Strategies of Containment: Iron, Fire, and Labor Management

Edward Holl. Port Royal Naval Hospital, 1817–1820. 24 https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00274 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 Strategies of Containment: Iron, Fire, and Labor Management JONAH ROWEN It was the preconcerted signal for our part of the country that the struggle for freedom had begun; and the volumes of lurid smoke rose high. When alone that evening, we sat ponder- ing, and saying one to another, “What will the negroes next do? What should we do?” . then the sky became a sheet of flame, as if the whole country had become a vast furnace. —Hope Masterton Waddell, reporting on the Christmas Uprising, Jamaica, December 18311 The insights of Robin Evans, Michel Foucault, and many others on the Panopticon as an “architectural figure”—and on “panopticism” as its theoretical corollary—make it easy to overlook the project’s constructional particularities.2 Yet its inventor, Samuel Bentham, planned the Panopticon in great material detail, notably in specifi- cations for the building’s resistance to fire. Samuel (brother of Jeremy Bentham, with whose utilitarianism the structure is usually associated) “designed [the Panopticon] to be fire-proof, as far as any structure could be made so.” Above all, this meant using iron instead of wood. “According to drawings which still remain . iron, cast and wrought, was introduced wherever wood was usually employed in a building.”3 These descriptions, from an 1862 biography by Samuel’s wife, date the Panopticon’s invention to the late 1780s or early 1790s, contemporary with or even predating the earliest fully fire-resistant buildings, which were mills.4 Thus Bentham’s specification gives the Panopticon a different set of architectural associations than Foucault’s “compact model of the disciplinary mechanism,” with its implications for modern imprisonment, spatial confinement, and scopic control.5 Instead, the Panopticon becomes one among a number of early projects conceived expressly for averting the threat of fire, according to a notion of containment that differs markedly from the confinement of bodies in space. Containment here meant a set of principles that allowed architects, engineers, and manufacturers to enact social-structural control by means of materiality. The form of the Panopticon exemplified every one of these principles, but so did many other architectural forms that Grey Room 76, Summer 2019, pp. 24–57. © 2019 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 25 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 bore no resemblance to Bentham’s invention. The present article uncovers a connected lineage of experimental iron-structured buildings designed for the British navy in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Much as Foucault’s intellectual construct of panopticism diffused across society as a whole (and not only in the Panopticon’s shape), fire-resistant iron architecture also enacted a kind of control—over both human beings and nonhuman elements—unrelated to its form. In part, my examples echo Foucault’s list of building types inspired by the Panopticon prison: “factories, schools, barracks, hospitals.”6 Factories include the Rope House at the Plymouth Dockyard (England, 1812) and the Painters’ Shop and Lead Mill at the Chatham Dockyard (England, 1817). Naval hospitals include one at the Port Royal Dockyard (Jamaica, 1817), one at Antigua (1826–1827), one at Barbados (1827), and another in the middle of the Atlantic, about halfway between Recife and Luanda at Georgetown (Ascension Island, around 1829).7 Naval barracks include those at Fort Nassau (Bahamas, 1826–1827) and Morne Fortuné (St. Lucia, 1829–1833). But an elite military residence com- plicates this seemingly Foucauldian list: the Naval Commissioner’s House at the Ireland Island Dockyard (Jamaica, 1822–1831).8 Colonialism will provide another complication. Although men- tioned only in passing in Discipline and Punish, colonialism is inseparable from the architectural genealogy of fire protection.9 And where Foucault’s story of “the birth of the prison” is con- cerned above all with an anthropocentric “history of the modern soul,” the human was but one target for containment in a global history of fire-resistant architecture.10 “Whatever we mean by modernity,” Lorraine Daston writes, “is in some way linked with new attitudes toward the control of the future and the possibility of a life relatively secure from the disrup- tions of chance.”11 Other historians of quantification, precision, and risk have expounded on this characterization of modernity in fields as diverse as abstract mathematics and the realms of fab- rication and construction.12 But what would modern architecture, specifically, look like when viewed through this lens? Over the past decade, architectural historians have begun to explore this question, analyzing buildings in regard to hypothetical risks, ben- efits, and futurity in general. Scholarship by Daniel M. Abramson, Michael Osman, and Joanna Merwood-Salisbury—on obsolescence, regulation, and technological potentialities, respectively—reveals attempts to grapple with hypotheticals, by architects specifically and technocrats more generally, over the past two centuries.13 Abramson describes buildings being fundamentally impermanent, subject to supersession under pressures as varied as the vicissi- tudes of technologies, economics, and land-use patterns. Planners, 26 Grey Room 76 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 and eventually architects, envisioned dismantling their projects as part of their designs. Osman, on the other hand, shows how control over environments governed technical, scientific, and aesthetic production and practices. Predicting and adjusting to circumstances as they changed required new, flexible systems or models that could adapt under inconstancy. Merwood-Salisbury writes against teleological narratives that place tall buildings along a develop- mental timeline that leads to a stylistically “modern” architecture. For Merwood-Salisbury, who writes of “the simultaneous uncertainty about and enthusiasm for material progress,” futurity played as much a role in restraining as in anticipating what was to come.14 In contrast to traditional modern architectural historiography, these authors suggest a nonlinear, nonprogressive image of architecture built to allay—and, in some cases, to elicit—anxiety. In doing so, they offer means of reconfiguring the values convention- ally associated with architecture. In place of durability or solidity, architects built to avert uncertainty. Pushing these ideas further back in time, the archives of the British colonial project during the first decades of the nineteenth century reveal how new technologies and materials served to pri- oritize security and control in ways that had not been possible before. Beyond simply providing shelter, designers, builders, and technocrats assigned architecture the function of containing, thus converting buildings into instruments for managing risk.15 Bentham and Holl, Fire and Paper In 1804 (the year Haitian revolutionaries finally triumphed over British and French counterinsurgencies), Edward Holl became assistant architect and engineer to the Navy Board. Notably, he was appointed by Samuel Bentham, then inspector general of naval works of the British navy. Holl served the navy from 1804 until his death in 1823, under changing titles, from assistant architect to surveyor of buildings to civil architect, and designed or inspired all of the buildings considered in this article.16 Under Bentham and Holl, the navy optimized the dockyards’ operations through surveillance measures and work reform initia- tives.17 For example, in 1797 (early in his tenure as inspector general), Bentham proposed several dockyard reforms, including a project for a steam-driven system to store and pipe water across the Portsmouth facility for firefighting. Paradoxically, opponents argued that this firefighting system would itself be a fire hazard, both from the machines themselves and from arsonists critical of replacing human with nonhuman labor: “The cry had been, and still continued, that steam-engines would set fire to the dockyard; [and] artificers would rise, if an attempt were made to introduce the machinery.”18 Bentham’s push to substitute machines for people Rowen | Strategies of Containment: Iron, Fire and Labor Management 27 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 speaks to his management strategy, an approach he bequeathed to his subordinate architect Holl and then to a subsequent generation of naval planners.19 Although many of the buildings Holl (and his followers) designed still exist today, equally important for my history of containment are surviving architectural drawings. As Antoine Picon argues, drawings paved the way for a correlation of conception and realisation, a correlation which would be one of the chief objectives of the nineteenth-century science of engineering. There is also good cause to link the appearance, in the practice of Enlightenment engineers, of the process of conception-realisation, to the much more general, technical imaginary, which sought to organise and to quantify flows and movements of every kind, from road traffic to the problems of water flow in rivers or canals . cartographic depiction served

Load more