Index# 20308
What is medicine? What is health care? How does architecture help or hinder the practice of medicine? Whether as a doctor or patient, what kinds of places do you envision as a medical space? For most of human history, medical doctors needed to see their patients up close and in person: does tele-medicine change all that? How does COVID-19 make you think about how humans occupy space? In this seminar, we will address these and other issues related to space and health care. Surveying the period from 1750 to the present, we will study the architecture of building types such as hospitals, asylums, and dormitories. We will explore architects who worked closely with doctors, and we will consider issues of surveillance and gender. Aspects of contagion, quarantine, and the history of public health will also enter our discussions. The importance of therapeutic architecture today will be the last subject before the student presentations. For the final research papers, students may choose any aspect of architecture as related to medicine from 1750 to the present.
About Professor Yanni
My area of specialization is the social history of architecture in 19th- and 20th-century Britain and the United States. I am the author of three monographs, each one a social history of a single building type. My approach to architectural history falls between vernacular architectural studies and the study of works by known architects. I am less interested in style or "great men" than I am in the meanings people in history made from the buildings they lived with. Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) examines the dwellings of college students set against the backdrop of massive shifts in higher education and proposes that residence halls manifest ideas about student life, education, class, gender, race, and citizenship. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/living-on-campus
I received my doctorate in art history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994; I graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut with B.A. in 1987. I was fortunate to receive outstanding mentoring from Joseph Siry at Wesleyan and David Brownlee at Penn, and I remain appreciative of the guidance and continuing friendship of these fine scholars. I am particularly grateful for the fellowships that allowed me to study at Penn.