The Scents of Empathy: How Mussolini’s Architect Transformed Asylum Design

Abstract

This essay examines the co-evolution of designing psychiatric spaces and sensory experiences for patients imagined to be the beneficiaries of such spaces. In 1905, architect Marcello Piacentini proposed a campus for a new psychiatric asylum, Il progetto Ophelia, in the medieval town of Potenza in southern Italy, which deliberately deployed principles of sensory-oriented design for therapeutic purposes. Two decades later, Piacentini helped to convert the abandoned asylum campus into an administrative center for Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government. Thinking about sensory design as a form of empathic architecture, I compare Piacentini’s asylum with that of Le centre de jour L’Adamant, a day center for patients under psychiatric care that opened in 2010 on a floating barge on the Seine in central Paris. Il progetto Ophelia and Le centre de jour L’Adamant both enable historians and philosophers to wrestle with the possibilities and limitations of practicing an ethos of architectural empathy.