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

 2014 Children, Youth and Environments Children, Youth and Environments 24(2), 2014 The Architecture of Childhood: Children, Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Postwar England Roy Kozlovsky (2013). Ashgate Studies in Architecture Series Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 279 pages. $109.95 USD (hardback). ISBN: 978-1-4094-3977-6. Roy Kozlovsky casts his academic eye back in time to an England struggling to recover from war. His comments draw from his rigorous search of writings and buildings produced from 1935 to 1959, threading them along a theme of childhood. His is a period I entered as an English child of 7 and left in 1959 to live in Canada as a father of a young family. Recollections of my life during those times in England bring to mind how government actions affected me as a child. My memories sometimes seem to contradict Kozlovsky, but appear now as shafts of sunlight in his documentation of disasters. He begins when war clouds darkened, and people foresaw social instability and began to prepare for recovery. They focused on youth, the sector of society most governed by the state. Kozlovsky sees in these years the most intensive discourse ever between government, architecture, and sociology over the care of children. The child brought planners a new regard for the user, and a focus on the effects of architecture on everyday life and its behavioral settings of light, textures, sound, and comfort. Children Must Speak for Themselves In the “The Peckham Experiment” in 1935, Kozlovsky describes a diagnostic center for family health, and research into children’s behavior, that formed a “common characteristic—children must speak for themselves….” Necessary and normal for medical diagnostic, but unheard of in planning, Peckham introduces an interesting counterpoint that Kozlovsky poses throughout his book between the planner who dictates to the user and the planner who listens to the user. When war and bombing began, frantic evacuation sent children to safety in the country. Into my own country-dwelling family came a teenaged girl, daughter of a London teacher, sent to us by local organizers because my father was a teacher. A pleasant time of friendship grew, and then multiplied when a whole school of boys and their teachers from London arrived and settled into old army barracks and a large mansion beside our school, with the principal and his wife coming to live with us in our large house. A year of delight followed for us all, particularly for the London boys and the girls in our co-ed school. Kozlovsky refers occasionally to the Book Review: The Architecture of Childhood: Children, Modern Architecture… 248 evacuation as traumatic, and recounts an aftermath of doubts on government wisdom. Surveys of “what children say” began to be circulated, and children’s voices began to be heeded. The voice of the user grew louder. Kozlovsky describes architect Max Lock’s 1947 project, “The Middleborough Experiment,” as “opening his planning process to the participation of the populous, including children, who helped in carrying out the preliminary survey. Participation and active citizenship were regarded as a measure to reduce political instability.” Adventure Playground Wartime boyhood in the country for my brother and I and our friends ran tirelessly in a life full of variety. All keen Boy Scouts, we had a code and self-imposed discipline. Kozlovsky describes how city governments, plagued with post-war juvenile delinquency, observed that children behaved well when actively and constructively engaged. Cities appointed leaders to supervise Adventure Playgrounds at bombed sites that were “chosen by children themselves... a place of their own where they could find materials for games of their own invention.” As in the Peckham Experiment, the Adventure Playground offered researchers ample material for study. Leadership, lightly applied, permitted anarchy to develop as a prelude to the youth imposing self-discipline. Kozlovsky returns often to the role of government in reconstructing England and its overall aim of healing its wounded society. School Design Kozlovsky describes a period of school building, with designs based on children’s observed actions and behavioral settings that supported their activities. Researchers watched children’s activities and measured the children’s perceptual sensitivity to the quality of light, color, textures, sound and comfortable...

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