Between Supervision and Functionality

This paper reviews the architecture of the Royal National Institute for the Insane in Stenjevec during its construction and the first years of its existence. Since the opening of the Institute in 1879 until the end of the World War I, there were numerous adaptations and extensions of the original capacities. The paper shows how these extensions reflected the existing paradigm of the institutional architecture in the second half of the 19th century. Architecture, under the influence of Pinel’s “moral treatment” as a primary therapeutic approach to mental illnesses in the 19th century, was considered to be a remedy and its therapeutic importance in the context of psychiatry was not questioned. While early examples of the architecture of psychiatric hospitals copied prison construction and were adapted to control the mentally ill (e.g., the Viennese “Narrenturm”), later plans, such as linear and separate (pavilion), sought to simultaneously increase control effectiveness, act therapeutically and respond to some practical needs of the more crowded institutes. The Stenjevec Institute, designed by the Viennese architect Kuno Waidmann, was created exactly at the transition between the linear and the separate type. The institute, originally conceived as a linear type of institution, was later transformed into a separate or pavilion type institute.