"Medici alienisti abili nella scuola di architettura". Concezioni dello spazio manicomiale nella letteratura medica del secondo Ottocento.

The essay examines the medico-psychiatric studies that, developed in Italy in the second half of the 19th century, not only argue the urgency of reforms aimed at rebalancing the social organism, counteracting poverty, disease, physical degeneration and psychic pathologies, but also attempt to demonstrate the incidence of environmental characteristics on the health of individuals. Functional programmes and asylum projects are, as early as the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century, almost exclusively the subject of alienists. Architects, forced to assimilate medical hypotheses, would end up taking on the responsibility of giving them form and composing spaces on the basis of a series of data: quantities of light, air and heat, dimensional ratios between built-up areas and open green areas, between cells and spaces dedicated to the moral treatment of patients, between per capita expenses of the alienated and profits produced by the farming colonies.