Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body

Sarah Schrank, Didem Ekici

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317123453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body brings together cutting-edge scholarship examining the myriad ways that architects, urban planners, medical practitioners, and everyday people have applied modern ideas about health and the body to the spaces in which they live, work, and heal. The book's contributors explore North American and European understandings of the relationship between physical movement, bodily health, technological innovation, medical concepts, natural environments, and architectural settings from the nineteenth century through the heyday of modernist architectural experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s and onward into the 1970s. Not only does the book focus on how professionals have engaged with the architecture of healing and the body, it also explores how urban dwellers have strategized and modified their living environments themselves to create a kind of vernacular modernist architecture of health in their homes, gardens, and backyards. This new work builds upon a growing interdisciplinary field incorporating the urban humanities, geography, architectural history, the history of medicine, and critical visual studies that reflects our current preoccupation with the body and its corresponding therapeutic culture.

PART 1

Interior Spaces and Everyday Therapeutic Architecture

1

Naked Houses: The Architecture of Nudism and the Rethinking of the American Suburbs

Sarah Schrank

In 1960, the flagship journal of the American naturist movement, Sunshine and Health, published a series of articles outlining the architectural challenges of designing houses for nudists.¹ For the previous twenty years, featured architect Kenn Trumble had built a career designing modest suburban homes that accommodated “the recent trend toward outdoor living.”² Traditional clients generally requested that some sort of patio, lanai, or other backyard living space be added to their home with the expressed concern that it still resemble other houses in their subdivision. The desire of the suburban dweller for both outdoor living and a nudist practice, however, created additional architectural problems. Common zoning restrictions against high fences made it impossible to add an open yet private patio to the outside of standard suburban homes and the glass doors that made the outside visible to the inside exposed naked residents to their neighbors’ gaze, potentially an unpleasant source of personal humiliation or legal action.

When an unsatisfied client sold his Trumble-designed home, the architect learned that suntanning was a crucial element of the nudist lifestyle and that for this particular demographic, the benefit of suburban living meant the ability to lie naked in the sun as much as it meant a seamless flow of movement from indoors out. This inspired him to incorporate small, fully enclosed screened patios into the homes’ basic design:

By keeping the privacy problem of the nudist in mind I . . . incorporated the outdoor living aspects of a home right into the basic concept of the house rather than trying to attach a chunk of outdoor living to the rear wall of a conventional house.³

The drawings for Trumble’s standard 1950s one-story ranch house show enclosed patio rooms with open roofs above to allow for private nude sunbathing. Because there were no extensions attached to the house, from the outside at least, the nudist home looked like any other postwar suburban dwelling (Figure 1.1).

1.1 Kenn Trumble’s designs for the “Sun-Fan House,” “Alternates #1 and #2.” Source: Sunshine and Health 29, no. 4 (April 1960). The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, Gift of Robert J. Young, XC2000.81.33.159. Photo: Silvia Ros.

Privacy from nosey neighbors and accessible sun exposure were not the only problems, however, that a savvy architect would need to address in order to satisfy the mid-range suburban nudist customer. It was also important to allow visitors entry to the home without forcing everyone inside to frantically pull on their clothes every time the doorbell rang. To this end, Trumble designed a floor plan that included a reception room off the main entry and a conveniently placed planter-and-screen combination that blocked views of the rest of the house without obviously hiding the other rooms. As with the patio additions, clients worried that their house not look too radically different from others on the block and that their nudism remain unknown to the neighborhood. Even if this was the era of backyard bomb shelters, no one wanted their home to look like a bunker. Trumble addressed this aesthetic concern by setting a large picture window into the front street-facing wall, thus emulating an archetypical 1950s suburban architectural feature while still camouflaging the house’s nudist function⁴ (Figure 1.2).

The fact that suburban nudists converted typical, mass-produced ranch houses into postwar homes for naked living represents an unusual, if logical, cumulative response to the historical relationship of the American body to the city and the desire to transfer the experience of natural living to urban environments. At the turn of the twentieth century, middle-class Americans became increasingly concerned about their bodies, both their appearance and their performance. Purposive exercise, body-building, dieting, and cosmetic use became both therapeutic and consumer habits of a social class in search of self-identity and status in the midst of modern industrial urbanization and as part of an economy of leisure. As Jackson Lears, John Kasson, and others have argued, concern with personal physical appearance was intertwined with the anonymity, physical mobility, increased visuality, and consumer practices that characterized daily life in cities.⁵ How one looked and how one was perceived from the outside became critical factors in the successful navigation of urban capitalism. The bicycle, the electric exercise machine, and body-building itself were in large part about maintaining healthful bodies in the city. A well-formed body became a highly desired quality in a modern urban culture that increasingly fetishized fitness while the industrial economy increasingly relied less upon human strength. As Carolyn Thomas de la Peña points out in The Body Electric, the machine, and the electricity that powered it, was incorporated into urban health and exercise practices as part of the modern industrial era’s concerns about male impotence and effeminacy in the face of the corporate restructuring of labor into white-collar classes and grey flannel suits.⁶

At the same time, middle-class Americans considered physical culture practiced outside the city as a sought-after ideal that included visits to health sanitaria, “tenting” (camping), and out-of-doors adventures permitting exposure to the sun and fresh air.⁷ Once rejuvenated, modern Americans, and especially men, could return to their city life taking some of their “natural” experience back with them. Early twentieth-century celebrities such as Pierre Bernard, the “Mighty Oom,” who popularized the physical practice of yoga in the United States, and body-builder Bernarr Macfadden, publisher of Physical Culture magazine, sold urban dwellers weekend retreats for physical and spiritual nourishment as part of a general regimen of rigorous dieting and exercise.⁸ If nature was the place where the body could rejuvenate, it was the city where the body would be displayed. Suburban nudism offered an ideal compromise, combining the outdoor experience of the backyard or open-air patio with the security and status of home ownership. Even if nude bodies were not openly displayed in the suburbs, bodies bearing (baring) the supposed enviable benefits of nudism—suntans, glowing skin, vitality, confidence—could be shown off to friends and neighbors. Suburbia, with the appropriate architecture and careful planning, could allow the central tenet of nudist practice, the embrace of the natural body, to flourish at home, creating an innovative space between city and country that incorporated a concept of the natural into a postwar consumer economy.

Trumble’s entrepreneurial goal was to sell his “Sun-Fan” house to a broad United States public but the market was in the new Sunbelt suburbs that sprang up in the late 1950s and 1960s and ran from Florida through the southwest and into southern California. Sunbelt suburbs typically housed white middle-class families and retired couples seeking a leisurely lifestyle at a cut-rate price.⁹ With an easily exploitable immigrant labor force, expanded service-sector economy, powerful anti-union lobbies, and minimal taxation combined with federally subsidized business and real estate development, the Sunbelt offered cheap housing and a convenient suburban life to a mostly white, and conservative, middle-class clientele.

1.2 “The basic floor plan for the Sun-Fan House.” Source: Sunshine and Health 29, no. 4 (April 1960). The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, Gift of Robert J. Young, XC2000.81.33.159. Photo: Silvia Ros.

Specifically, Trumble focused on Land O’Lakes, a suburban region of Pasco County, Florida, whose nudist history began in 1949 when Dorothy and Avery Weaver Brubaker founded the Florida Athletic and Health Association and opened a nudist camp, the Lake Como Club, on their 210-acre property.¹⁰ Subsequently, other nudists set up shop in the area, taking advantage of west central Florida’s cheap land, warm climate, and natural environment conducive to nudists’ outdoor activities. By the 1970s, suburban Tampa began to surround the quiet, semi-rural area. Rather than move, the nudist community of Pasco County grew, with a surge of new membership in the 1980s and 1990s. The camps, which generally offered mobile home rentals, trailer lots, and tent sites, became more sophisticated and competitive; some, like Caliente, have developed into clothing-optional tourist resorts with pools, spas, luxury hotel accommodations, and condos for sale at both the mid-range and high end of the market.¹¹ Paradise Lakes became a nudist subdivision with 700 homes ranging in size from tiny 400-square-foot studios priced under $100,000 to million-dollar homes. Realtors estimate that 60 percent of Paradise Lakes is occupied by full-time residents. Others, like Oasis, The Woods, Riverboat Club, and Lake Linda Circle, feature mixed developments with anywhere from twenty-five mobile homes to subdivisions featuring hundreds of moderately priced, small houses with pools and backyard sunbathing decks, with most built in the past twenty years.¹² These communities are marketed as clothing-optional nudist environments, but realtors describe residents as living a “hybrid” experience: clothed in the front yard but nude in the fenced backyard.¹³ In an effort to branch out, in 2004, Quaker Bill Martin opened a 240-acre Christian nudist resort in Hudson, in the far northwestern corner of Pasco County with 500 homes for sale.¹⁴ Concentrated along a six-mile (11km) stretch of US Highw...