Yielding and (Not) Breaking: Two Observations on the Walls of a Psychiatric Hospital

Abstract

This essay examines two materials found on the walls of a British psychiatric hospital: shatter-proof glass and steel-reinforced concrete. Interested in their constitution through and of the institutional space, it explores these common building materials’ capacities to tolerate as well as to hold and contain. In doing so, the essay contemplates visually and textually where institutional space and practices begin and are bounded. The authors’ own voices enter in an epilogue, reflecting on their role in facilitating and testing the tolerance of institutional spaces. In doing so, they point towards architectural features in which these walls and their particular forms of boundaries between the inside and the outside of the psychiatric institution are constitutive of spaces of tolerance: they contain and regulate the users of the spaces (staff, patients, visitors as well as researchers). The tolerance articulates as selective yielding and holding.

Keywords:

• word
• visual methodologies
• affect
• new materialism
• institutional spaces
• psychiatry

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the management of Gartnavel Royal Hospital, Glasgow, UK, for making this research project possible, especially the reference group. They also thank all the participants of the project, many of them staff and patients at the hospital.

Additional information

Funding

The research project from which this material originates was funded by the European Commission Marie Sklodowska Curie Individual Research Fellowship [grant number 706026 – GART-PSYSPAC – H2020-MSCA-IF-2015].

Notes on contributors

Ebba Högström

Ebba Högström is a researcher, educator and architect working in the intersection between geography, planning and architecture. Her research interest concerns how built environments and landscapes are spatially and materially configured, used, and experienced in relation to visions and plans. She is particularly interested in institutional geographies, and (auto-)ethnographic approaches for experiencing, analyzing and representing space. As a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the School for Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, she worked with the research project GART-PSYC Psychiatric Spaces in Transition: Discourse, Dwelling, Doing. Currently, a senior lecturer at the Swedish School of Planning at Blekinge Institute of Technology, she runs the Master’s Program in Urban Planning.

Gesa Helms

Gesa Helms is an artist, researcher and educator, and a human geographer by training (Universities of Göttingen, Germany, and Glasgow, UK). Her current (artistic) research as practice combines (auto-)ethnographic approaches (in lens-based, social, textual, performative and visual media) with facilitation in group and one-to-one settings and is in the production of both public and private spaces. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow of the School for Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow.