Architecture
Sylvia Lavin
1. For an overview of contemporary clini­
cal psychiatric understandings of hoard­
ing sec Gail Steketee and Randy Frost,
"Compulsive Hoarding: Currcm Status of
the Research," Clinical Porhol0t,7 Rnin>
23, no. 7 (December 2003): 90S-27.
2. Following the ovenhrow ofhu
husband Ferdinand Marcos's regime and
subsequent exile of the Morcos family,
former first lady of ,he Philippines Imelda
Morcos was foun d 10 have left behind a
collection of dcsignc, shoes numbering
jusl over 1,000 pairs (original estimates
went as high as l,000 pairs). Of those,
7+9 pairs now make up the bulk of the
collection at tbe Mo.rikina Shoe Museum
in ManjJa.
l. Amelie Gillette, "Hoarding ls So Hot
Right Now," Th, A.Y. Club, 2010, Imp://
www.avclub.com/aniclcs/hoarding-is­
so-ho1-right-now,l7868/ (IS February
2010).
In Extremis
In 1947 Langley Collyer was found dead, rotting under HO
tons of"stuff," having gotten caught in one of his own traps
(set to keep out potential robbers who thought there must be
treasures in a house filled almost solid with miscellaneous
things) while trying to bring some food to his paralyzed broth­
er. Homer, the brother, died too, of starvation. The Collyer
brothers, who have a small park in Harlem named after them
as well as a firefighter's term - houses crowded with quantities
of things that obstruct emergency access are called "Collyer's
mansions" - are if not the first then certainly the most fa­
mous case study in what is now called hoarding, a mania for
collecting that is overtaking the airwaves; to wit, the slew of
reality TV shows such as Hoarders, Hoarding: Buried Alive, and
even Animal Hoarding. 1 Every age has its favorite neurosis,
from the agoraphobia and hysteria that took over the streets
and homes of turn-of-the-century women to the multiple
personality disorder that became the self-diagnosis of choice
for the myriad (of again mostly women) who read the book
or saw the movie Sibyl. Now hoarding is the craze du jour
afflicting everyone from Imelda Marcos2 to Angelina Jolie
(how many children does it take to go from having a family
to a collection to a problem?).
If every age has its symptomatic symptom, every age also
has its symptomatic cure, and today, as one pop culture Web
site put it,"Clean-up crews are the new rehab."l The pageant­
ry of cleaning house is now therapeutic entertainment. Of
course domestic hygiene has always been a subject promoted,
regimented, and enforced by architecture and interior design,
but now it is spectacularized - this new exhibition value re­
quires strategies of display, like reality TV - as well as medi­
calized - a new status that requires diagnostic classification
rather than the kind of"how to deal with your clutter" advice
offered by Martha Stewart. Indeed, the tidy-up tradition of
interior decorating manuals that may be said to run from
Elsie de Wolfe to Dwell magazine has taken a radical turn. Bad
interiors are now considered to be not just in bad taste, but
actually bad and dangerous. Hoarding is about to enter the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM),
making it a recognized medical condition rather than just an
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