The Architectures of Childhood: Children, Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Postwar England by Roy Kozlovsky (review)

In the ongoing British documentary Seven Up, begun in 1964 by Paul Almond and continued every seven years thereafter by Michael Apted, the lives of fourteen British children are revealed on camera. Seeing the diverse circumstances of these children’s schools, houses, and social structures was, at least initially, intended to demonstrate the maxim “show me the child at seven and I will show you the man.” The practice of observing childhood as it is being performed may be one of the lasting examples of a postwar British obsession with the child as the image of the future. This is the subject of Roy Kozlovsky’s book, The Architectures of Childhood: Children, Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Postwar England, which elegantly and convincingly shows the central place of childhood in England in the years around World War II.

Kozlovsky argues that bureaucratic England’s intense preoccupation with childhood and children’s subjectivity structured some of the key institutions and buildings of the twentieth century. Kozlovsky is an architectural historian, but he seeks to move away from what he calls “design-centered” studies on architects or isolated buildings in order to develop a larger pattern of the ways that buildings such as schools, hospitals, health care centers, housing projects, playgrounds, and cities are embedded in a discourse of self-analysis and renewal that, he argues, was deliberately joined to the welfare state’s governing of the self. In six chapters and an introduction, he explores the institutions of the era, including celebrated modernist structures such as the Pioneer Health Centre at Peckham, the Finsbury Health Centre, the Hunstanton Secondary Modern School, and the adventure playground type (one of which the Seven Up children visit in the first film). He examines these not as heroic aesthetic and technical achievements, as they have been portrayed by others, but as spatial, social, and psychological dimensions of a culture that actively sought to reestablish humanism in its institutions.

Kozlovsky relies on Nikolas Rose’s notion of governmentality as a technique of freedom-inducing self-improvement that was tied to extensive psychological and bureaucratic research. Kozlovsky analyzes the defining documentary evidence that led to the Education Act (1944), the National Health Service (1948), and a number of surveys, reports, and committees that affected the establishment of social policy and design of children’s spaces. The interest of the popular anthropological project called Mass Observation in housing and urbanism shows how thoroughly British domestic and civic culture were debated not just by leaders at the top who were connected to ideas spreading across Europe and the United States, but also in towns and villages. Kozlovsky carefully marshals this considerable body of evidence to demonstrate how the designs of specific spaces were envisioned and what they aimed to add to the life of the child and by extension to the nation. We see ever-closer contact between experts, authorities, parents, and children built into the spaces that provided preventative health measures, guided thoughtful parenting, empathized with a child’s feelings of fear and isolation, and enabled free play. Furthermore, evidence from the buildings themselves—entrances, fenestration and use of glass, the color of walls, size and placement of rooms, and designation and representation of special places for play in the urban environment—bolsters and deepens Kozlovsky’s reading of Rose and makes tangible the critical role of the child’s own experience in the making of modern Britain.

The nuanced analysis of recreation and free play, especially in the case of the adventure playground, is where Kozlovsky’s contributions are especially useful and relevant. These seemingly anarchical open spaces, where children might explore, build, and test themselves without interference were, he suggests, always subjected to the gaze of others, particularly the play leader. If play was understood as “human instinct” and characterized and celebrated as a “free, liberating, civilizing activity” (70), it was also consciously staged...