Thomas Stedman Whitwell (1784–1840) was an English architect and civil engineer, best known for his collaboration with Robert Owen on an unrealised design for a secular communal utopia at New Harmony, Indiana, USA.
Owen had previously provided workers at his cotton mills with a pioneering model company town, New Lanark, Scotland, intended to raise the standard of living and education of his employees.
[9] The engraving of Whitwell's famous perspective of the proposed town was entitled "DESIGN for a Community of 2,000 Persons Founded upon a Principle Commended by Plato, Lord Bacon and Sir Thomas More".
Rapp's emphasis on the spiritual experience of nature had led to the inclusion of a labyrinth with a temple in the middle within Harmonie, and other Rappite towns such as Economy, Pennsylvania.
[12] Whitwell's design for New Harmony also features multiple paths along which residents could meander, but the temple was replaced by a secular "Conservatory, of about one hundred feet in diameter, for the reception and cultivation of exotics".
One, entitled On Warming and Ventilating Houses and Buildings By Means of Large Volumes of Attempered Air, was published in 1834, but another, intriguingly titled Architectural Absurdities, is now lost.
[16] Whitwell's reputation as an architect has not withstood the test of time, and his texts have either been lost or had little or no influence, but his design for New Harmony has been revisited as one of the culminations of early 19th-century Utopian experimentation in the United States.