Photo via Flickr / CC.
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Weyburn seen from above in 1960, forty-nine years before it was demolished. via Shoo Line Historical Musuem.
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Entrace to an abandoned Weyburn, 2008. Via Wikimedia.
Psychiatrists talk one language and I talk another. They knew what they wanted but someone had to translate their wishes into architecture. To me there was really no other way. If I were to really understand the fears and problems of the schizophrenic, I would have to look at things the way they did.
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- Provide "as much privacy" as possible
- Minimize ambiguity of architecture's "design and detail"
- Bear no intimidating features
- Foster spatial interactions that curtail the frequency and intensity of "undesirable confrontations"
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Izumi's sketch of his would-be "socipetal" plan, via Arthur Allen / Design Observer.
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Izumi's work featured in the January 9, 1965, issue of the Montreal Gazette via eBay
Still others closer to the man sung his praises, however cautiously. For all he knew, Allen, the fellow Canadian architect who frequented Izumi's office, said there "was no magic intended" in the shape of Izumi's spaces. "But who knows," he added. "There were some unusual and interesting people working in Weyburn Hospital."Like Osmond, who maybe wasn't off base when he held up the Yorkton center, together with the five other acid-aligned mental hospitals rolled out under the Saskatchwan Plan, as not just an "ingenious" design. It was also a monument to humanitarianism. He took this as further proof of LSD being as much a conscience-expanding tool as it is consciousness-expanding. And yet even he stopped short of deeming Izumi's reported LSD insights as genuine beyond reasonable doubt. It could be said that Izumi, gifted as he was, could've done this all just as well, perhaps better, without tripping on acid. Osmond did not know just how that "could be proved or disproved."We'd do well to not be fully charmed off a metaphorical dose of Izumi's architecture of LSD. By his own admission, dropping acid, eating mescaline, smoking DMT, or ingesting whatever other psychedelic may in no way bring you any closer to wrapping your head around the gravity of the wide ranging experiences known to cut across mental illness writ large. Izumi didn't assume his acid trips "gave him complete and immediate insight into the needs of the patient," notes Elizabeth Donaldson of the New York Institute of Technology. He worked tirelessly "to check his perceptions" by way of "intense" conversations with patients and his colleagues, which only went so far in connecting the dots between architecture and patient health at Yorkton Psychiatric Center. Or any other hospital drawn up through the lens of psychoses, for that matter.It's a poignant marker in the story of Kiyoshi Izumi that that sort of thing hadn't yet been rigorously measured by even the time he died in 1996. And he was the first to say that it may always be difficult to gauge.Yet his ideas still reverberate, presaging a number of recent reforms. Most notably, the American Institute for Architects' call in 2006 for any and all new hospital construction to be based on single-room designs in no small way took root in Izumi's belief in the indivudual's sacred right to privacy--something that arguably could've only crystallized through the psychomimetic gauntlet. By stepping into a warp.An immersion in their "reality," he said, was "a convincing experience" that forcefully reaffirmed what he considered the selfless and social responsibility of the architect, a worldview that for him ultimately transcend the clinic to include all people, all space. In the end, Izumi took a great hit for an even greater good. If that's not something to build on, maybe we've all lost it.@thebanderson…among the most attractive and architecturally advanced buildings ever constructed for psychiatric services …As for the physical plant, it was a pleasure to view a facility that was more than merely new. Creativity and imagination were evident in scores of details. We felt the wards and day rooms combined efficiency with comfort and cheerfulness to a very exceptional degree.