Architecture

The following text courtesy : Francis R. Kowsky

Withers's (Frederick Clarke Withers) professional reputation came to maturity when he received the commission to design the Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane at Poughkeepsie, an institution founded in 1866 by the New York legislature. In 1867, the building committee, which included General Howland, selected Withers as architect; by June of that year, Dr. Joseph Cleveland, the new superintendent, had approved his plans. Construction began in the spring of 1868, but the huge project was not finished until ten years later.

Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane, portion of South Wing

From the nature of the plan of the Hudson River State Hospital, it is evident that Dr. Cleveland and the "eminent men" who acted as his advisors had instructed Withers to design the building according to the principles established by the American Association of Superintendents. These tenets of asylums construction, which had been formulated in a series of twenty-six "propositions" by Dr. Thomas Kirkbride of the Pennsylvania Hospital, prescribed that narrow pavilions for patients should extend from either side of a central administration building. Joined at right angles to each other, the pavilions contained living quarters and rehabilitations facilities. The extended plan of Withers's Hudson River State Hospital, which "from one end to the other was more than half a mile," was a factor that aroused serious opposition to the completion of the project in the 1870s. It had become clear by then that the cost of construction would be exorbitant.

Generous amenities provided for the patients also made the Poughkeepsie hospital expensive. Not only were "living rooms" and "parlors" dispersed throughout the long stretches of bedrooms, but libraries and billiard rooms were made accessible to the quieter patients housed near the administration building. For exercise and recreation, Withers introduced "Ombra spaces," large, airy galleries on each floor of the transverse service pavilions. Composed in a series of arcaded openings in the otherwise barracks like exterior, the sweeping arches demonstrated the High Victorian Gothic style's potential for grace as well as utility.

Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane, portion of Central Building

Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane, portion of Central Building

The plan of the Hudson River State Hospital followed the dictates of the Association, but Withers's elevations were the first significant example in the United States of the application of High Victorian Gothic design to hospital construction. The disparate elements and loosely knit plan lent themselves to the variety and picturesqueness fundamental to Withers's esthetic sensibility. When the asylum was completed in 1878, however, the hard linearity and lively polychromy of its red brick and white sandstone walls summed up a style rather then introduce one. By then, in the same state, H. H. Richardson had already installed the powerful Romanesque in the repertory of asylum architecture; the brooding towers of his Buffalo State Hospital (1871) set the mood that characterized institutional architecture in the 1880s.

Additional Architecture

Proposed Block for Acute and Violent Cases, F.C. Withers, Building #1, 1889

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