Australian asylum architecture through German eyes: Kew, Melbourne, 1867

Kew Asylum in Melbourne, which by the 1890s was the largest in Australia, was planned in the 1850s, built on a prominent site in the 1860s, and opened in the early 1870s with accommodation for over 500 patients. Costing nearly 200,000 pounds sterling and visible for miles, it was hailed by some as a 'palace.' Yet, in terms of international asylum architecture, the building was already out-of-date when it received its first patients in 1871; within a few years it was being labelled 'backward.' Recently an article, published in a Berlin medical journal in 1867, has come to light that contains notes and a plan supplied by Kew's German architect. This enables us to study more closely the thinking behind the design of the asylum, the overseas models on which it was based and why it attracted so much criticism so quickly. Kew's problems reflect many of the fundamental shortcomings of mid-nineteenth-century asylum architecture in Australia and elsewhere.