© 2003 by Design History Society
The Design of Moral Architecture at The York Retreat1
University of Winnipeg
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Abstract |
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Both institutional and architectural history places the asylum alongside the prison and the workhouse, whose design characteristics emphasize confinement and control. this connectin obfuscates important differences in how ideas about treatment were reflected in particular architectural design. In other words, there have been few attempts to understand how the physical structure of the asylum became part of its medical discourse, and no attempts to research the treatment programme evolving as a result of the designers' intentions and becoming part of the asylum's architecture. Every researcher working in the field of the history of asylum's acknowledgements the importance of the York Retreat an its policy of ‘moral treatment’ in influencing the course of nineteenth-century asylum construction. Since the investigation, the influece of The Retreat needs to be evaluatedin light of the research. This article will focus on the correspondence between the founder of The York Retreat. William tuke, and its architect, John Bevans. I will present their discussions on the design of The Retreat within the context of their perceptions of insanity and their beliefs in ‘moral treatment’ to show how the intentionality of design is realized in architectural form.
Key Words: architecture • design • Great Britain • insinity • representation
1A version of this paper was presented at the Sixth Annual Hannah International Conference on the History of Mental Illness in Toronto, 2001. I would like to acknowledge the support of the Hannah Institute and the Borthwick Institute for Historical Research.