UCLA

This dissertation examines the design, construction, and early operation of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore as an instance where the disciplinary techniques for medical observation, experimentation, and education became deeply entangled with architecture. The design and construction of the Hospital—led by a physician and assisted by an architect—reveals the professional dynamics and rivalry between medicine and architecture at a time when both were in the early stages of their professionalization, and in a subject in which both professions claimed expertise and authority. Influenced by the rise of the laboratory medicine, the project reflects the application of the scientific method to architecture that ultimately conceived the built hospital as a full-scale architectural experiment: “a sort of laboratory for heating and ventilation.” The process began with a survey of current practices on the basis of literature review and visits to existing hospitals, leading to the development of a hypothesis that manifested itself in the plans, followed by the construction of the experiment, and finally the evaluation and analysis of the building performance during the operation of the hospital. Using building forms and heating and ventilation systems as independent variables, the goal of the experiment was to correlate environmental condition with disease incidence in order to arrive at the best architectural configuration. The result was the isolation and abstraction of specific components of architecture that allowed them to become objects of scientific study and analysis. In a period when American architects were embracing the revival of classicism and the aesthetic principles of the �cole des Beaux-Arts, the hygienic and antiseptic principles in the Hospital resulted in bright, sterile interiors with rounded corners, smooth and impermeable surfaces, and no cornices or ornaments to hold germs or foul air. Meanwhile, seeing the building as a didactic demonstration of the experiment, all the pipes, ducts, traps and mechanical apparatus were exposed to view so that the Hospital would function as “a laboratory for teaching the practical application of the laws of hygiene to heating, ventilation, house drainage, and other sanitary matters.” The project represents a salient moment when the disciplinary entanglement of medicine with architecture, in the pursuit to increase and diffuse knowledge, became at once phenomenological and discursive. By the time the Hospital was constructed, these architectural propositions conformed to, but at times contradicted, the therapeutic, educational, and experimental mandates of the institution.