The architecture of quarantine: A historic exploration of the migrant antidote architecture

Disease and isolation strategies to curb pandemic transmissions of human migration have been employed on travel routes for a millennia. Detached spaces for temporal quarantine were largely antiquated as a historical architectural antidote of physical separation between immigration and inhabitant. This essay questions how antidote architecture has previously affected migration and how these findings are applied as contemporary quarantine measures at ports of travel. Historically architectural characteristics of sequestered infrastructure proliferated prominent trade routes of the Old World, facilitating the moderation of economic globalisation affecting immigration of the migrant across trade, employment and settlement into colonisation. The historical research critiques of antidote architecture suggest immigration laws imposed on human migration across transpacific routes are reflective of emerging localised state authority, deployed through spatial planning and infrastructure. Moreover, these texts indicate a paradigm of humanistic freedom to both protect and segregate geo-political migration across conflicting idioms in seeking to control spread of infectious disease. Evidently, past academic research reveals economic globalisation impacts of migration quarantine, largely suspending the migrant workforce and commerce contributions to a global economy. With this understanding, this essay investigates antidote architecture introduced at historic ports of globalised migration recognising quarantine architecture as patterns of human movement. Largely categorised as self-contained satellites, this essay investigates the underlying tension relevant to the connections of quarantine stations employed as an antidote to disease and contemporary immigration detention facilities where non-criminal populations are held in custody en masse. In reference to a twenty-first century application, regenerative principles of antidote architecture are reconsidered across modern typologies of migration referencing the continued historical convergence of quarantined sites.