1.5.2 HYGIENE
Hygiene is a relative concept; a hundred years ago, it involved areas that currently are
understood to fall under the domain of social policy, health care, elderly care, food safety
and personal hygiene.^241 In the inter-war period, the pursuit of hygiene included major
public information campaigns in Europe. Similarly, in architecture, the progressive
aesthetic ideas of the first few decades of the 20th century were to do with hygiene,
light and transparency.^242 Kirsi Saarikangas, a Finnish art historian who has studied
housing architecture, concluded that, at that time, in the approach to hygiene in hous-
ing, the focus was on the home as the benchmark and instrument for hygiene, social
and aesthetic education and improvement.^243 A sanatorium and a laboratory, however,
were central symbols of the new society and citizens, setting the standards for housing.
Alongside population density, cleanliness and healthiness, which had been the corner-
stones of hygiene in the home, new notions entered the discourse in the inter-war
period, namely the design of details, a pragmatic spatial organisation and the relation
between different rooms.^244 Saarikangas also made a sharp observation regarding the
“vulgarisation of bacteriology”. With the confusion of miasma theory and bacteriology
in public health education and housing-related debate in the press, the aim of creating a
clean living environment became a type of vulgarised form of bacteriology. At the same
time, popularising bacteriological findings became an objective for the discipline and
the prevention of disease a moral virtue. As bacteria are invisible to the eye, ordinary
people had to make do with removing visible signs, that is, dirt, and with creating
spaces that looked, smelled and felt clean.^245 In terms of lighting, hygienic standards
referred to the elimination of glare, avoiding tiring the eyes, the reduced capacity to
work and sensory irritation.^246 Physical privacy and cleanliness were emphasised as a
hygienic strategy. This showed in the architecture of dwellings, schools, barracks, hos-
pitals and other public institutions, where physical privacy and the private space were
assigned more importance. In the debate on hygiene and housing, emphasis was placed
on the impact of the environment on personal health and morals. The entire debate was
marked with a belief in the power of architecture to change people’s lives.^247
According to Maarit Henttonen, hygienic considerations in conjunction with hos-
pital architecture also included the notion of aesthetic hygiene. Simple, downtoned
architecture was perceived as hygienic and so this aesthetic hygiene was extended in
hospitals to the level of specific details, both inside and outside.^248 According to Anne-
marie Adams, hospitals in the United States and Canada aspired towards impeccable
241 Henttonen 2009, p. 55.
242 See Overy 2007, pp. 52–57.
243 Saarikangas 2002, p. 44; Gold 1997, pp. 57–64.
244 Saarikangas 2002, pp. 45–50.
245 Saarikangas 2002, pp. 51–53.
246 Norvasuo 2009, p. 79.
247 Saarikangas 2002, pp. 59–61.
248 Henttonen 2009, p. 324.