Thomas Stedman Whitwell (1784–1840) was an English architect, best known for his collaboration with Robert Owen in an unrealised design for a secular communal utopia at New Harmony, Indiana, USA.
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Thomas Stedman Whitwell was born in 1784 in Coventry, England. He moved to London in his early twenties, evidenced in records of having exhibited at the Royal Academy. In 1811, he was employed at the Architects’ Office at the London Docks.[1]
After gaining some experience at the London Docks, Whitwell returned to Coventry where he designed a modest number of built works both there and in Birmingham, few of which survive to this day.[2] His last completed commission in England was for the Brunswick Theatre in London’s Whitechapel district. Mortalities were suffered after the roof trusses, overloaded with theatre equipment, collapsed days after its opening.[3]
Perhaps due to interest in his exhibition of an unbuilt plan for an ideal community named ‘Southville’ at Leamington Spa,[4] Whitwell became involved in the design for a utopian community at a site then named Harmonie (or New Harmony, Indiana) in Indiana, United States, collaborating with early social reformer and cotton mill owner Robert Owen.
Owen had previously provided workers at his cotton mills with a pioneering model Company Town at New Lanark, Scotland intended to raise the standard of living and education of his employees.[5] Inspired by stories of the utopian self-sufficient communities, such as the Shakers, springing up in the United States, Owen proposed to create a town unconstrained by the economic conditions and religious influences in the United Kingdom.[6]
Owen purchased the land and town of Harmonie in Indiana from George Rapp and the Rappites, a separatist religious community. The Rappites had built a substantial and successful town on the site but sold it to Owen so they could relocate to an area with more opportunities for trade.[7]
Owen had intentions to redesign the town as a self-sufficient secular community complete with factories, pleasure gardens, a gymnasium and educational facilities. Whitwell devised an ordered quadrangle layout for the proposed town, ‘thirty-three acres; that of the enclosed quadrangle twenty-two acres, nearly three times as large as Russell Square, London.’[8] Communal residences were located on the periphery, acting as a boundary wall, and all facilities were to be placed symmetrically within. Whitwell wrote of careful consideration of the positioning of the building massing to provide ample light and air to all residents.[9] The engraving of Whitwell’s famous perspective of the proposed town was entitled ‘DESIGN for a Community of 2000 persons founded upon a Principle Commended by Plato, Lord Bacon and Sir Thomas More.’[10]
The direct influence of Sir Thomas More’s book Utopia (published in 1516) upon Whitwell’s design was obvious. The set-out of long communal dwellings of the New Harmony design complement More’s portrayal of the fictional capital of Utopia, Aircastle. There, houses built as long terraces contained back doors opening onto shared gardens, features employed in New Harmony.[11] The description of the citizens of Utopia includes that they only needed to work six hours a day thanks to the efficiency and shared property within the towns.[12] This seems to have made its mark in Whitwell’s supremely orderly design.
While New Harmony was intended to be a secular community, the influence of Rapp’s religious doctrine appears to have been an influence on Whitwell’s design. Rapp’s emphasis on the spiritual experience of nature had led to a labyrinth with a temple in the middle included within Harmonie, and other Rappite towns such as Economy, Pennsylvania. All included this vital feature.[13] Whitwell’s design for New Harmony also features multiple paths along which to meander, however the temple was replaced with a secularised ‘Conservatory, of about one hundred feet in diameter, for the reception and cultivation of exotics.’[14]
Whitwell spent some time in New Harmony around 1825-26. However, he returned to England, disillusioned, when the construction of the new town proved financially unviable.[15]
Whitwell’s short stay at New Harmony allowed him to publish in the New Harmony Gazette a proposal for a new system of town naming according to latitude and longitude degrees, allowing travellers to immediately understand their location according to place names.[16]
Upon his return to England Whitwell spent the last part of his life composing theoretical works. One entitled On warming and ventilating houses and buildings by means of large volumes of attempered air, was published in 1834. Another intriguingly titled manuscript, Architectural Absurdities, is now lost.[17]
While Whitwell’s reputation as an architect has not withstood the test of time, and his texts have either been lost or uninfluential, his design for New Harmony has constantly been revisited as one of the culminations of early 19th Century Utopian experimentation in the United States. The proliferation of new communities with emphasis on either religious or secular collective living reached its high point as Whitwell was producing his design for New Harmony. However, none displayed such a graphic interpretation of their own philosophies as Whitwell’s famous perspective. One of the key features of Whitwell’s design, the botanic garden in the centre with equal views and access from every dwelling, has been echoed in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City values and carried out in countless permutations worldwide. One example is Milleara Estate in Avondale Heights, Victoria, Australia, designed by Walter Burley Griffin.
Much of the influence of Whitwell’s New Harmony design can be credited to Owen, who toured both the United States and the United Kingdom promoting the plan, even persuading American President John Quincy Adams to keep a model of it in his office for a period of time.[18] Owen continued to exhibit and publish it after Whitwell’s death in a brochure named ‘Plan for a Model Community’, a publication still widely available. Its success beyond New Harmony into an illustration for early 19th century experiments in communal utopian living has likely rested in the design’s stand-alone and symbolic appeal.