Angels in the Architecture is a photographic study of this institution's one-hundred-year history. Heidi Johnson's photographs of the building today are juxtaposed with rare images from private collections and state archives. The photographs are augmented by powerful first-hand accounts of former staff members and patients that reveal both sad realities and surprising acts of kindness.

The book takes readers on a virtual walking tour of a nineteenth-century asylum. Of particular interest is the hospital's Building 50, a four-block-long structure topped by twelve castlelike spires that is now on the National Registry of Historic Places and is also Save America's Treasures candidate.

Kirkbride's architecture conveyed a belief in the healing influence of landscape shared by poets and artists of the nineteenth century. Johnson has captured Kirkbride's spirit of compassion -- of angels in the architecture -- in a book that conveys the human element of mental illness with beauty and integrity.