This is a larger phenomenon that you find all over the world in asylums for several generations. Namely, that... Asylums were idealized by a lot of people who called for construction and who wanted humane accommodations for dependent people and so on. and for many years, for multiple generations, asylums generally were constructed to look very impressive on the outside and very beautiful, sometimes also on purpose imposing, really to make a big, big impression with big towers and facades and so on.
And rarely was that beauty mirrored inside. Now in the early asylums, to some degree it was. You still had had aspirations of home-like quarters.
And in fact, those aspirations, intimately tied to the ideology of moral treatment, lasted until about 1880 or thereabouts. And then whatever culturally normative elements there were in the... The asylums of different kinds began to be stripped and it became to be reduced to the bare, you know, the walls and the cultural normative furniture disappeared and so on and partially this had to do with a change in ideology which I call a materialization of mindset. and a world view and of course partially it had to do with the change in the clientele, the residents, over time, partially the ceiling up phenomenon, partially new kinds of populations that grew up in urban areas, often Immigrants who began to make up a very disproportionate amount of institutional residents because they came to a different country, they were disoriented, they were, you know, rootless and so on and so they had either a higher rate of disorder or a higher rate of abandonment.
you know, one or the other. And so you got that discrepancy between the external and the internal until later on the ideals about what the asylum should look like on the outside changed to fit the reality a little closer and buildings became plainer, you know. Boxy, more modernistic, Bauhaus, not quite but close to it, and there was not a big aspiration later on for external beauty.