{"id":72,"date":"2008-05-13T07:30:11","date_gmt":"2008-05-13T11:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/?p=72"},"modified":"2015-02-13T00:09:58","modified_gmt":"2015-02-13T04:09:58","slug":"is-it-a-kirkbride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/is-it-a-kirkbride","title":{"rendered":"Is it a Kirkbride?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"Asylum Projects\" href=\"http:\/\/www.asylumprojects.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Asylum Projects<\/a> forum member squad546 may have found <a title=\"Austin State Hospital\" href=\"http:\/\/asylumprojects.org\/forum\/viewtopic.php?t=144\" target=\"_blank\">yet another Kirkbride<\/a>, but then again maybe not. This one&#8217;s in Austin, Texas and it&#8217;s a bit of a question mark. If you look at the satellite photo below (or better yet the aerials on the AP forum) you can see what I mean.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"484\" height=\"300\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" marginheight=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/maps.google.com\/maps?f=q&amp;hl=en&amp;geocode=&amp;q=4110+Guadalupe+St,+austin,+texas&amp;sll=37.0665,-95.678068&amp;sspn=48.822589,72.246094&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;t=h&amp;layer=c&amp;cbll=30.309554,-97.738726&amp;panoid=BhoPDsTWa5gSmNh2xk5pzg&amp;s=AARTsJr67rAHa2Ri_bkXJiwCeqYJ4FmR9Q&amp;ll=30.310487,-97.738915&amp;spn=0.00081,0.00114&amp;z=18&amp;output=embed\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Pictured is the original Austin State Hospital building, constructed in the mid 1850s. After finding some old images of the place online (<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.ci.austin.tx.us\/library\/ahc\/hydepark\/images\/PICA04382lg.jpg\" title=\"Austin State Hospital\">Picture 1<\/a>, <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/docsouth.unc.edu\/nc\/king\/king128a.jpg\" title=\"Austin State Hospital\">Picture 2<\/a>) my assumption is that the building was probably planned as a Kirkbride, but for whatever reason it either wasn&#8217;t completed or it was decided from the start that there&#8217;d only be one wing. The historical pictures show it looking pretty much the same as it does now, except maybe the shorter &#8220;wing&#8221; and front portico were added some time after initial construction. I could be wrong, but I think it&#8217;s a solid hypothesis. More research will reveal if it matches the facts.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>This got me to thinking though about a question that pops up every now and then: how do you tell if a building is a Kirkbride? There are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/buildings\/\" title=\"Kirkbride Asylums\"\">lots of examples<\/a> where the it&#8217;s pretty obvious, but there are a handful of other asylum buildings which fall into a gray area. They look sort of like a Kirkbride, but not quite. In most cases they&#8217;re a collection of separate buildings loosely joined together so that the arrangement approximates a Kirkbride layout (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ogdensburg.info\/webphotos\/nthsfacnrth.jpg\" title=\"Saint Lawrence State Hospital\" target=\"_blank\">St. Lawrence State Hospital<\/a> in New York is a good example.) In other cases, they&#8217;re relatively small buildings without segmented wings. They were probably planned as Kirkbrides with the notion that sections would be added later as necessary, but the need never arose. And then there are similar asylums built before the Kirkbride era which have a central admin with straight, flanking wings. But they can&#8217;t be called Kirkbrides because the Kirkbride plan didn&#8217;t even exist when the building was made.<\/p>\n<p>So how do you tell if it&#8217;s a Kirkbride or if it&#8217;s just Kirkbride-like? It&#8217;s pretty safe to say that a building has to meet two basic criteria to be called a genuine Kirkbride, if there is such a thing.<\/p>\n<p>1) The building was constructed specifically as a psychiatric hospital<br \/>\n2) The building was built according to Dr. Kirkbride&#8217;s recommendations for hospital design<\/p>\n<p>That seems pretty straightforward, but if you examine the second requirement closely you might see there&#8217;s a bit of a problem. Dr. Kirkbride made recommendations about a wide range of elements related to hospital design &#8212; not just the shape and layout, but how an asylum building should be <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/about\/cogahi\/index.html?c=50\">ventilated and heated<\/a>, where the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/about\/cogahi\/index.html?c=47\">kitchen should be placed<\/a>, what the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/about\/cogahi\/index.html?c=29\">walls should be made of<\/a>, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/about\/cogahi\/index.html?c=15\">amount of water required on a daily basis<\/a>, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/about\/cogahi\/index.html?c=48\">necessity of dumb waiters<\/a>, and on and on. If a hospital was built following almost every one of Dr. Kirkbride&#8217;s recommendations, but the wings aren&#8217;t segmented and arranged <em>en echelon<\/em>, is it a Kirkbride or not? I&#8217;m not really sure to be honest. I think to answer one way or the other requires either an impossibly strict definition, or one that&#8217;s sort of flexible.<\/p>\n<p>If you wanted to, you could probably come up with a formula. Determine how many of Kirkbride&#8217;s principles a hospital embodied, weigh certain items according to the level of importance or uniqueness (for example, segmented wings are worth 40 points, dumbwaiters 0.25 points), and then arrive at a score by which you could measure a building&#8217;s &#8220;Kirkbride-ness&#8221;. If it&#8217;s above 70, you&#8217;ve got a certifiable Kirkbride.<\/p>\n<p>I like to keep things simple though. If a building was built to house the mentally ill with the purpose of curing them, and it has a central administration section with wings comprised of at least one L-shaped segment each*, then it&#8217;s a Kirkbride. There are probably a few people who wouldn&#8217;t agree, but I personally wouldn&#8217;t even bother to argue about it.<\/p>\n<p>I guess what I&#8217;m basically trying to say is that the definition of a Kirkbride building is fuzzy. I think it might have to do with the fact that the term itself is a little artificial. Kirkbride buildings are probably more correctly referred to as &#8220;linear plan hospitals&#8221;. But that term doesn&#8217;t really communicate the more personal history of these places and how they came to be. The Kirkbride tag also serves to differentiate a subset of linear plan asylums that are different than the ones that preceded them.<\/p>\n<p>And as a final thought, it&#8217;s interesting to think that Dr. Kirkbride probably wouldn&#8217;t even want his name associated with some of the later behemoths like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/buildings\/greystonepark\/\" title=\"Greystone Park State Hospital\">Greystone<\/a> even though it&#8217;s obviously what we call a Kirkbride building. Since he was opposed to the idea of an asylum housing more than a couple hundred patients at a time, I&#8217;m sure he wouldn&#8217;t have called Greystone a Kirkbride. Actually, I&#8217;m sure he wouldn&#8217;t have called any building a Kirkbride, but you know what I mean.<\/p>\n<p><small>* There are, of course, exceptions like Buffalo State Hospital which has wings made up of pavilions joined by enclosed hallways.<\/small> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Asylum Projects forum member squad546 may have found yet another Kirkbride, but then again maybe not. This one&#8217;s in Austin, Texas and it&#8217;s a bit of a question mark. If you look at the satellite photo below (or better yet the aerials on the AP forum) you can see what I mean. Pictured is the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,32],"tags":[73],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-web-sites","tag-kirkbride"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1318,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions\/1318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}