When Dickens visited America, he said there were two things worth seeing, this building and Niagara Falls.

Just as modernist architecture was built with the best intentions to sweep people up from the slums into pristine but ultimately alienating boxes, the ESP was built under the auspices of Quaker reformist ideas.

It was built to scoop prisoners out of squalid places of violent interaction with other prisoners, to clean monastic solitary confinement with a bible, where no interaction with human beings would return people to a pure state.

Instead it turned people insane.

In 12 Monkeys the main protagonist is locked up here and deemed crazy, which he begins to be, unable to communicate an unbelievable story to others.