Angels In The Architecture

Angels in the Architecture

Is love enough to heal their family? Emelie and Liam have a happy life with their five-year-old adopted son, Ben. Emelie, an artist, adores mothering Ben, but as he grows into childhood, she longs for a baby. An accident brings this desire to the forefront. Spending her studio time drawing and painting an imaginary baby, Emelie slips into believing that the baby is real and in need. She tries to hide her struggle from her beloved husband Liam and Ben, but soon it overtakes her. Liam delights in being a dad and loves his orderly life with Emelie and Ben. No matter what, Liam can't give up his hard-won stability. When Emelie slides out of touch and family life no longer feels predictable and safe, his fears push him to rigid control. Ultimately, Liam sweeps Ben out of Emelie’s orbit, even as she is recovering her health and equanimity. Pushed into opposition by unconscious forces, Emelie and Liam struggle to grasp how their loving family unit became so unrecognizable. Emelie, finally well, is determined to get her family back, but the road toward reconciliation is full of obstacles. Out of sync, each must grapple with the meaning of family and their deepest desires. Can Emelie and Liam find their way back together? This story of a contemporary family from the Canadian Maritimes touches on issues of parental devotion, the trauma of infertility, and the effort to hold a family together when unanticipated changes threaten to tear them apart.

Angels in the Architecture

An intimate photographic journey into 115 years of history inside a nineteenth-century asylum. In the nineteenth century, perhaps no approach to mental illness was more compassionate than that of hospital administrator Thomas Story Kirkbride, whose asylum designs integrated beauty and nature as a method to treat patients. The Northern Michigan Asylum in Traverse City, Michigan, was one of the last of nearly two hundred such architecturally intriguing asylums. Founded in 1885 under the principle "beauty is therapy," the Northern Michigan Asylum closed in 1989 and today stands as a haunting reminder of this lost era. Angels in the Architecture is a photographic study of this institution's one-hundred-year history. Heidi Johnson's photographs of the building today are juxtaposed with rare images from private collections and state archives. Johnson has captured Kirkbride's spirit of compassion--of angels in the architecture--in a book that conveys the human element of mental illness with beauty and integrity.

Angels in Stone