Colin winterbottom saint elizabeths hospital

St. Elizabeth's Architecture Through the Ages

by Nena Perry-Brown

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The National Building Museum debuted a new exhibit this past weekend which explores the establishment and evolution of the St. Elizabeth’s medical campus, a 350-acre site in Congress Heights. The site has been walled off from the rest of the city for over 150 years and has been largely vacant for over a decade. Now, as it is on the verge of a large-scale, comprehensive redevelopment, this exhibit revisits the campus’ history.

While the land where St. Elizabeth’s sits was originally occupied by the Piscatawny tribes, the British government deeded it to John Charman in the 1660s, who dubbed the site “St. Elizabeths”. After changing hands several times, prominent local landowner Thomas Blagden (for whom Blagden Alley is named) acquired 185 acres of the site in the 1840s.

Around the same time, the moral reform movement was going strong and seeking to address societal ills like disease, crime and violence by offering people the opportunity to have a better quality of life. The Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane (AMSAII; later renamed the American Psychiatric Association) was established in 1844 and began issuing recommendations for how to care for the mentally ill, championing fresh air and ample outdoor recreation space.

The federal government took note of this shift and Congress authorized the creation of the “Government Hospital for the Insane” in 1852. The St. Elizabeths site was one of the largest tracts of farmland in the city and was a prime piece of land overlooking DC and both the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers. To secure the site, influential advocate Dorothea Dix persuaded Blagden and

Established in 1855 in Washington, DC, St Elizabeths Hospital was the first federal psychiatric hospital in the US. The 1950s were the peak years of this medical institution, housing 8000 patients. Later in 1990, the hospital’s campus became a National Historic Landmark. However, only the east campus has been operating since 2010. What is highly interesting about the architecture of this “Collegiate Gothic” style building is the renovation method of its Center Building.

The government plans to make the Center Building the new headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security. In order to renovate this old building, JMA Preservation completely hollowed out the interior of the building while only conserving its façade. This type of reconstruction practice is called façadism or façadomy.

The Center Building was the first building on the campus of St Elizabeths Hospital. It was also a significant example of the Kirkbride Plan which was a common design for hospitals during the second half of the 19th century. According to the plan, the superintendent’s office and living space should be at a central point from which the wings of the building would extend. The wings also had to be symmetrical and linear so that each patient’s room could have a clear view outside and avoid overlooking one another’s room.

During the 1940s to 1950s, homosexuality was considered as a mental illness. So, St Elizabeths Hospital was among the institutions that applied electro-shock treatments for turning homosexual individuals into heterosexuals. Thus St. Elizabeths became highly notorious for repressing the LGBTQ+ community.

At the core of most Winterbottom photographs is an interest in vivid textures and composition driven by dynamic tension between subjects in the frame. He loves to make photographs with strong tactile quality – where by looking at the image the viewer may “feel” the texture with their eyes as though they were touching the subject itself. His emphasis on texture is reinforced by his continued use of film to imbue images with a pleasing, lively grain. Winterbottom generally scans his film and makes his own large format prints using archival digital methods. This mix of analog capture and digital output draws on the strengths of traditional and contemporary methods.

Winterbottom's most recent projects build on years of working from historic preservation sites, and especially from scaffolding erected to facilaitate stone repairs.  From his first trip up scaffolding during refurbishments at the Washington Monument in 1998, Winterbottom has watched for local historic preservations projects and made photographs from scaffold at sites including the US Supreme Court, the US Capitol, the National Archives building, St. Elizabeths Hospital, among others.  Those unpaid personal, artistic projects prepared him for work at Washington National Cathedral and the Washington Monument following the 2011 earthquake.  Photographs from those pro

WASHINGTON, DC — In the 19th century, many state-sponsored mental institutions in the United States took an architectural approach to treatment. Under the Kirkbride Plan, proposed by mental health advocate Thomas Story Kirkbride, around 80 asylums were constructed in the mid to late 1800s. Emphasizing fresh air and sunlight in their wings, the institutions’ grand central buildings looked more like lavish estates than the prisons where most patients had been confined in the previous century. In his 1854 On the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements for Hospitals for the Insane, Kirkbride argued, “The proper custody and treatment of the insane are now recognized as among the duties which every State owes its citizens.”

Although they later became overcrowded and plagued by abuse, the Kirkbride institutions represented a turning point toward more humane treatment of mental illness. Unfortunately, their design heritage is now disappearing. From Greystone Hospital, demolished in New Jersey in 2015, to Fergus Falls Regional Treatment Center, which remains in limbo in Minnesota after a proposed redevelopment fell through, these structures struggle for preservation. The challenge is due not only to their colossal, purpose-built size, but also to their complex history, in which some methods of “moral treatment,” like Thorazine, were successful and others, like lobotomies, were cruel. Even Kirkbride himself was into some of the 19th century’s curious fads, such as magic lantern slides showing scary images, which he thought could replace “delusions and morbid feelings, at least for a transitory p