The Cottage Plan

The Cottage Plan

This stop is a flat panel with images and text lit from behind that explains what the Cottage Plan style of hospital design was.  

As the popularity of the Kirkbride Plan began to dwindle, the Cottage Plan gained momentum as the new way to design hospitals for the mentally ill, and it lasted through the mid-1900s. 

Early Cottage Plan buildings retained many of the ornate appearances and treatment methods of the Kirkbride Plan era. Buildings were typically no more than two stories tall, and built of fireproof materials such as brick, stone, and slate. They were purpose built for a single type of patient, typically with two sets of buildings, one for each gender.  Hospital campuses resembled that of a college, with large, well-manicured lawns, flower beds, trees, fountains, and other decorative items. Typically, an administration building was located at the front of the campus, and patient buildings would encircle the campus, with communal buildings such as a kitchen, chapel, or auditorium in the center. Power plants, laundry facilities, and farms were often located to the rear of the campus.

The cottages varied in size, with buildings that accommodated six to a dozen patients to larger ones which housed 20 or more.  The cottages became places where the patients were employed at farming, gardening or shop industries.  The cost of construction was less when compared with Kirkbride Plan building construction.  This approach was also viewed as more homelike and convenient for administration while permitting future expansion.

From 1920 through the 1940s, hospitals had become less places of healing and more places to warehouse society’s unwanted, and hospital construction caught up with the trend. Campuses continued to use the Cottage Plan, but constructed larger and more utilitarian buildings.  These new buildings often made extensive use of dormitories rather than individual patient rooms and housed hundreds of patients in a single building. Care for the mentally ill at this time period was minimal, while overcrowding became rampant; the drab, uniform, and institutional appearance of buildings constructed at this time reflects these circumstances.

Hospitals built starting in 1950 are often referred to as the Post Drug Cottage Plan (Thorazine was introduced in 1950).  During this time period, hospitals tended to go back to smaller cottage type buildings or modest single buildings. Hospital design again began to consider the effect of architecture on mental health, and many ideas related to this, originally championed by Dr. Kirkbride 100 years ago, began to be given credence. Buildings built at this time were made to be more decorative and interesting compared to the unadorned and utilitarian structures which had dominated the previous 30 years. Individual patient rooms began to replace the dormitories. Hospital populations were on the decline due to new medicines being developed to treat mental illness. This population decline accelerated as the movement to "deinstitutionalize" mental healthcare in favor of community-based care went into effect.