Quarantine: An Architecture of Waiting, From Public Health to Political Limbo
This is the second installment in our series about migration. To read the introduction to the series, click here.
Our recent Covid-19 pandemic reintroduced many to the concept and the experience of quarantine. Medical quarantine in the present century tends to be individual, digitally monitored through our cell phones and undertaken in reserved corridors of hotel rooms or in our own residences. But historically quarantine was a group activity segregated in purpose-built institutions. Prior to about 1900, an entire ship—cargo, crew, travelers, immigrants—would be quarantined on the basis of one or two active cases of an epidemic disease such as plague, cholera, or yellow fever. The sick were isolated in hospitals, while their contacts—also known as suspects—were quarantined. As such, quarantine was a waiting game, in which inmates sat around for days or weeks hoping they would not develop any symptoms.
All of this waiting required a complex of buildings, from dormitories to hotels, mess halls and dining rooms, hospitals, warehouses, disinfection factories, recreation facilities, and staff housing: this complex was known as a quarantine station or lazaretto. Often sitting empty, the physical plant of the quarantine station itself waited, perpetually ready to host hundreds of passengers, many of them healthy migrants, and to disinfect piles of baggage and cargo. Quarantine stations were the architectural manifestation of an essentially spatial solution to public health. However, as their medical rationale became less important in the early twentieth century, the architecture of quarantine stations seems to have been adopted for the political detention of migrants. A long view of quarantine reveals the geographic and formal continuities between early modern lazarettos for public health and the current archipelago of migrant detention centers. Migrants of all sorts have long been associated with contagion, of conveying disease from abroad; today, even though disease transmission is better understood by medical professionals, the architectural forms and political practices of quarantine continue.
Maritime quarantine, focused on the control of ships entering ports, was invented in response to the Black Death in the late 1300s. Fort-like lazarettos—often extensions of the city walls—spread throughout the Mediterranean in the following centuries. The English prison reformer John Howard visited and stayed in several lazarettos for his 1789 book on the building type. In it he proposed regulations and a rationalized design for an ideal English coast quarantine complex that marked the transition of lazarettos from forts to something more akin to a camp (Figure 1). Warehouses and apartments symmetrically flanked a broad parade ground, what Howard labeled as the “Bowling Green,” thus recognizing the need to keep the quarantined well-entertained. “Many lazarettos are close, and have too much the aspect of prisons,” wrote Howard; instead, they “should have the most cheerful aspect… A spacious and pleasant garden in particular would be convenient as well as salutary.”[1]
Figure 1. Ideal plan for a quarantine station from John Howard, An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe (1789).
During the nineteenth century, the design of quarantine stations oscillated between Howard’s Enlightenment order and an opposite, picturesque approach that saw buildings distributed more organically across the landscape of their otherwise contained sites on islands and peninsulas (Figure 2). By 1900, a global network of stations had appeared, sharing programmatic characteristics and site design strategies. This globalization of quarantine practice and architecture was driven by the great migrations out of Europe, China, and South Asia; by the increased size and speed of shipping that carried these migrants; and of course, by the terrors associated with waves of cholera and the third plague pandemic which began in the 1890s. Since entire groups were quarantined together, certain groups could be targeted for extra suspicion and longer quarantines, or even for mandatory quarantine, such as when Indian pilgrims to Mecca were required to stay at least ten days at infamous Suez Canal stations like Kamaran Island, regardless of the presence of any symptoms aboard their ships (Figure 3).
Figure 2. 1847 plan of the Canadian quarantine station on Grosse-Ile, near Quebec City, which combines the order of the wards in the “Sick Division” with the picturesque ensemble of buildings around the bay in the “Healthy Division.” Source: Library and Archives Canada, H1/340/Grosse Ile/[1850] (NMC: 53839)
Figure 3. “Kamaran harbour and village from the north-east, seen from the air. Quarantine station in foreground.” Source: Naval Intelligence Division [UK], Western Arabia and the Red Sea (1946).
As quarantine globalized, so did the resistance to quarantine from pilgrims, migrants, ships’ captains, and, most influentially, shipping companies and merchants, who criticized its costly delays and inconsistencies among stations. One solution was quarantine conventions and standards, developed through some of the first international conferences ever held, a form of nineteenth-century health diplomacy that ultimately evolved into the WHO. These agreements on the justification and duration of quarantine, and on the facilities to be provided at quarantine stations, helped convince trading nations to continue submitting their shipping and citizens to this imposition. A more medical solution to the inconveniences of quarantine ultimately arrived at the molecular scale. Bacteriology allowed the identification of disease agents, and the confirmation of their presence or absence in individual migrants or other travelers. As the understanding of disease etiology and treatment advanced, it became increasingly illegitimate to quarantine entire groups based on suspicions arising from spatial proximity to the symptomatic.
The individualization of diagnosis, treatment, and threat to public health, paralleled the individualization of migrants in new immigration processes. Group quarantine waned after the turn of the twentieth century, while individual civil and medical inspections (the famous “line inspections”) waxed at places like Ellis Island. At this time, Ellis Island was extended on fill to create space for a hospital to treat the maladies and ships’ fevers common among arrivals; meanwhile, a separate quarantine island was maintained just outside of New York harbor, awaiting epidemic outbreaks. These outbreaks, however, were decreasingly common as sanitarians cleaned up cities and ships and water supplies (Figure 4).
Figure 4. 1910 additions to the United States quarantine station in San Juan. Source: National Archives at College Park, Cartographic Division, RG90.
As the public health rationale for quarantine faded, a new political rationale came into focus. Targeted group quarantines of the late nineteenth century served as models for urban experiments in which entire racialized districts would be designated suspect. Although this practice originated with plague scares, as in the notorious turn-of-the-century quarantines of Honolulu and San Francisco Chinatowns, with the coming of war it quickly transformed into the “quarantine” of enemy aliens, suspect only by race or ethnicity (Figure 5). The Nazis posted signage stating that the Warsaw ghetto was a quarantined area. To quarantine an entire neighborhood proved difficult, however; it was easier to relocate suspects to remote camps. Over the centuries, the usage of the word “quarantine” has always blurred the boundaries between its medical and political meanings. By the start of the twentieth, the different rationales for quarantine also began to share spatial and architectural solutions. There are many similarities between the Japanese internment camps of Manzanar or Tashme and earlier quarantine stations, being ordered architectures of segregation and waiting.
“…as their medical rationale became less important in the early twentieth century, the architecture of quarantine stations seems to have been adopted for the political detention of migrants.”
Figure 5. The quarantined area of Honolulu during the 1900 plague epidemic; the entire area would burn to the ground two weeks later. From the Honolulu Advertiser (Jan. 5, 1900); in a doctor’s scrapbook in the National Library of Medicine (Acc 2002-019).
The typology and premise of these institutions reverts to an immigration context with the displaced persons camps after the Second World War: large numbers of refugees kept in camps, waiting to prove their admissibility to wealthy nations untouched by wartime destruction. By this time, a significant transformation had been effected in the geography of border control. As early as the 1920s, the United States and other immigrant-receiving nations had off-shored immigrant medical inspection, so that sick or suspect migrants never even left their countries of origin. Similarly, in the displaced persons camps of the late 1940s, potential immigrants would sit and wait while governments checked their health and background, and then the latter could pick and choose who they wanted to admit. Health was only one criterion for these immigration decisions; political affiliation and enemy military service also played roles.
After the 1960s, what we might think of as political quarantine had largely eclipsed public health as the principal rationale for the separation and detention of migrants. This mode of quarantine again favored islands, but no longer ones adjacent to busy ports of entry; the new detention sites were geographically, and often, legally remote from national territory. For example, immigration and quarantine buildings were no longer operated in New York harbor; instead, migrants would be held at U.S. military bases on Cuba or Guam. Rather than the North Head quarantine facilities at the entrance to Sydney’s harbor, Asian migrants would be detained on Christmas Island, adjacent to Indonesia. Regrettably, these political quarantines have no necessary endpoint—migrants cannot prove, by lack of symptoms, that they are healthy and therefore admissible. Presumed guilty, by association with a particular ethnic origin, they lack evidence to prove a negative. They sit in limbo, barred from entry to a new country, and also unable to return.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, what some scholars call a global archipelago of detention has formed, mostly on remote islands, replacing the nineteenth-century network of quarantine stations. Although good photographs—and certainly good architectural plans—of the recently reactivated Guantanamo Bay detention camps, or of Australia’s North West Point Detention Centre, are difficult to come by, these sites seem, conceptually and architecturally, little different from Howard’s vision of the modern and hygienic lazaretto. So, while our recent North American experiences with Covid quarantines were largely individual and residential, many classes of migrants still wait in remote, offshore “quarantine stations” around the world, with no release in sight.
Citation
David Monteyne, “Quarantine: An Architecture of Waiting, From Public Health to Political Limbo” PLATFORM, May 5, 2025.
Notes
[1] John Howard, An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe (Warrington: William Eyres, 1789), 23.
