Dana Arnold (University of Middlesex and CRASSH)
Alberti claimed that a house is a small city. Perhaps then he would agree then with my assertion that hospitals are heterotopias and their spaces operated as a kind of countersite or dystopian image of the metropolis. Here I want to think about the aesthetics of the hospital – its phenomenological presence. In other words how it was encountered as a physical object in the urban topography and how its interior spaces were experienced by its occupants and by the range of publics who passed through it. My frame for this investigation is the discourse around the notion of home.
Dana Arnold is Professor of Architectural History and Theory at Middlesex University, London, UK. Her research focuses on urban space and the city as visual culture. This work has taken on a global dimension with research projects on the architectural dialogues between London and Paris, and those between Britain and China, and Europe and the Middle East. She is Guest Professor, International Research Centre for Chinese Cultural Heritage Conservation, Tianjin University, China and Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Architecture at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara. Her interest in how architecture, space and cities combine is the subject of a number of monographs: The Spaces of the Hospital: Spatiality and urban change in London 1680-1820 (2013); Rural Urbanism: London landscapes in the early nineteenth century (2006); and Re-presenting the Metropolis: Architecture, Urban Experience and Social Life in London 1800-1840 (2000). She is currently a Visiting Fellow at CRASSH working on her new book project Ambivalent Geographies: Cross-cultural Exchanges in the Architecture of the British Concession in Tianjin, China, c.1860-1946.