'Built for health': American architecture and the healthy house, 1850--1930

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, public understanding of disease changed dramatically. Before the development of scientific ideas about germ transmission, disease was associated with spaces, character and habits. In this period, domestic architecture functioned as a spatial version of preventive medicine by protecting its inhabitants from dangerous "miasma" and other forms of illness. Gradually, as the American public discarded spatial theories of disease, bacteriology was generally accepted as the medical authority of modernity. Yet, as this dissertation demonstrates, professional medicine never gained a hegemonic role over the concept of individual wellness, and the issue of health never entirely left home. Health concerns continued to shape the design of the single-family house as the pursuit of physical perfection became an increasingly important part of American identity. The tension between medical advancements and traditional domestic practices sparked innovation in architecture as new ideas about health and older ideas about the significance of the home collided in living rooms, kitchens and gardens.; "Built for Health" is structured as a series of case studies, using houses selected to reflect the diversity of American thinking about both health and home. The first chapter, "Pattern Book Plans for Healthy Homes" probes the construction of an ideal body behind Orson Squire Fowler's Home for All (1848) and Catharine Beecher's American Woman's Home (1869), arguing that both authors presented architectural solutions to the Solan, p. 2 reproductive health crisis that they perceived among the native-born middle class. Chapter Two, "Testing a Spatial Cure at Saranac Lake," examines the early buildings of the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium (1884--1954), the first American medical facility dedicated to the treatment of tuberculosis. At the Adirondack Sanitarium, Dr. Edward Trudeau employed home-like cottages as a form of spatial therapy while simultaneously pursuing chemotherapeutic research in his adjacent laboratory. The third chapter of the dissertation proposes that ideas about the therapeutic value of handcraft infused the spread of arts and crafts architecture in San Francisco, focusing on Bernard Maybeck's Keeler House (1895). The final case study, Richard Neutra's Lovell Health House (1929), brings an architectural icon into the debate about health and houses, by suggesting that modern architecture does not always translate into the kind of "modern medicine" that one might predict. The Lovell Health House was built as an advertisement for naturopathic healing, a drugless health regime which Dr. Philip Lovell, the client of the house, considered to be the acme of modernity. The Lovell Health House, like all of the case studies in this dissertation, demonstrates the previously-overlooked significance of the American house as a site of debate about the influence of architecture upon the human body.