Andreas Nicolas Fischer’s sculpture, “Fundament”, maps the 2007 world gross domestic product.

...mad man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East, 
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid 
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, 
rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench 
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, 
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon...

Back in the 19th Century, one Thomas Kirkbride penned a treatise entitled On the Construction, Organization and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane.

Kirkbride intended to treat the mentally ill with architecture:

Kirkbride developed his requirements based on a philosophy of Moral Treatment. The typical floor plan, with long rambling wings arranged “en echelon” (staggered, so each connected building still received sunlight and fresh air), was meant to promote privacy and comfort for patients. The building form itself was meant to have a curative effect, meant as “a special apparatus for the care of lunacy,” and Kirkbride wrote that their grounds should be “highly improved and tastefully ornamented.

–Kirkbride Plan, Wikipedia.

Perhaps predictably, the insane asylum fan community on the internet has done a great job collating information about these buildings. The hospital pictured above is Greystone Park, the local freaky place for kids to smoke a J near my highschool. I don’t know if its funny or sad or what that as far as I can tell, the modern legacy of Kirkbride’s efforts is the embedding of the “Spooky Victorian Insane Asylum” trope in our popular culture, from Ginsberg on down to Scooby-Doo.

Ry’s post reminded me of another entry in the Modern Scandinavian Experimental Urban Planning file (also known as the Le Corbusier Is The Fucking Worst file.)

Jakriborg is an apartment building district, or new town, under construction at suburban Hjärup, between Malmö and Lund in the Southwest Scania metropolitan area opposite to Copenhagen on the Swedish side of the Danish-Swedish border. Hjärup is built on the fields of the village of Uppåkra, which existed for a thousand years as the predecessor of Lund until the town was moved in 990 to a new and more secure location a few miles away, at which time Uppåkra reverted to a village. Jakriborg is separated from the rest of Hjärup by the railroad Malmö-Lund on the Copenhagen-Stockholm line. The architectural style of Jakriborg is not connected to traditional styles of other, more northern, parts of Scandinavia, nor with the functionalism that has been dominant in most of Europe for much of the 20th century. Instead, the style is inspired by pre-industrial town architecture found in the coastal region of the southern Baltic and the North Sea between Flanders and Tallinn, of which perhaps the old Hansa city of Lübeck [lubeck is trippy –ed] is the best known example. The project shows similarities with the contemporary New Urbanism movement and seems to share many sentiments with the Poundbury project in England.

I can’t make up my mind about this. I’d really like to go check it out and see how its working in practice. “As a matter of principle, the streets are neither long nor straight.” That is the same principle Toll Brothers uses, look how that’s turned out so far.

St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Wall of room in Ward Retreat 1. Reproductions made by a patient, a disturbed case of dementia praecox; pin or fingernail used to scratch paint from wall, top coat of paint buff color, superimposed upon a brick red coat of paint. Pictures symbolize events in patient’s past life and represent a mild state of mental regression. Undated, but likely early 20th century.

Jätkäsaari is the target of a new planned district of Helsinki. Originally several islands, it was reshaped and reattached to the headland by way of land reclamation. They are in the process of relocating the current harbor industry to the eastern side of the city to make room for the construction.

Jätkäsaari is not a suburb, but occupies 100 hectares (about .4 square miles) along the southwestern coast. The plan calls for a dense urban neighborhood with housing for 15,000 that combines “top technology, ecological considerations and the centuries-old traditions of city life”.

Let’s hear it for the pedestrians:

Jätkäsaari will run counter to today’s constant growth in the number of cars; this will be a district designed primarily for pedestrians, with excellent public transport. It will have up to three tram lines, and the Helsinki Metro already runs close to the northern edge of the area. Cycle paths are being planned with great care to serve those living and working in every part of the district. The area will have very few streets allowing vehicular access, and every residential street will be a cul-de-sac. Through traffic will thus be minimal.

All that is old is new again:

The principle of minimizing motorized traffic will also apply to waste management. A process has been designed in which sorted household waste will go straight into a pneumatic conveyance system leading to a central underground collection point. This means that residents will not need to avoid garbage collection trucks navigating the narrow streets.

Read more here.

From Illustrated Description of the Broadway Pneumatic Underground Railway, published by Beach Pneumatic Transit. The complete 1870 volume is available online.

Paul Collins’ fantastic book, Banvard’s Folly, has an in-depth chapter on Alfred Beach’s pneumatic dispatch. Beach also pops up in a few other chapters as well, as he ran Scientific American for several decades.

From Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s “Structure of the Mammalian Retina” Madrid, 1900.

Edward Gorey’s cover illustration from John Bellairs’ The Lamp form the Warlock’s Tomb.