planning,” 9 townscape design, 118–19, 122–23 transitional grammars, 195 The Trial, 89 triangle, as design element, 82–83 Truman, President Harry, 26, 27, 29 Tschumi, Bernard, 206 Turner, John F. C., 207 Turner, Mayo, 124 Turney Home for Youthful Offenders, 126 2001: A Space Odyssey, 161 United Mine Workers hospitals, 13, 54 United States ,as welfare state, 16, 22

253

254

INDEX

University of California, Berkeley, 88, 97, 105–6, 115–16, 184 University of Illinois Architecture Department, 98 University of Michigan, 97, 107 University of Pennsylvania, 182, 184 The Urban Condition: People and Policy in the Metropolis, 175, 176 urban design, linguistic model for, 190 urban housing, 131–69; and crime prevention, 146–47, 167–69; Defensible Space book, 130, 136–38; fear of crime, 131–33; good city/bad city parable, 138–45, 152; Oscar Newman and defensible space, 134–36, 147–48; psychology and architecture, 149–57; public space v. private space, 157–61; territoriality, 161–67 urban policy, 59, 137; and human ecology, 9; and space science, 175 urban renewal, 175–76 Urban Renewal Design Center, 147 urban research, 207 U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, 28, 38 user behavior, 5–6 U. S. Public Health Service, 23, 31, 35–36 Utica crib, 59, 60 Van Arsdall, H. P., 33 Van der Broek and Bakema, 147 Van der Rohe, Mies, 31, 51, 107 Van der Ryn, Sim, 105–16; correctional facility design, 109–16; and design variables, 111–12; and graphic representation of data, 10, 111–12; onlooker columns, 77–78, 112–14; studio on open prisons, 106–8, 111 Van Dyke Houses, 140–44 Van Eyck, Aldo, 147, 157, 159, 160–62 Varnelis, Kazys, 196 Venturi, Robert, 69, 196, 207 vertical territories, 156 Vickers, Sir Geoffrey, 175 Vickrey, Wilmont, 58 Vidler, Anthony, 182, 184, 196, 206 Ville Radieuse (Le Corbusier), 140 violence during the 1960s, 132 volume, architectural focus on, 55–56 voluntary hospitals, 25 voluntary institutions, 15

Von Eckardt, Wolf, 3–4 von Uexküll, Jakob, 52 waiting spaces in buildings, 91, 92 Wakefield, Robert, 88 Ward, Anthony, 179 ward geography, 47–56, 100 Washington Post, 49 Washington University, 147 Waterloo, IA, Shoitz Memorial Hospital, 49, 50 Watson, James B., 8 Weaver, Robert, 175 Welfare Island hospital, 31, 36 welfare state, United States, 16, 22 Westgate Housing project, 170 Wheeler, E. Todd, 10, 36, 54, 55, 77, 80 Wheeler’s Zone Mental Health Center, 79 Whitaker and Baxter (public relations firm), 26 Whitfield, Stephen J., 27 Who Designs America? The American Civilization Conference at Princeton, 72 Wigley, Mark, 208 windows in hospitals, 38–39, 40 Wittman, Friedner, 88–89 Witzwil, Switzerland, 101 Wood, Elizabeth, 8, 134, 135 Woodbridge, NJ State School, 82–83 worker efficiency and design, 48 Works Progress Administration, 8 World Health Organization, 16, 27, 66 Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, 53 Wundt, Wilhelm, 7–8 Wurster, William, 181, 182 Yale University, 97, 207 Yamasaki, Minoru, 17, 147, 159 Yolles, Richard, 59 You’re the Doctor, 45 Zeisel, John, 10, 179 Zevi, Bruno, 81 Zimbardo, Philip, 117