Steinhof: A Difficult Modernity

A lecture by Leslie Topp, Professor of Architectural History at Birkbeck, University of London.

PRESENTER / Leslie Topp, Birkbeck, University of London
RESPONDENT / Emese Lafferton, CEU
INTRODUCTION / Michael Ignatieff, President and Rector, CEU

MODERATOR / Michael Lawrence Miller, CEU

When the Steinhof psychiatric hospital complex was opened in 1907 it was publicised and acclaimed in superlatives: the largest, the most advanced, the epitome of the modern psychiatric facility. But what modern meant in terms of psychiatric hospital design was not at all self-evident in the early twentieth century, and sceptical voices from within and beyond the psychiatric profession saw the very institution of the asylum as outdated and oppressive. Otto Wagner was only one of a series of advanced architects across the Austrian lands of the Empire who sought to make a tired institution culturally meaningful through architectural, landscape and small-scale urban design. But while other designers opted for the familiar imagery of the organic village, Wagner imagined the hospital complex as a utopian city on a hill, recasting carceral control and isolation as advanced master planning in an early modernist mode. This lecture situated Steinhof in the context of the other psychiatric hospitals of the region, and architectural and psychiatric history more broadly, arguing that it embodies a difficult modernity.

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