Recommended: Sounding Rooms, on the implausible notion of unfolding familiar space, with new rooms gradually unravelling around you. The comments mention Danielewski's House of Leaves, unsurprisingly, plus Geoff's earlier post about the undiscovered bedrooms of Manhattan, but there are other precedents, like the Winchester Mystery House (for which no floorplan seems to exist, at least not online), or even the weblog, a potentially infinite unfolding space, always linking onwards, opening new rooms and new exhibits, and new thoughts. At least, that's the idea.

For unbounded spatial experiences you could do a lot worse than consider the traditional asylum, a sprawling combination of isolation wards, careful segregation and starkly titled structures ('acute block', 'chronic block', etc.). The Index of English and Welsh Lunatic Asylums and Mental Hospitals appears to be a bible of information about these structures, although many readers will be very familiar with the asylum form through the urban exploration movement. For some reason, they are among the most visited and documented of all abandoned building types (Danvers State Insane Asylum, Hellingly Asylum, Byberry Asylum (complete with Patient Information Handbook), New York State Asylum for the Insane, County Asylums in the UK and and more). This monumental plan of Menston County Asylum in Ilkley gives you some idea of their scale, a terrifyingly large edifice, in the characteristic 'broad arrow layout', divided into male and female sections, poised on the edge of the moors (although the original plan is somewhat diluted by the incursion of the new Royds Park development on the site).

So why are these structures so fascinating? We'd hazard that they represent a convenient synthesis of several elements missing from modern life, and that their survival - even if it is only in virtual form - as ruined carcasses allows our memories and imaginations to hold on to a strong narrative from the past. There's not a lot of mystery in architecture anymore (apart from the occasional Fifth Avenue blip, thanks k). Frankly, there's not a lot of corridors in architecture anymore, certainly not on the grand institutional scale demonstrated by some of these Victorian British, Canadian and American asylums, with rows of doors stretching into the distance. Both empty buildings and blogs present themselves as vessels for exploration, neatly compartamentalised, reducing life into a series of boxes. Whereas one is the ultimate wunderkammer of curious afflictions, aspirations, delusions and illusions - phantoms of the mind - the other uses the physical object (or at least its pictorial representation) as the landscape to traverse. These giant, empty brick labyrinths function as useful places to keep the dark parts of our mind.posted by things at 16:01 / 0 comments