Kirkbride Buildings - Historic Insane Asylum Architecture

I’ve added an Independence State Hospital page where you can see my photos of the Kirkbride and learn a little about its history. The photos are from a visit to Iowa I took back in 2004. As I mentioned in the Clarinda post, the quality of the pictures leaves something to be desired. I think these are even a full step down from the Clarinda photos. (The ones from Cherokee are even worse. I don’t even want to post those, but I probably will just to be as complete as possible. Watch for them in the future…)

Independence is a nice looking Kirkbride. It’s facade isn’t as dramatic as some, but it’s still a pretty impressive sight, set back from the main road, sitting at the end of a long stretch of open lawn. Its relative simplicity in design would probably have pleased Dr. Kirkbride. (more…)

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Filed under: Buildings, Pictures, Web Sites by Ethan
Tags: History, Independence, Independence-State-Hospital, Iowa, pictures

A while ago I came across some photos of Taunton State Hospital on the Library of Congress’ American Memory web site. They’re part of a collection of photos put together by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) to document achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States. Of course I immediately searched for images of other asylums, but didn’t find much of interest in terms of Kirkbrides (except for these photos of Buffalo State Hospital). A few days ago I had a few hours to kill and discovered that there were actually lots of photos of other Kirkbride buildings in the collection. Here’s what I found: (more…)

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Filed under: Buildings, Pictures, Web Sites by Ethan
Tags: American-Memory, architecture, Buffalo-State-Hospital, Cherokee-State-Hospital, Clarinda-State-Hospital, Columbus-State-Hospital, HABS, Independence-State-Hospital, Kalamazoo-State-Hospital, Kankakee-State-Hospital, Library-of-Congress, Mount-Pleasant-State-Hospital