‘asylum’ relates to those dispossessed of a homeland who seek sanctuary elsewhere. While historically associated with institutions of care for the mentally ill, it is more enduringly aligned with a right to protection and a place safe from danger or hardship. And yet, the haunting Gothic image of a ‘lunatic asylum’ as a state-run institution for detaining, confining and safeguarding those proclaimed ‘mad’ – previously looked after by family, religious institutions and community – was the precursor of the psychiatric hospital, emphasising seclusion and restraint over care. This is reinforced by popular culture, especially film and television, where such masonry piles bathed in shadow are tinged with terror, capturing a failed 19th-century notion of monuments to moral architecture. However, the history of psychiatric institutions is one of buildings outliving the specific set of assumptions and circumstances that originally gave rise to them. Middlemore Hospital’s recently completed Acute Mental Health Inpatient Unit proposes and performs a refreshed typology in which night’s muted
