Title: The Architecture of Madness
Subtitle: Insane Asylums in the United States
Description: Elaborately conceived, grandly constructed insane asylums—ranging in appearance from classical temples to Gothic castles—were once a common sight looming on the outskirts of American towns and cities. Many of these buildings were razed long ago, and those that remain stand as grim reminders of an often cruel system. For much of the nineteenth century, however, these asylums epitomized the widely held belief among doctors and social reformers that insanity was a curable disease and that environment—architecture in particular—was the most effective means of treatment.

In The Architecture of Madness, Carla Yanni tells a compelling story of therapeutic design, from America’s earliest purpose—built institutions for the insane to the asylum construction frenzy in the second half of the century. At the center of Yanni’s inquiry is Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, a Pennsylvania-born Quaker, who in the 1840s devised a novel way to house the mentally diseased that emphasized segregation by severity of illness, ease of treatment and surveillance, and ventilation. After the Civil War, American architects designed Kirkbride-plan hospitals across the country.

Before the end of the century, interest in the Kirkbride plan had begun to decline. Many of the asylums had deteriorated into human warehouses, strengthening arguments against the monolithic structures advocated by Kirkbride. At the same time, the medical profession began embracing a more neurological approach to mental disease that considered architecture as largely irrelevant to its treatment.
Subjects: Asylums, Design and construction, History, Hospital architecture, Psychiatric hospitals, Almshouse, Poorhouse, Psychiatry, Mental Health Care, Mental Illness, Autism, Psychology, Gothic Architecture, Greek Revival Architecture, Urban Planning, building, health care history, medical history, medicine, standards of care, Kirkbride Plan, African American health care, integration, race relations, civil rights, human rights, confinement, institutionalization, deinstitutionalization, History, 19th Century, History, 20th Century, Hospital Design and Construction
Places: United States, Eastern State Penitentiary, Utica (New York), Buffalo (New York), Buffalo State Hospital, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, Illinois, New Jersey, California, London (England), Glasgow (Scotland), England, Scotland, Auburn (New York), Camarillo (California), Columbia (South Carolina), Poughkeepsie (New York), Hartford (Connecticut), Connecticut, Peoria (Illinois), Jacksonville (Illinois), Trenton (New Jersey)
People: Thomas S. Kirkbride, Frederick Law Olmsted, H.H. Richardson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Nellie Bly, Charles Dickens (1812-1870), William Battie, Henry C. Burdett, John S. Butler, Horace Buttolph, D. Tilden Brown, Harold Cooledge, John Conolly, Richard Dewey, Dorothea Dix, Francis Delilez, Ellen Dwyer, Earle Pliny, William Dean Fairless, Jürgen Habermas (1929-), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), John E. Galt, John P. Gray, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Gilpin, Lawrence Goodheart, Isaac Holden, John Haviland, Ebenezer Haskell, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Helen Horowitz, Robert Hooke, John Howard, Benjamin Latrobe, R.D. Laing, Francis Kowsky, Jeanne Kisacky, Joseph Melling, Bill Forsythe, Ro
Time periods: Victorian Era, 1950s, 1990s, 1980s