KU LEUVEN HEALTH HUMANITIES LECTURE SERIES:
Health and the Built Environment
'We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us’, or so Winston Churchill once said. For better or for worse, our constructed physical space – the so-called built environment – impacts on our behaviours, our social interactions, and our physical and mental health. The speakers of this year’s LCH² lecture series discuss various examples of the relationship between architectural space and human well-being, from across a range of health humanities, including architecture, literary and colonial history, sociology, and disability studies. In doing so, they will touch on themes as varied as the role of the corridor in hospital architecture, the connections between buildings and disabled bodies in science fiction movies, and the architectural evolution of retirement homes. Join us online and on campus, at KU Leuven, for a series of inspiring health humanities talks about the built environment.
A History of the Hospital Corridor: Madness and Civilisation
The great reformist drive of the liberal state in the nineteenth century embodied hopes in a new kind of institutional architecture, built around the novel device of the corridor. In prisons and workhouses, but particularly in hospitals and asylums, the movement that the corridor allowed embodied rationality, order, rehabilitation and hygiene. But by the 1960s, some began to suspect that these spaces produced the opposite effects: disorientation, disorder, even an annihilation of the self. The ‘monster’ asylums began to be abandoned, and hospitals became profoundly anti-corridic. The true horror now is to be left abandoned as a patient in a hospital corridor. This talk will track this rise and fall of a model of embodied space.
Roger Luckhurst
Roger Luckhurst is Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of several books on the Gothic and Science Fiction. His recent books include Corridors: Passages of Modernity and Gothic: An Illustrated History. He was editor of the scholarly edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s volume of medical tales, Round the Red Lamp, in 2023. His next book, Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead appears in autumn 2025.
