Kirkbride Buildings - Insane Asylums

[Robbie]

I'm going to be featuring an insane asylum soon in one of my games. Or at least using a similar concept but with a more medieval flare to it. So I did a little research and found out there's a LOT of information and floorplans on these amazing buildings, some of which still stand.

The Kirkbride concept (http://www.kirkbridebuildings.com/index.html) was a belief that using a certain style of building and decorum would lend to the healthy recovery or curing of mentally ill patients along with the barbaric medical treatments utilized in those days. While not particularly interested in the medical treatments, I'm definitely interested in the buildings and floorplans.

The most useful resource I found was an urbex'er in the uk who has explored many of the uk asylums and presents maps, but if you look through the previous link and this following one you'll find some pretty amazing layouts.

http://www.simoncornwell.com/urbex/frames.htm

I'm attaching some of the more amazing ones for a glance.

You can also find many more by scrounging around here: http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~asylums/index.html