'Le choix du style': neo-Tudor prison gatehouses and their reception in 19th-century Belgium

In the wake of penitentiary reform in the Western world during the 19th century, a network of cellular prisons was established by the Belgian state throughout the country in order to facilitate the new cellular regime imposed on detainees. Between 1850 and 1919, almost thirty prisons were built with a star-shaped structure of cell wings, radially arranged around a central observation point. The gatehouse, being the only visible element of the cellular prison that moreover was not dictated by functionality, often served as a showpiece for the architect’s artistic – hence, stylistic - creativity. Although the typology of the cellular prison (inspired by model prisons in the US and UK) was radically modern, Belgian architects favored a neo-gothic idiom to express the penal purpose of the prison and emphasize the function of confinement. Battlements, embrasures, machicolations and lookouts were common elements of prisons and prison gatehouses such as Brussels (1850), Leuven Centraal (1860) and Saint-Gilles (1885). Joseph Jonas Dumont, Belgium’s most important prison architect, preferred the neo-Tudor style, which he had become acquainted with on his trips to Great Britain to study prison architecture. This paper discusses the divergent contemporary reception of Dumont’s stylistic choices