A Colonized Medicine Model: The Architectural Explorations of Virginia's Central State Hospital

Architecture plays a powerful role in shaping patient experiences of early “insane asylums” and directly embodies the ideologies of hospital administrators. As the first U.S. psychiatric facility for African Americans, the Central State Hospital in Petersburg, Virginia offers physical evidence for the post-emancipation warehousing and institutionalization of Black citizens. This thesis explores how racialized power structures and the sociomedical beliefs of white administrators impacted the hospital’s architectural character, first by underpinning early American conceptions of insanity and psychiatric institutions, including two Virginia state hospitals. Drawing from site plans, construction contracts, floor plans, and annual reports, this thesis then develops a structural report of major patient-occupied buildings to interrogate them against asylums constructed for white residents. Austere constructions and an administrative pursuit for economic efficiency made for an institution that explored contradicting asylum forms, including a central administrative building, detached wards, colony system, private patient rooms, and dormitories.