Movement of the Machine The American Hospital at Midcentury Joy Knoblauch U-M School of Architecture and Urban Planning Monday, 17 March 2014 4:00–5:30 pm In 1934 the historian and urbanist Lewis Mumford predicted that a simplification of the externals of machine-dominated environments would be necessary to prevent fatigue resulting from contact with increasingly complex mechanisms. The transformation of American hospital environments at midcentury suggests that Mumford was prescient: a streamlined aesthetic came to dominate the modern hospital even as its procedures, devices, and social complexity increased. As architects were called on to humanize the hospitals space—to communicate their attention to the human element within—designers began to balance this streamlined appearance with one of programmatic transparency. Doctors, patients, bureaucrats, and the public were the audience for an enriched language of diagrams, corridor designs, and façades intended to communicate attentiveness yet preserve the smooth interface that packaged the modern hospital’s complex internal workings. Joy Knoblauch specializes in design and the human sciences, and the interaction between architecture, government and population. Her work has been published in the new journal Manifest, covering American Architecture and Urbanism, and in the edited collection In Search of the Public: Notes on the Contemporary American City.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 13:39:09 +0000