The Quaker idea, by contrast, was more aimed at the mind,
> that the offender should be set apart from society to silently meditate
on
> his or her sins, without any contact with other prisoners or the outside
> world.  It was, to quote from the book I bought there, "a monastary for
> men who do not choose to be monks."

I believe that this "joint" was one of the few ever built under the
influence of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon design(1790), as was also the
maximum security prison at Joliet Ill. Interestingly, no prison was ever
constructed to Bentham's scheme in England, nor did the Benthamite idea of
isolation and reflection on one's deeds ever get put into practice as a
regular form of penal organization there (Northern Ireland, more recently,
is another story), while it became quite common here.

Anyone else visiting Philadelphia who is not familiar with the city might
also want to look at Furness' Academy of Art, arguably the finest
Romanesque Revival structure in the country, his surviving railroad
stations on the Mainline, and (here we go again Larry) Louis Kahn's
Richards Lab at Penn, his first major commission, and, dare I say, a
building that had a profound influence in moving the minds of his
contemporaries away from the paradigm of the International Style. Its best
not to point out here that the building didn't "work" very well, and until
renovations were made, the presence of the structure was somewhat
diminished by festoons of aluminum foil that the scientists hung in their
windows in an effort to keep their chambers at a livable temperature.

That's for starters, without even touching on Phillie's rich collection of
surviving Colonial and Federal buildings.

Bruce