The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities

The Architectures of Childhood

124 The Architectures of Childhood Roy Kozlovsky But we’re children, people’s belongings. —Elizabeth Bowen, A House in Paris The metaphor of the “children’s table” alludes to the familiar architecture of the everyday, where the ambiguous status of the child is literally inscribed into the choreography of domestic space. How then does the scholarly focus on the child challenge or inform current approaches to the study of architecture? And conversely, what can the study of the material culture of childhood contribute to the discipline of childhood studies? This chapter explores the prospects of bringing together these two academic disciplines to open a critical space for engaging core issues facing the humanities. The motivation for studying the “architecture of childhood” resides in the context of modernity itself, as one of its central tenets is a belief in the critical role of childhood in forming the private, biographical self and in the importance of childhood to the making and imagining of nations and collectives. As a result, the architecture of childhood embodies the utopian premises and internal contradictions of what was promised to be “the century of the child,” which was aligned with a parallel transformative architectural project , that of the modernization of everyday living environments by modern architecture. The examination of the spaces of childhood has been traditionally shaped by the different methods and preoccupations of architectural and childhood studies. In the “design-centered” perspective, environments designed for children are often interpreted in relation to other buildings designed by The Architectures of Childhood 125 the same architect or are grouped with other contemporary projects to allow for discussion of issues that architectural discourse has autonomy with respect to, such as authorship, technique, or style. In these studies, what is of prime importance is the architectural merit of the object. Even in studies of building typologies specific to children, such as schools or playgrounds, the objects of analysis are chosen primarily for their monumental status as exemplars of an architectural approach at the expense of the ordinary. In child-centered studies, be they histories of play, education, or childhood in general, these environments receive the status of documents. In Centuries of Childhood, the founding text of the field of childhood studies, Philippe Ariès includes a section on the everyday architecture of the home to support his claim that the nuclear, child-centered family is a modern invention. In studies of educational history, the architectural object, the school, is explored as a document of educational and governmental policy, an approach that consequently fails to account for the more architectural aspects of childhood environments. A subject matter that brings the two fields of inquiry together is their shared investment in analyzing institutions through the theoretical framework of space, power, and knowledge, as part of the “spatial” turn in the social sciences and the humanities. The theoretical work of Michel Foucault , Pierre Bourdieu, and Henri Lefebvre makes space an agent in fashioning important aspects of human life such as selfhood, social relationships, and ideology. Exemplary in this respect is Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), which examines space as a social practice capable of transmitting regimes of power and knowledge. Foucault draws on the architecture of the school, together with the prison, barrack, and factory, to account for the disciplinary regime of power, which “proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space.” The discourse of spatiality has been especially productive for uncovering asymmetrical power relations and tactics used to modify or restrict human behavior with respect to the fashioning of a subject , themes that inevitably arise in connection with children, since, as the sociologist Nikolas Rose suggests, “childhood is the most intensively governed sector of personal existence.” One type of architectural scholarship that is indebted to Foucault is the comparative study of building typologies. Thomas Markus’s Building and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origins of Modern Building Types (1993) explores the school building type as a site for “the production of character” by examining the ways in which human 126 Roy Kozlovsky interactions are regulated through partitioning and circulation. One of the limitations of this method that analyzes the layouts of buildings as diagrams of power is that it excludes the possibility of negotiation or resistance by those who come under their sway. Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s spatial concept of habitus, which defines the subject as an active agent in fashioning its identity in relation to a...