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ARCHITECTURE, POWER, and POVERTY Emergence of the Union

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ARCHITECTURE, POWER, and POVERTY Emergence of the Union ARCHITECTURE, POWER, AND POVERTY Emergence of the Union Workhouse Apparatus in the Early Nineteenth-Century England A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Gökhan Kodalak January 2015 2015, Gökhan Kodalak ABSTRACT This essay is about the interaction of architecture, power, and poverty. It is about the formative process of the union workhouse apparatus in the early nineteenth-century England, which is defined as a tripartite combination of institutional, architectural, and everyday mechanisms consisting of: legislators, official Poor Law discourse, and administrative networks; architects, workhouse buildings, and their reception in professional journals and popular media; and paupers, their everyday interactions, and ways of self-expression such as workhouse ward graffiti. A cross-scalar research is utilized throughout the essay to explore how the union workhouse apparatus came to be, how it disseminated in such a dramatic speed throughout the entire nation, how it shaped the treatment of pauperism as an experiment for the modern body-politic through the peculiar machinery of architecture, and how it functioned in local instances following the case study of Andover union workhouse. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Gökhan Kodalak is a PhD candidate in the program of History of Architecture and Urbanism at Cornell University. He received his bachelor’s degree in architectural design in 2007, and his master’s degree in architectural theory and history in 2011, both from Yıldız Technical University, Istanbul. He is a co-founding partner of ABOUTBLANK, an inter-disciplinary architecture office located in Istanbul, and has designed a number of award-winning architectural and urban design projects in national and international platforms. He participated in seminars, conference lectures, exhibitions, and studio reviews in a series of prestigious institutions and events such as New York Insitute of Technology, Cornell University, Tirana Epoka University, Skopje Architecture Week, Antalya Architectural Biannual, İTÜ, ODTÜ, YTÜ, KOÜ, Mardin Artuklu University and Design Atelier Kadıköy. His publications have so far revolved around the issues of open-source architecture, space and power, hybrid ecology, vibrant preservation, metropolitan commonwealth, and hygienic underbelly of modern architecture, in journals and books such as Footprint, Architectur Aktuell, Arredamento Mimarlık, and Direnişi Düşünmek: 2013 Taksim Gezi Olayları. He continues to pursue his intellectual and practical curiosities in his academic and professional life between Istanbul and New York. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to my former chair, Christian Otto, and my later supervisors, Mary Woods and Medina Lasansky for their support and feedback. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 1 1.1. General Framework and Terminological Definitions 1 1.2. Narrative Structure and Content 4 1.3. Spatio-temporal Context and Cross-scalar Scope 7 1.4. Historiographical Approach and Archival Research 8 2. INSTITUTIONAL MECHANISM 14 2.1. Parish Workhouse of the Old Poor Law 14 2.2. Union Workhouse of the New Poor Law 24 2.3. Construction of Modern Poor Law Administration 39 2.4. Transition from Parish to Union Workhouse System 46 3. ARCHITECTURAL MECHANISM 49 3.1. Evolution and Opposition 49 3.2. National Dissemination of the Union Workhouse 55 3.3. Workhouse Architecture at the Dawn of Professionalization 59 3.4. Sampson Kempthorne: The Official Workhouse Architect 64 3.5. Gilbert Scott and William Moffatt: A Pragmatic Partnership 76 3.6. Prominent Workhouse Specialists 81 3.7. Reception and Representation of Workhouse Architecture 86 4. EVERYDAY MECHANISM 90 4.1. Andover Workhouse Commission 90 4.2. Andover Workhouse Construction 96 4.3. Paupers and Everyday Workhouse Life 104 4.4. Andover Workhouse Scandal 140 5. AFTERLIFE 147 5.1. Paradigm Shift and Reformulation 147 5.2. Dissolution, Preservation, and Final Condition 149 BIBLIOGRAPHY 156 v 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. General Framework and Terminological Definitions This essay is about the interaction of architecture, power, and poverty. It is about the formative process of the union workhouse apparatus in the early nineteenth-century England, how it came to be, and how it shaped the treatment of under-privileged classes through the peculiar machinery of architecture. A workhouse, in England, was an institutional building maintained by the policies of poor relief. Paupers and underprivileged classes who were unable to support themselves were lodged here in exchange for their employment; hence the literal name, the work+house.1 The first step towards the national control of poor relief in England goes back to the fourteenth century, however, the first official record of the term “workhouse” dates back to 1631, when the Mayor of Abingdon proudly proclaimed: “Wee haue erected wthn our borough a workehouse to sett poore people to worke.”2 The workhouse institution officially emerged when it was separated from houses of correction and almshouses after the enactment of the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601. This marked the beginning of a series of Poor Law reforms, now known as the Old Poor Law, which necessitated the able-bodied paupers to work inside the workhouse buildings in exchange for accommodation and made parishes, territorial administrative units under the pastoral care of religious authority, legally responsible for the care of paupers and maintenance of these workhouses. The union workhouse was the modern institution for pauper management that emerged with the enactment of the New Poor Law of 1834, which was to function under a secular and centralized state authority all around the nation in newly constituted administrative unions that replaced the parish workhouse and its religious administration model after its long period of evolution. Between 1834 and 1850, more than four hundred union workhouses were constructed with state resources following the elaborate textual guidelines and technical drawings of officially promoted architectural typologies published in new Poor Law reports. In an era that witnessed an overwhelming multiplication of populations, political struggles, and side effects of rapid industrialization and urbanization, the union workhouse was about to introduce a new discourse, a new architecture, and a new of perception of pauperism in the form of a multimodal apparatus. By the union workhouse apparatus, I mean, a complex system constituted by a tripartite combination of institutional, architectural, and everyday mechanisms in the early nineteenth-century 1 The workhouse, in different contexts, was also called a working-house, a house of industry, or a poorhouse. 2 Quoted in: E.M. Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900), 226. 1 England.3 Each of these mechanisms consist of particular actors, historical aims, socio-spatial forms, and discursive and visual expressions [Table 1.1]. In order to explain the general framework of the union workhouse apparatus, I shall briefly unpack these mechanisms and their constituents in the first instance. Table 1.1. A compact elaboration of the constituents of the union workhouse apparatus [Author’s diagram] The institutional mechanism of the union workhouse apparatus consisted of legislators and supervisors as its primary actors who were New Poor Law commissioners, assistant commissioners, boards of guardians, union workhouse officers, and parish overseers. The strategic aim of the mechanism was to 3 The use of the term apparatus as a theoretical device derives from a body of sources. First, there are Antonio Gramsci's fragmentary notes and ideas in his Prison Notebooks, that advance Marx's theory of the state, and attach a number of institutions from the spontaneous private realm of "civil society" to the coercive "state apparatus", such as the schools, the church, the political parties, the trade unions. Then comes Louis Althusser's theory of the repressive state apparatus (RSA) and the ideological state apparatus (ISA) separating the institutions that function by the "iron fist" such as the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, from the institutions that function by the "velvet glove” through religion, education, family, media, and culture. Finally it is Foucault's dispositif and its interpretations by Agamben and Deleuze, that detach the apparatus from its linear functioning within the State and the economic infrastructure and render it historical, horizontal and multi-modal, so as to analyze "a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions" which enhance and maintain the exercise of power within the social body; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Books of Antonio Gramsci, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 12, 259-63. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 141-48. Michel Foucault, "The Confession of the Flesh," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 194-95. Giorgio Agamben, "What Is an Apparatus?," in What Is an Apparatus, and Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University
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