Philadelphia’s first insane asylums offer a useful starting point for considering the relationships among theory and practice among a vast constellation of penal, educational, and…
The Lazaretto quarantine station on the Delaware River was built beginning in 1799, in the aftermath of four devastating yellow fever epidemics, to protect Philadelphia…
Environmental determinism—the idea that the environment, including architecture, can shape behavior—linked asylums and dormitories. In both cases, the architecture of carefully planned structures reformed the…
Almost all nineteenth-century asylums built in the United States were modeled after the Kirkbride plan (named for Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, the superintendent of the Philadelphia…
This essay examines the architectural, visual, and imagined therapeutic landscapes of puériculture, a science of infant rearing developed by French obstetrician Adolphe Pinard in 1895…
Defined here as the introduction or conservation of outdoor vegetation in cities, urban greening has bloomed during periods of intensive urbanization. This was true in…
Examining the key texts that have been published on palliative care architecture, and focusing on the most important hospital and hospice design-research issues that have…
Once one gets past the perversity of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” (1844), it is hard not to be…
Annmarie Adams is Stevenson Chair, department chair of Social Studies of Medicine, and Professor of the School of Architecture, McGill University. She is the author…
John Ruskin’s “The Lamp of Memory” is the central text for Ruskin as a preservationist. Yet it is itself but one chapter in The Seven…
