The Architectures of Childhood

Children, Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Postwar England

Roy Kozlovsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317044642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Between 1935 and 1959, the architecture of childhood was at the centre of architectural discourse in a way that is unique in architectural history. Some of the seminal projects of the period, such as the Secondary Modern School at Hunstanton by Peter and Alison Smithson, Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation at Marseilles, or Aldo van Eyck's playgrounds and orphanage, were designed for children; At CIAM, architects utilized photographs of children to present their visions for reconstruction. The unprecedented visibility of the child to architectural discourse during the period of reconstruction is the starting point for this interdisciplinary study of modern architecture under welfare state patronage. Focusing mainly on England, this book examines a series of innovative buildings and environments developed for children, such as the adventure playground, the Hertfordshire school, the reformed children hospital, Brutalist housing estates, and New Towns. It studies the methods employed by architects, child experts and policy makers to survey, assess and administer the physiological, emotional and developmental needs of the 'user', the child. It identifies the new aesthetic and spatial order permeating the environments of childhood, based on endowing children with the agency and autonomy to create a self-regulating social order out of their own free will, while rendering their interiority and sociability observable and governable. By inserting the architectural object within a broader social and political context, The Architectures of Childhood situates post-war architecture within the welfare state's project of governing the self, which most intensively targeted the citizen in the making, the children. Yet the emphasis on the utilization of architecture as an instrument of power does not reduce it into a mere document of social policy, as the author uncovers the surplus of meaning and richness of experience invested in these environments at the historical mom

1
The Peckham Experiment: Functionalism and Subjectivity

The environment that first embodies the pragmatist conception of architecture as an ongoing process designed to alter the subjectivity of its occupants by defining them as active, participatory agents is also one of the starting points of modern architecture in England: the Pioneer Health Centre at Peckham. This unique establishment was founded by the biologists Dr. G. Scott Williamson and Innes H. Pearse as an experimental institution for the study and administration of preventive health for families in a communal framework. It did not provide curative services, as the sick were referred to clinics or hospitals for treatment. Its purpose was primarily diagnostic and preventive. Members of the Centre—exclusively families with children—were offered periodic free medical examinations, following the reasoning that it is best to treat a disorder at an early stage before it becomes pathological. Secondly, the Centre provided physical, nutritional, educational and social activities to cultivate the health of its members, following the definition of health as a positive quality rather than as the absence of disease. The institution focused on the rearing of children as the most important activity of the family, in accordance with the developmental, process oriented biology of its founders. In addition, it experimented with ways of disseminating expert medical knowledge to laypeople in order to influence their personal conduct and their choices regarding their health. Preceded by a pilot study that took place in a rented property at Peckham between 1926 and 1929, the Centre was opened in 1935 in a purposely built edifice designed by the engineer Sir Owen Williams. Retrospective historical accounts recognize Williams as a precursor of the New Brutalism: Peckham’s exposed concrete structure was considered by Kenneth Frampton (2003) as one precursor of the movement, while Banham (1966) assigned this role to another building by Williams, the Boots Packed Wets Factory at Beeston (1930–32). The Centre’s formative influence on the development of the modern movement in England is often attributed to those aspects of the building that correspond with the formal, technological or material traits associated with modern architecture: it was the first civic building in England to feature a flat-slab concrete construction; the façade showcased its exposed, “fit to purpose” concrete structure that was “objectively” determined by computation of structural loads; and its interior had an open plan with flexible glass partitions that gave it an image of lightness and transparency. J. M. Richards’s influential 1935 piece in the Architectural Review constituted Peckham as an exemplary modernist building that represented the movement’s ideals of practicality, simplicity and lightness. Richards was in a unique position to evaluate the building, as he had been employed, on separate occasions, by both the engineer and the scientists. Richards celebrated the “accuracy” and “exactness” of the building’s design in reflecting the innovative aims of the scientist, which he contrasted with the historicism and subjectivism of traditional architectural culture. It follows that he was critical of those aspects of the building that did not correspond with design-centered definitions of functionalism, such as its symmetry, which Richards considered as “the last symptom to survive of the pre-scientific days of design by formal preconception.” Another difficulty was posed by the building’s façade: its bay windows and flower boxes were criticized as “a compromise with the picturesque,” since the addition of signifiers of domesticity to the façade negated the “grace that comes from a minimum structural solidity.” Richard censored those aspects of the building that deviated from the formal definition of functionalism as a style, contributing to the misunderstanding of its innovative conception of functionalism.

Another discourse informing the reception of the building was its correspondence with the modernist myth of the engineer as a noble savage who, unencumbered by tradition and guided solely by the objectivity of numbers and practicality, creates works that are simultaneously timeless and in tune with the spirit of the age. David Cottam (1986; 2001) examines the building through the methodological lens of authorship, situating it in relation to other works by the engineer. An expert in reinforced concrete construction technology, Williams designed some of the most influential buildings of the ‘30s, such as the Boots Packed Wets Factory and the Daily Express building (1929–32) in London. Cottam argues that the engineer’s work had been embraced by modern architects because it projected an image of lightness and transparency; his later work, while being even more “functional” in addressing the requirements of the industrial process, was disregarded because of its inelegant appearance. Cottam is critical of the transfer of functionalist methods from industrial projects to recreational and civic buildings such as the PHC. His argument relies on the striking similarity between the Health Centre and the Wets Factory: both were organized around a light well, had extensively glazed facades, minimal internal subdivisions, and a similar approach to structure and finishing. Cottam (1986:100) cautions that by imposing a factory building type on a social institution, Peckham failed to address “the less tangible, humanistic elements of architectural design.” The implied critique is that functionalism was aesthetically and experientially impoverished and thus inadequate for addressing the full range of human needs.

1.1 The Pioneer Health Centre, 1935. Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Library Photographs Collection

In contrast to such design-centered accounts which emphasize the formal and technological aspects of the architectural object, the role of individual authorship, or the very fact of newness and invention, this chapter situates the architecture of the Pioneer Health Centre, and with it, the emergence of a pragmatist strain of functionalism in England, within the discourse of the client, as an instrument for producing knowledge on health and the subjectivity for acquiring it. The emergence of architectural modernism in England is thus contextualized within the development of institutions programmed for production—at Beeston, the manufacturing of pharmaceutical products, and at Peckham, the construction of a subject that desired to be healthy.

The founders provided abundant information on the institution and its architecture in a series of books they published to promote their approach to preventive health. These texts present the building and its architecture as an integral component of the experiment, providing an alternative understanding of its incorporation of features associated with modernism such as the open plan, spatial interpenetration, and transparency; these could be shown to be formulated not by the building’s architect, but by those who commissioned it. The history of the design of the building makes it clear that the clients rejected the original 1930 plan by E. B. Musman for being too formal and ceremonial, and developed, with the assistance of J. M. Richards, the spatial arrangement of the institution as it was built in 1935. Richards (1980:88) suggested that they self-consciously employed an engineer to materialize their design, as they were “suspicious of architects generally and not wanting someone with his own architectural theories,” and valued “the clear relationship between function and structure evident in the buildings he had already done.” The result of this collaboration is an architecture which is functional, but not in the manner in which this modernist concept has been understood. Frances Donaldson (1959:154), the wife of the sociologist Jack Donaldson who was a patron and co-worker at the Pioneer Health Centre, introduced its architecture with the following statement:

This building, which has been minutely planned to serve an entirely original purpose ... was functional, not in the architectural sense of the word in much use at that time, but in its response to the needs of an inspired conception.

Donaldson’s distinction is a critique of the definition of “functionalism” prevailing in professional architectural circles in England as an antithesis to formalism.1 The architecture of Peckham was based on a biological definition of function as an indeterminate process enfolding in time. Richards (1935:208) was able to identify, probably because of his intimate knowledge with the project, that being “scientific” paradoxically implied being inexact in the organization of the plan: “what was required was a not too exact allocation of function; the kind of plan that will be adaptable to any alteration of use or change of emphasis experience may demand.” It reveals that during the late interwar period, there developed in England an awareness of an alternative understanding of functionalism, one which was not deterministic in assuming a cause and effect relationship between form and function.2

Due to its seminal role as a precursor of postwar spaces of childhood, the relationship between the building’s design and institution’s public health policy will be explored at length. In this respect, it is advantageous that the Pioneer Health Centre has often been paired with another seminal modernist building, the Finsbury Health Centre (1938). It was designed by Tecton, a firm led by Berthold Lubetkin in partnership with Drake and Lasdun, whose work will be explored in the chapters on schools and housing. These two experiments in giving shape to a new building type, the community health centre, were informed by contrasting approaches to preventive health, making the comparison between them relevant for linking their modernist architectural principles with their sponsors’ preventive health policy and conception of citizenship.

Health and Citizenship

Both Peckham and Finsbury were conceived at the historical moment when health and its efficient and equitable administration became the subject of public debate whose outcome shaped the postwar English welfare state. Significantly, the issue of children’s health played an important part in this debate, since their legal status and physiological characteristics were considered distinct: first, their biological needs and vulnerability to illness were increasingly seen as different from those of adults, as can be seen in the formation of pediatrics as a specialized branch of medicine. Secondly, they do not have the legal autonomy to make informed decisions regarding their health, nor the resources to secure treatment. Due to their dependent status, children were essential to the process in which medical treatment was socialized as a right of citizenship.

Until the 20th century, the health of the English people was considered as a private matter of the individual. An exception was the public financing of sanitation projects in the 19th century as preventive measures for containing contagious diseases. Otherwise, English society relied on voluntary organizations and the Poor Laws to provide medical assistance for those too poor to afford private physicians. This state of affairs began to change at the beginning of the 20th century, following several political and medical developments. There are two contrasting narratives that explain the gradual socialization of health in England: one in which the provision of health services was a right won after a lengthy democratic struggle for equality, the other that it was the result of top down policy making driven by utilitarian concerns.

The narrative of health as a right of citizenship was most memorably presented by T. H. Marshall (1950), who argued that democratic enfranchisement, together with the principle of equality, brought about the gradual expansion of rights to include the right to be healthy. Marshall classified rights into three groups: civic rights such as equality before the law, granted in the 18th century; political rights such as the right to organize in associations, won in the 19th century; and finally, social rights typifying the welfare state, which include the right to work, to education, and to health. Marshall remarked that it was the child who was first granted social rights with the 1870 Education Act. In the field of health, the first universal services to be legislated in 1911 were primarily aimed at children: the School Medical Service and the Infant Welfare Work directly targeted children, while the Tuberculosis Service addressed a disease that mostly afflicted the young. The expansion of social rights was promoted through the constitution of the child as an exception: in the English Poor Laws, poverty was considered a vice, and those without work were defined as “able bodied paupers”. Since children could not be held responsible for being poor, society was obliged to provide them with the social and economic goods of education, nutrition and health. Only later were such obligations towards children extended to the general population as a universal right of citizenship. As these gains were won by the Labour Party, they reflect a shift in its outlook from Marxist socialism defined by class struggle over the means of production, to a humanist socialism that called for the egalitarian distribution of services such as health, education, housing, and utilities (Steedman 1990:8).

A complementary and equally influential narrative explaining the socialization of health stresses the role of modernizing forces within the state bureaucracy, who defined health as a national resource to be managed in a rational manner under the banner of “national efficiency”. The historian G. R. Searle (1971) demonstrated that it emerged as a response to Great Britain’s declining military and economic power, which the Boer War first exposed. Since modern warfare required large armies to be recruited from every social strata, and the competitive international economic system required an educated and healthy workforce, the general health and welfare of the population, including that of women and children, became conceptualized as a “national resource” that the government had the interest to maximize in a rational and efficient manner. Destitution and ill health, previously regarded as the misfortune or the character flaw of the individual, were now defined as the waste of human resource, an ill afforded “luxury”. Preventive health policy was promoted on the grounds of efficiency, since, in the words of the Chief Medical Inspector Arthur Newsholme, “disease is always more expensive than measures for its prevention.” World War One repeated the spectacle of the discovery of the poor state of health of the majority of England’s urban population, making public health a major policy issue during the interwar period. Initiatives to raise the “physical efficiency” of the population and address its “physical deterioration” included measures to improve physical fitness by promoting outdoor recreation, leading to the massive construction of swimming pools and playing fields (Worpole 2000). The PHC originates in this discourse of efficiency, and was specifically designed to appeal to the “modernizers”. A fund raising prospectus from 1933 stated that “the new Pioneer Health Centre will discover disease in its early stages, preserve and develop the health of the people, so relieving congestion in the hospitals, convalescent homes, orphanages and asylums. Will be the first Medical Research Centre to study conditions which make for Health and Efficiency. Will be self-supporting” (PHC 1933). With its subtitle, “The Devitalization of the Race”, the pamphlet tapped into the alarmist narrative surrounding the numbers of British youth found to be unfit for recruit during the Great War. In addition to the direct reference to the discourse of national efficiency, it claimed to be financially self-sufficient. Access to the resources provided at Peckham was not universal, as a right, but reserved to paying members, since its founders argued that providing free medical treatment was a form of “institutionalized charity” that would constitute the masses as passive recipients of welfare. The experiment tested the economic feasibility of self-sufficient, voluntary health schemes for the average working population, and the advantage of policies promoting self-responsibility over those providing material entitlements to improve health.3

A major development in preventive medical knowledge which further demonstrates the policy implications of the “social” and “modernizing” positions was the discovery of vitamins, which gave rise to the “newer science of nutrition”. Prior to the discovery of vitamins, food was measured quantitatively in terms of energy: Seebohm Rowntree’s survey of poverty from 1902 studied the “amounts of calories, proteins and fat necessary to maintain persons in a state of physical efficiency.” Such a method for conceptualizing food informed the legislation of subsidized school meals and the establishment of the School Medical Service (Searle 1971:65). After Edward Mellanby established a link between rickets (also known as the “English disease”) and vitamin deficiency, certain foodstuff came to be considered “protective”. Mellanby believed that “proper feeding… would be as revolutionary in its effects on public health as was the introduction of cleanliness and drainage in the last century.” In the ‘30s a series of committees were appointed to study the political implications of nutritional science; the socialists claimed that nutrition deficiency was a direct consequence of poverty, since the poor and unemployed could not afford “preventive food”, while the liberals attributed it to ignorance and faulty methods for preparing food which depleted its nutritional benefits (Mayhew 1988:452).4

The discourse of nutrition was fundamental to the Peckham experiment, to the point that it became the central metaphor of its architecture. The PHC is nowadays credited as a precursor of the organic food movement, as Pearse and Williamson were the founding members of the Soil Association, and the Centre operated an organic farm to supply its members with fresh foodstuff (Matless 1998:162–4). Food was allocated “biologically”, with prenatal and post-natal women given the best choice of food, in contrast to the tradition of reserving the most “vital” food to the male breadwinner. The centre sought to transform the ways food was prepared at the home, as part of the scientists’ campaign against “devitalized” canned and processed food. This educational project was programmed into the architecture of the building: a glass partition separated the cafeteria and the kitchen to promote awareness of how food was to be prepared, a feature that several postwar schools adapted as well.

As the exa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1 The Peckham Experiment: Functionalism and Subjectivity
• 2 Adventure Playgrounds; Play on Display
• 3 The Architecture of Educare
• 4 Children in Hospital
• 5 Cradles of Citizenship; Housing and Community Planning
• 6 Team 10 and Urban Childhood
• Afterword
• List of References
• Index