Lying in the Dark Room

Book excerpt: Lying in the Dark Room: Architectures of British Maternity returns to and reflects on the spatial and architectural experience of childbirth, through both a critical history of maternity spaces and a creative exploration of those we use today. Where conventional architectural histories objectify buildings (in parallel with the objectification of the maternal body), the book—in the mode of creative practice research—presents a creative-critical autotheory of the architecture of lying-in. It uses feminist, subjective modes of thinking that travel across disciplines, registers and arguments. The book assesses the transformation of maternity spaces—from the female bedchamber of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century marital homes, to the lying-in hospitals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries purposely built by man-midwives, to the late twentieth-century spaces of home and the modern hospital maternity wing—and the parallel shifts in maternal practices. The spaces are not treated as mute or neutral backdrops to maternal history but as a series of vital, entangled atmospheres, materials, practices and objects that are produced by, and, in turn, produce particular social and political conditions, gendered structures and experiences. Moving across spaces, systems, protagonists and their subjectivities, the book shows how hospital design and protocol altered ordinary birth at home and continues to shape maternal spatial experience today. As such, it will be of interest to a wide range of readers, from architectural historians, theoreticians, designers and students to medical humanities historians, to English Literature, humanities and material studies scholars, as well as those interested in creative-critical writing.