1 A SI M P L E I DEA O F A RCHIT E CT URE “Morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated instruction diff used—public burdens lightened—Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws are not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea in Architecture.”1
The Inspection-House If this was a picture, you’d have seen it before. History, you see, is repeating itself. With our new digital century comes a familiar problem from the industrial age. A social tyranny is once again encroaching upon individual liberty. Today, in the early twenty-first century, just as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this social threat comes from a simple idea in architecture. In 1787, at the dawn of the mass industrial age, Jeremy Bentham designed what he called a “simple idea in architecture” to improve the management of prisons, hospitals, schools and factories. Bentham’s idea was, as the architectural historian Robin Evans noted, a “vividly imaginative” synthesis of architectural form with social purpose.2 Bentham, who amassed great personal wealth as a result of his social vision,3 wanted to change the world through this new architecture. Bentham sketched out this vision of what Aldous Huxley described as a “plan for a totalitarian housing project”5 in a series of “open”6 letters written from the little Crimean town of Krichev, where he and his brother, Samuel,
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