Complexity and Coherence

Abstract

Leslie Topp traces the emergence of the asylum mortuary as an architectural challenge. Drawing on new archival research, Complexity and Coherence: The Challenge of the Asylum Mortuary in Central Europe, 1898–1908 unpacks the highly fraught combination of scientific practices, death rituals, and psychiatric strategies that made up the mortuary's program. Topp analyzes three mortuary buildings in new psychiatric institutions at Vienna, Mauer-Öhling (Lower Austria), and Kroměříž (Moravia). Far from conforming to an established type, each building represents a radically different approach to the challenge of rendering the program's abrupt juxtapositions meaningful and coherent. In each case the building is conceived within the force field of Wagner School modernism, but the contrasting built results show the diversity of that modernism pushed to its limits by the complexity of the program's requirements and associations.