Projects & Other Work
Built with Care: Hospital Architecture in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean
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This book project examines the architectural history of hospitals in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean, from roughly 600 to 1700. It considers the longue durée of a wide geographic area to understand how the hospital as an architectural idea and reality came to be and then changed in response to the needs of diverse premodern communities. Then, as now, hospitals were institutions providing medical care and social services to diverse populations. Medieval and early modern hospitals had familiar features to a modern observer: medically organized wards, pharmacies, worship spaces, and community kitchens; the care provided—and the buildings it occurred in—were instrumental to the social relations of communities. Both the patients and the ideas inhabiting the hospitals were highly mobile, and hospitals were literal and figurative waystations on the extensive travel networks of the Mediterranean, allowing ideas to spread rapidly in the region. In what follows, I offer an alternative viewpoint of the history of the premodern hospital, one that centers the built environment as a meaningful component of the human health experience across the diverse cultures of the Mediterranean. To do so, I query geographic, textual, and architectural data drawn from an ever-expanding dataset of over 850 hospitals.
Photo: Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence, Author, 2023.
The Architecture of Healing: Hospitals in the Mediterranean (600-1700)
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Dissertation - Duke University, 2024
This dissertation examines the architecture of hospitals—long-term medical care institutions—in the premodern Mediterranean. Architectural remains exist from the sixth century in West Asia, North Africa, and Southern Europe, regions between which people traveled extensively. I contend that, as a result of cross-cultural exchange, hospitals constitute a group in their architectural form, medical care, and facilitation of community. Although scholarship clarified the communal role of premodern hospitals, current interests remain concerned with local circumstances and Eurocentric narratives. My dissertation bridges architectural and scientific history to address these issues in the field with a novel approach that considers the transcultural architectural history of Mediterranean hospitals in the aggregate. It advances an architectural history that question the primacy of European history in our narratives of the formation of the modern age. The dissertation foregrounds the role of architecture in the history of the human health experience in a diverse, well-connected Mediterranean.
Photo: Loggia of the Ospedale Maggiore (Ca' Granda), Milan, Author.
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Maps, Views, and Chorographies: An Examination of the Depiction of Place and the Representation of Architecture in the Civitates Orbis Terrarum (1572)
Through the examination of depictions of historic hospitals, this chapter explores the fabrication and meaning of the early modern European city views found in Frans Braun’s and Georg Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum (1572). It argues that despite their similitude to modern maps, the authors of the images made distinct visual choices that advance visual arguments about the cities depicted, rather than simply documenting the cities as they were. Furthermore, it claims these images as chorographies, a specific type of city view utilizing elevated viewpoints, comingled visual perspectives, prominent and recognizable urban architecture, and a general disinterest in charting the real navigability of the urban fabric.
Image: Franz Hogenberg and Georg Braun, Map of Milan. From Civitates Orbis Terrarum (1572). Engraving. Photo: Duke University Rubenstein Library.
Image: Detail of Benedetto Bordone, Map of Vinegia. From Libro di Benedetto Bordone nel qual si ragiona de tutte l’isole del mondo (1528). The Morgan Library & Museum, PML 125859. Gift of Lydia L. Redmond, in memory of her mother and stepfather, Mr. & Mrs. William M. Clearwater, 1996.
Out of Sight, out of Mind: Italian Lazzaretti and Collective Trauma in Fourteenth-and Fifteenth-Century Italian Cities
In the fifteenth century, cities in the Italian peninsula began constructing hospitals, called lazzaretti, for the treatment and confinement of plague victims. These lazzaretti were removed from the urban fabric, forcibly removing the sick from their communities and revoking their access to facets of daily life necessary for participation in said community. Using the framework of trauma studies, this project addresses the construction of lazzaretti outside of Italian city walls as loci of collective, communal trauma in which the traumas of the Black Death aggregated into a broader societal response of mandatory isolation that restructured the exurban environment.