Chris Payne at the Architectural League

Cremation Urns, Oregon by Chris Payne

Thursday, June 25, 6:30 p.m.Chris Payne
Chris Payne
Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, A Photographer's Journey
Lecture
The Architectural League
The Urban Center
457 Madison Avenue

RSVP at rsvp@archleague.org.
Admission is free.
Information at info@archleague.org or 212.753.1722 x13.

From the League: For more than half the nation's history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States. Yet in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these massive buildings neglected and abandoned. Photographer Chris Payne will discuss and show images from his six-year research and book project, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals (MIT Press, forthcoming September 2009), which explores the architecture, decay, and presence in the American landscape of state mental hospitals.