American Architecture: Architectural Ruins Designed to Heal

Between 1848 and 1890, dozens of grand mental asylums were built around the United States under the Kirkbride Plan, designed by Thomas Story Kirkbride. An architecture of fresh air and sunlight offered a very different curative approach from the crowded facilities that characterized earlier mental health treatment facilities. Overcrowding and funding cuts brought horrid conditions to these spaces during the 20th century. These Victorian structures are disappearing, and many believe they’re taking a voiceless history with them. According to a report from Preservationworks (which last month focused on Kirkbride preservation at its conference), there were once over 70 of these asylums; now only 15 remain.

The Disappearing American Architecture with a Shameful Past

Prior to the mid-1800s, treatment of the mentally ill often regarded a spectrum of illnesses as dangerous and threatening. The most disadvantaged mentally ill wound up in publicly funded almshouses, as there were no state-funded psychiatric institutions at the time, where they received no treatment and lived in squalid conditions. The lack of specialized care meant that 18th-century “lunatics” often eventually wound up in prisons or chains as the only solution to perceived danger to themselves and society.

A favorite subject within this field is the American insane asylum, whose tragic remains carry echoes of the unsavory history of mental illness treatment in the United States. These state-funded asylums were intensely overcrowded and often housed patients in nightmarish conditions in the 20th century. Beginning in 1955, with the introduction of the antipsychotic drug Thorazine, these institutions were closed in large numbers, never to be reopened. Now, these closed but undemolished asylums dot the country.

In his recent photobook Abandoned Asylums, Photographer Matt Van der Velde depicts this earlier period of asylum architecture, when the institutions were built in the belief that the built environment has the power to cure.

From the Factory Floor

Leaving the floor for a client back east…

by ADG Lighting