Towards an Architecture of Allyship
In 1959, sociologist Peter Townsend set about visiting older people’s care homes across the UK, which were a relatively new concept at the time. A product of the postwar consensus and burgeoning welfare state in the UK, they were designed to replace the Victorian workhouses where an increasing number of older people of limited means were being housed in harsh conditions. Many care homes were set up in these former workhouses, which were spaces designed to be a hostile deterrent to worklessness. Their architectural assemblages reinforced authoritarian discipline and took many principles from prison design.