Abstract
Can buildings readily be interpreted as cultural documents that encode attitudes towards children and their emotions? Or do they perhaps play a more active, dynamic role in the emotional construction of childhood? This chapter explores the place of architectural culture within the field of childhood studies and the history of emotions. The use of architecture as a document of emotional and childhood history was pioneered by Philippe Ariès. In Centuries of Childhood, he counterpoised textual documents with material artefacts such as paintings, clothing, toys and, pertinent to our subject, architecture to chart the historical development of a caring and loving sentiment towards children. He compared the layout of the medieval house with that of the eighteenth-century mansion to historicize the crystallization of the modern family as an emotional unit. The pre-childhood house was a heterogeneous social unit that was public in character. It was occupied by the master, his wife and their children, as well as servants and apprentices, and was frequented by a multitude of people. Consequently, ‘nobody was left alone’ in the house.1 With the advent of the modern ideal of childhood, which entailed a different emotional and caring attitude towards one’s children, there emerged a ‘need’ to separate the affairs of the family from the intrusion of others by rearranging the house into private and public zones. Ariès tied the specialization of rooms in the house, as well as the invention of the corridor, to such emotional ‘need’ for intimacy.
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Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 398.
Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), 249.
Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 119.
Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 3rd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 13.
A contemporary example of a phenomenological reading of architecture and its emotional significance is Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (London: Academy Editions, 1996). See the discussion in Chapter 7 of this volume.
Mark Jarzombek, The Psychologizing of Modernity: Art, Architecture, and History (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 72.
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David Canter, Psychology for Architects (London: Applied Science Publishers, 1974), 3.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, ‘Design and Order in Everyday Life’, Design Issues 8(1) (1991), 26–34, here 34.
E.R. Robson, School Architecture (Leicester University Press, 1972), 6.
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Kim Rasmussen, ‘Places for Children — Children’s Places’, Childhood 11 (2) (2004), 155–173.
The term was developed by the architectural historian Elizabeth Cromley. See discussion of the concept in Abigail A. van Slyck, A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890–1960 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxxi.
William M. Reddy, ‘Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions’, Current Anthropology 38(3) (1997), 327–351, here 331.
Harry Hendrick, ‘Children’s Emotional Well-being and Mental Health in Early Post-Second World War Britain: The Case of Unrestricted Hospital Visiting’, Clio Medica: The Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine 71 (2003), 213–242, here 214.
Susan Isaac,(ed.), The Cambridge Evacuation Survey; A Wartime Study in Social Welfare and Education (London: Methuen, 1941), 11.
Richard M. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy (London: HMSO, 1950), 538.
Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1990), 121.
Marjory Allen, Planning for Play (London: Thames & Hudson, 1968), 18–19.
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Anna Freud and Dorothy T. Burlingham, War and Children (New York: Medical War Books, 1943), 191.
John Mays, Adventure in Play (Liverpool Council of Social Service, 1957), 27.
Marjory Allen, Junk Playgrounds (London: National Under Fourteens Council, 1948), 3.
Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review 107(3) (2002), 821–845, here 834–836.
Lindsay Prior, ‘The Architecture of the Hospital: A Study of Spatial Organization and Medical Knowledge’, British Journal of Sociology 39(1) (1988), 86–113, here 101.
Ministry of Health, The Welfare of Children in Hospital (London: HMSO, 1959), sec. 6, 2.
J[ames] C. Spence, ‘The Care of Children in Hospital’, British Medical Journal 1(4490) (1947),125–130, here 127.
Nuffield Foundation Division for Architectural Studies, Children in Hospital: Studies in Planning (London: Oxford University Press for the Nuffield Foundation, 1963), 58.
John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, vol. 1, Attachment (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 27.
Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, School (London: Reaktion, 2008), 67–118.
Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is that What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History & Theory 51(2) (2012), 193–220, here 212.
Herbert Read, Education through Art (New York: Pantheon, 1945), 277.
Arthur Stone, Story of a School: A Headmaster’s Experiences with Children Aged Seven and Eleven, Ministry of Education Pamphlet no. 14 (London: HMSO, 1949), 14.
Ministry of Education, Moving and Growing: Physical Education in the Primary School: Part One, Education Pamphlet no. 24 (London: HMSO, 1952), 37.
Mick Donovan, Gareth Jones, and Ken Hardman, ‘Physical Education and Sport in England: Dualism, Partnership and Delivery Provision’, Kinesiology 38 (1) (2006), 16–27.
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Kozlovsky, R. (2015). Architecture, Emotions and the History of Childhood. In: Olsen, S. (eds) Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484840_6
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