The therapeutic landscape: Nature, architecture, and mind in nineteenth-century America

"The Therapeutic Landscape" examines social reform and architecture in nineteenth-century America. Educated Americans maintained that the built environment helped form character in youth and re-form it when disordered in adulthood. They used paradigms of human nature from Scottish Common Sense and Whig moral philosophies to advance a broad program of reform. Their expectation that health and morality would follow changes in the design of houses and gardens, pleasure grounds at asylums, and naturalistic urban parks, emerged from their conception of human nature and its sensitivity to the environment. After introducing this discourse, the dissertation examines particular episodes in its history. Part one treats the role of landscaped grounds in the therapy practiced at the reform generation of mental asylums in the northeastern United States. It continues with an assessment of corporate and public asylum grounds in American landscape history. By 1835 the therapeutic landscape of the asylum was the primary example of naturalistic built landscape in the nation. Explicitly designed to generate positive mental impressions on both patients and public, it anticipated the design elements and social ends of the rural cemeteries and public parks that followed. To elucidate connections between the asylum and park, part two examines the social thought and design philosophies of two founding landscape architects, A. J. Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted. Both extended the language of faculty psychology from its base in moral philosophy to discussions of horticulture, landscape gardening, domestic architecture, and the public park. Both designed asylum grounds. Their campaign for beautiful countrysides, suburbs, and cities was not simply an aesthetic undertaking but one with both moral and political ends. Downing articulated his campaign in the language of faculty psychology, used the English country house and park tradition to serve republican social ends in the United States, and shared the values of American Whig political culture. Olmsted's public parks reflected his contact with the English and asylum landscape traditions, and were calculated to promote mental health and social community. Together these institutions and individuals demonstrate the connections between the psychology and politics of domestic, public, and landscape architecture in nineteenth-century America.