Asylum ($30) is a visual dairy which documents the decay of state mental hospitals throughout the United States. For more than half history of our nation, mental hospitals were a disturbing feature of the landscape of America. Between the middle of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, more than 250 institutions were built across the U.S and by 1948 there were over half a million patients classed as insane housed within their walls. The blueprints for them were set by Thomas Story Kirkbride, the Pennsylvania hospital superintendent. These consisted of a central administration building to be symmetrically flanked by pavilions and encircled by lavish grounds offering pastoral vistas. This vision disappeared in the second half of the century through the introduction of a shift in policy and psychotropic drugs and now many of these huge, beautiful buildings, and those who lived in them, are abandoned and neglected.
