Kirkbride Buildings - Historic Insane Asylum Architecture

Sorry for the blatant self-promotion, but I think some of you regular readers will be interested in this. I’ve started another web site along similar lines to this one, although it doesn’t have anything to do with asylums. It’s a collection of photos and history of buildings in the northeastern United States.

www.nearchitecture.com

In studying Kirkbrides for so long, I’ve also gained appreciation for other buildings too. Even though they don’t have the same allure as the old insane asylums, other buildings can still be beautiful and intriguing. While traveling to visit Kirkbrides, I’ve come across a few other places worth taking pictures of. I wasn’t planning this new site when I took the photos though so the galleries are currently a bit uneven. But at least it’s a better starting off point than the original KirkbrideBuildings.com! (I still can’t believe I put that online. You’ve come a long way, baby…) (more…)

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…)

For those of you in New England: Carla Yanni, author of The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States, will be giving a lecture at the Lamar Soutter Library in Worcester, Massachusetts on March 12, 5:00PM-7:00PM. The lecture is open to the public. Dr. Yanni will also be signing her book, which is a really good read if you’re at all interested in asylum history.

The book is generously illustrated with old photos, drawings, and architectural plans. It also engagingly describes the familiar arc of the asylum system’s rise and fall, while revealing a few nuggets of data not readily available elsewhere. Most importantly though, the peculiar relationship between architecture and early mental healthcare is analyzed and presented here much more thoroughly than in most other books on asylum history. You really get a strong sense of why Dr. Kirkbride and his peers believed in the power of their buildings.

In connection with a broader overview of American asylums, Dr. Yanni also presents closer studies of the Kirkbride asylums at Trenton, New Jersey; Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Buffalo, New York; Poughkeepsie, New York; Morristown, New Jersey; and Saint Elizabeths in Washington, DC. There are also a couple of intriguing, first-hand accounts from nineteenth-century asylum patients. It’s definitely worth getting your hands on a copy.

Although it looks like they’ve been around for a bit, this is news to me: the Richardson Center Corporation has a web site where you can learn about their mission to preserve the Richardson Complex and its surrounding grounds.

The most exciting thing (apart from the fact that they’re trying to save the building) is the creation of an Architecture and Visitor Center in the central part of the Kirkbride. They say its creation is already underway, but I don’t know if that means they’ve actually started moving in yet. Regardless, it seems likely that in the near future it’ll be possible for people to go inside the building. So that’s good news.