Paradox of Isolation: Amsterdam's Pest Asylums and the City's Continual Modernization

Abstract:In Michel Foucault's theory of disciplinary power, an intricate point that architectural historians have largely overlooked is his tracing of modern surveillance and incarceration to the seventeenth century's innovative quarantine practices. Between the 1580s and 1660s, Amsterdam experienced an unprecedented degree of morphological transformation. Pest asylums played a vital but underexamined role that was inherited from the late medieval period. Today, the urban fabric still reflects a cyclical pattern of redefining spatial interiority and exteriority, rooted in governmental interventions for purging contagions, that spans more than a half millennium. This article foregrounds the historical relationship between Amsterdam's physical growth and the planning of sites beyond the fortified municipal border for depositing contagiously ill bodies. The analysis, aimed at decentralizing the Dutch "golden age" perspective, reconnects an early modern urban design feat with both the city's monastic past and its industrial future. Among the case studies is the asylum buildings' only surviving fragment: the lazaret's entry portal structure dating to 1609. As spaces devised for a community to paradoxically eject the "outsiders" that it has fabricated, pest asylums carry a broader significance of elucidating the subjective, arbitrary, and contradictory underpinnings of public health control over time.