The Brooklyn Rail

In October of 2020, amidst mounting resistance to public health measures, I read Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). In this description of London’s 1665-66 epidemic, a familiar experience unfolded. Quarantines were greeted with resistance. “Quacks and Mountebanks” peddled “pills, potions, and preservatives,” and people died by the score, sometimes poisoned by purported remedies. For survivors, Defoe said it could “bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on things with before.”

With “differing eyes” I returned to my research on architecture and urbanism during the Enlightenment, an era when governments considered ways that the built environment could increase what they termed “public happiness,” and we call collective good. New and revitalized institutions constructed ever larger buildings that promised to ameliorate life for most urban dwellers. The sick, mendicants, criminals, and the military were housed in these immense and soberly ornamented structures, designed with internal corridors, stairs, and rooms that channeled movement and often segregated categories of inhabitants.

Decrees heralded these visually dominant new buildings and dictated how people should use them. The laws targeting the sick and poor led Michel Foucault to characterize them as instruments of social control, and even those who do not share his jaundiced view acknowledge the ways they sought to contain and shape human activity. Defoe, however, laid bare the power of human resistance, and our pandemic likewise reminded us how humans can circumvent masonry and health measures. It all prompted me to consider architectural history not only from the perspective of architects and planners, but also from the view of people who did not conform to designers’ wishes.

To give an example of this bottom-up approach to architectural history, I turn to the remarkable Lazzaretto of Ancona (fig. 1). The lazaretto was built from 1733–43 to quarantine all goods and merchants that arrived in this Adriatic port, one of the most important in the Papal States at the time. Architect Luigi Vanvitelli, nestled his building within Ancona’s harbor, facilitating the reach of merchant vessels. Yet he safely separated it from the rest of the city by designing a pentagonal island that connected to shore via a single wooden bridge. A perimeter wall protected it from the sea while a fortified corner guarded it from naval attack.

Goods could be offloaded at one of four portals and ushered into a wide interior street. From here they were carried into the main structure, a second, inner, pentagon with warehouses on the top floor. These storerooms were subdivided and equipped with separate entrances to minimize cross-contamination. Merchants were similarly kept apart, housed in individual cells bordering the building’s central courtyard. The courtyard was a multipurpose space, built above cisterns that collected rainwater for the inhabitants, and equipped with an open-air chapel that allowed Christian merchants to worship from the windows of their cells (Muslims were not provided with a mosque) (fig. 2). Internal divisions meant tradesmen and goods would not spread disease, and its island location ensured that even if plague raged in the lazaretto, it would not harm the city.

Despite proclamations that detailed the lazaretto’s public good and praised its design, the history of human activity reveals a more complex story. First, the city government resisted this gift of papal munificence because it came with fiscal obligations. The finished building therefore sat unused for several years, leading papal authorities to set up sugar manufactory within its walls. In 1763, however, plague outbreaks occurred in various Mediterranean cities, and 1,243 merchants would be compelled to use the lazaretto that year. Even in this moment of need, the architect’s planning was undermined. A drawing from the time reveals that, amidst the influx of merchants, organization collapsed (figs. 3, 4). The drawing’s index, on the left-hand side, bemoans the “confusion,” and at its center we witness merchants ranging about the courtyard with little commitment to remaining within their cells. In fact, dotted lines index the movement of individuals who have left sequestered clusters and threaten to spread disease to others. Fortunately, plague did not ravage the lazaretto in 1763, and the drawing was intended to caution future administrators rather than document past tragedy.

Architectural history has traditionally privileged architects and patrons over those that built or inhabited the structures they planned. This is changing, and as this case study demonstrates, that narrative should continue to be rebalanced, giving weight both to the designer’s creative act and the creative use, or misuse, of the final structure. Doing so helps restore the role of historically marginalized actors to architectural history and opens new avenues for understanding how they also shaped the built environment.