Kirkbride Planned Institutions

Kirkbride Plan hospitals came from a Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride. Early in his career as superintendent of the Philadelphia Hospital for the Insane he wrote a book titled: On the Construction, Organization and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane. Within his book he espoused an architectural design for the hospital, administration of said asylum, placement of the hospital, and how the hospital grounds should be created and maintained.

A Kirkbride plan hospital can also be called a congregate or liner planned hospital. In this plan, the very center of the large building was the administration and branching off to either side of the administration was a set of connected wards. The wards closest to the administration were for the rather calm and manageable patients. Each ward farther away from the administration portion were for more unmanageable patients, culminating with the very far end wards for the most unruly and violent patients.

Yet the slow demise of these type of asylums came about with a combination of the death of Dr. Kirkbride in the late 1880's and more popular treatments for insanity. Asylum designers soon moved away from Kirkbride's model towards more segregated styles of asylum construction.