Q U E S T I O N I N G A R C H I T E C T U R A L D E S I G N S T A N D A R D S
B Y I M P L E M E N T I N G T H E H U M A N A S A H O L I S T I C L I V I N G B E I N G

The topic of mental health and illness has always been an important and difficult subject. As history shows, its architecture is an expression of the existing knowledge in this field. The position of humans in society has been evaluated with the definition of illness of the respective time. Whereas in the ancient world, people with what we would call mental problems today, got guided into a deep ritual sleep -the incubation- in order to heal their ‚misbehavior‘, it became a tool of control, isolation and segregation in the progress of time. In the 1950ies, with the contribution of medication to the field of psychology, the treatment and its architecture experienced a drastic change. Clinics became labs, where people were stripped of their rights and became guinea pigs to medical studies. From the typology of the panopticon it evolved into a more hospital like architecture. With those changes the definition of normality and simultaneously the one of illness were redefined over and over again throughout time, depending on several factors such as social and cultural values. In the present, the line between healthy and ill gets drawn in a very taxonomic manner, by the diagnostic tool called DSM-5 - a large collection of symptoms. Looking at the history of mental illness also means looking at the history of medicine and women. Being the oldest mental illness ever described, Hysteria brought a lot of pain to the female gender. Making the life-giving organ responsible for behavior that fell out of the ‚normal‘, women were burnt at the stake, their female organs were removed or later in history they even became showpieces for men of science. Even though Hysteria was removed from the DSM in the 1960s, statistically seen women are still more effected by mental illnesses than men. If this is due to gender specific paid or unpaid work, or that women are more likely to talk about mental issues or that medical staff is more inclined to assign a mental illness to women‘s physical complaints, is not resolved yet. By researching different approaches on how to deal with mental illnesses throughout history, we came to question if contemporary renderings portraying new psychiatric clinics is how architecture for the mind should look like in the future.