ABSTRACT
The single room, or cell—that is, the room designed for one person alone inside it—was at one time the fundamental unit of psychiatric architecture. In the earliest purpose-built asylums of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, multiplied and arranged repetitively off a corridor, cells stood for both the collection of the mentally ill under one roof, and for their separation one from another in an ordered array of isolated individuals. 1 By the late nineteenth century, though, the single room was the exception, rather than the rule, in newly built asylums. Its physical presence was diminished, but despite that—or indeed because of it—it loomed large in discussions of asylum design. Most asylums built around 1900 in Western countries included a small number of single rooms in the sections of the institution for pauper patients (that is, for patients who could not afford their own maintenance and became wards of the state); these were meant for the temporary isolation and observation of patients in a highly disturbed state. Most asylums also had designated wards for paying patients; here, only those paying the highest rate (first-class patients) were entitled to single rooms. These single rooms were meant to guarantee privacy, with all the protection of sensibility and of individual identity that that brought with it.
