the architecture of educare

History of EducationVol. 39, No. 6, November 2010, 695–712

ISSN 0046-760X print/ISSN 1464-5130 online© 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/0046760X.2010.514295http://www.informaworld.com

The architecture of educare: motion and emotion in postwar educational spaces

Roy Kozlovsky*

Northeastern University School of Architecture, Boston, USATaylor and FrancisTHED_A_514295.sgm(Received 5 December 2009; final version received 29 July 2010)10.1080/0046760X.2010.514295History of Education0046-760X (print)/1464-5130 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis3960000002010Dr [email protected]

This essay explores the interplay between educational and architecturalmethodologies for analysing the school environment. It historicises the affinitybetween architectural and educational practices and modes of knowledgepertaining to the child’s body during the period of postwar reconstruction inEngland to argue that educational spaces were designed to accommodate thechild’s free movement and bring it under observation, in order to constitute anactive and emotionally adjusted citizen. Drake and Lasdun’s Hallfield PrimarySchool is studied to illustrate the architectural implications of the shift in themodes of knowledge defining the child as an active and emotive subject, in partby aestheticising the sensation of movement. Thus the essay expands uponAndrew Saint’s seminal account by reinterpreting the architecture of the postwarschool as a social technology, and identifying a pragmatist current of modernistarchitecture that was influenced by the concepts of time and growth developedindependently by Alfred North Whitehead and Herbert Read.

Keywords: architecture; school; childhood, educational reconstruction; space

Introduction

There is a striking similarity in the development of modern architecture and modernpedagogy…. Both started from an unprejudiced conception of man and accordinglyplaced higher importance on psychological factors.1 (Alfred Roth, The New School,1950)

The study of the environments where education takes place intersects two distinctfields of knowledge, architecture and education. This seemingly simplistic statementhas a double register: in terms of historical subject matter, the study of the school, andespecially that of the modern school building, requires knowledge in both fields toaccount for the collaborative nature of the process of design of these environments. Asthe opening quote by the architect Alfred Roth suggests, historically, modern archi-tects have identified with the cause of progressive education and sought to representand enable its ideals and methods through their design. To describe and critique thisencounter one must be familiar with the history of both movements. On a more theo-retical level, the opening statement suggests that the two disciplines can be enrichedby a productive exchange of their methods and interests towards establishing an inter-

*Email: [email protected] Roth, The New School (Zurich: Girsberger, 1950), 30.

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disciplinary, but not necessarily a specialised space of inquiry. One theme that at thepresent brings the two fields together is the shared investment in analysing schoolsthrough the theoretical framework of space, power and knowledge, as part of the‘visual’ and ‘spatial’ turns in the social sciences and the humanities. Catherine Burkestated its impact on the study of the school in a recent issue of Paedagogica Historicadevoted to architectures and pedagogies:

An examination of the visual culture of the school involves bringing into focus, perhapsfor the first time, the significance of detailed characteristics of schooling such as theintricate, regulated and ritualized choreography of the body; the design and siting of thebuilt environment; the purposeful arrangement of objects in the classroom; the shape ofinterior and exterior spaces.2

The concept of ‘space’ was developed in nineteenth-century architectural criticism asreferring to the ‘containing’, volumetric properties of the building – most evident inAdolf Loos’s concept of the raumplan3 – for the purpose of shifting the focus fromthe visual primacy of the façade or the efficiency of the plan to the phenomenologicalexperience of a subject moving through the building’s interior. With the ‘spatial turn’,this concept is also understood as a social practice, as a site for the study of powerrelations and the production of the self. In the issue of Paedagogica Historicamentioned above, Nick Peim used Michel Foucault’s definition of ‘social technology’for analysing the role of space in education: ‘Government is also a function of tech-nology: the government of individuals, the government of souls, the government ofthe self by the self, the government of families, the government of children, and soon.’ This quote continues with a sentence that is especially relevant to this essay: ‘Ibelieve that if one placed the history of architecture back in this general history oftechne, in this wide sense of the word, one would have a more interesting guidingconcept.’4 Following Foucault and other theoreticians of ‘space’ such as Pierre Bour-dieu and Henri Lefebvre, architectural discourse has been employing this category ina manner that corresponds with its usefulness to historians of education. Schools,together with other child-centred environments, lend themselves to this type of anal-ysis because children, due to their status as immature and in need of education andcare, are legitimate targets of certain modes of spatial and aesthetic strategies whichwould have deemed problematic in environments and material practices applied to‘mature’ subjects.

The engagement of an architectural historian with the field of education historyholds some obvious risks, but might also have its rewards in suggesting new ways ofseeing the material at hand. Peim observed that the impact of the loosening of theboundaries between the disciplines introduces an uncertain, experimental methodologyto the historiography of education:

2Catherine Burke, ‘Containing the School Child: Architectures and Pedagogies’, PaedagogicaHistorica 4, nos 4–5 (August 2005): 492.3Loos was recorded saying that ‘I do not design floor plans, facades, sections. I designspaces… For me, there are only contiguous, continual spaces, rooms, anterooms, terraces etc.’The composer Arnold Schoenberg commented that in Loos’s work ‘everything is thought out,imagined, composed and moulded in space’. Yehuda Safran and Wilfried Wang, eds, TheArchitecture of Adolf Loos (London: Arts Council, 1985), 74.4Michel Foucault, ‘Space, Knowledge and Power’, in Power: Essential Works of Foucault1954–1984, Vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 2000), 364.

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This openness to the range of phenomena within and around the school requires a think-ing without strict boundaries, but also produces specific forms of history that necessarilyfeed into conceptions of what history can be, engendering a sense of further possibilitiesarising from specific forms of engagement.5

This openness is explored in this paper as it links a variety of discourses – power, aesthet-ics, building science, the historiography of the modern movement, child developmentand education – to account for the exceptional architectural quality of the postwar schooland its importance to both architectural and educational history.

School buildings as discursive objects

The critical perspective of examining the school as a site for an array of disciplinarypractices that act upon the substance of the person entails a revision of how the postwarEnglish school has been interpreted by each discipline. Broadly speaking, design-centred studies have conceived these spaces of knowledge as monuments of modernism,and situated them within the discourse of the architect, as part of a broader debate overmodern architecture; educational centred studies in turn have examined the schools ofthe postwar period as documents of educational policy.

School buildings figure prominently in historical accounts of postwar architecture,often in the form of an opposition between two paradigmatic projects, the Hertford-shire schools and the Hunstanton Secondary Modern School (Figure 1). In the early1950s, architects routinely contrasted these buildings as part of a formative modernistpolemic between formalist and functionalist positions and, more broadly, the ideolog-ical debate over the status of architecture as an autonomous aesthetic discipline and asocially engaged practice committed to progress, a pattern that subsequent historiesreplicate: Andrew Saint, in his authoritative study of England’s postwar school build-ing, Towards a Social Architecture (1987), positioned the technical and planningachievements of the Hertfordshire approach as ‘the biggest and most radical adventureever undertaken in the history of British architecture’, in part to redeem the taintedreputation of the Modern Movement by rekindling its mission of ‘making buildings ofreal benefit to society’.6 The architectural historian Reyner Banham in turn criticisedthe Hertfordshire approach as the self-righteous imposition of the decree ‘formfollows curriculum’ – a reference to its alignment with progressive child-centredmethods of education – which resulted in bureaucratic buildings that lacked architec-tural character. While Saint criticised the Smithsons’ Hunstanton Secondary School inNorfolk ‘unapologetic image-mongering’, Banham designated this school as a semi-nal ‘New Brutalist’ building in his historical account of that movement.7 Hunstanton’svalue resided in its dialogue with the architecture of the modernist master Mies vanDer Rohe and in its ‘naked’ treatment of materials such as brick and steel – concernswhich are autonomous to architectural culture. In retrospect, it is significant that

5Nick Peim, ‘Towards a Social Ecology of the Modern School: Reflections on Histories of theGovernmental Environment of Schooling,’ Paedagogica Historica 4, nos 4–5 (August 2005):637.6Andrew Saint, Towards a Social Architecture; The Role of School Building in Post-WarEngland (New Haven, CT: Yale Architectural Press, 1987), viii, x.7Reyner Banham, ‘The Architecture of the English School’, History of Education Quarterly21, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 191; Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethics or Aesthetics?(New York: Reinhold, 1966), 19–20.

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debates fundamental to modernism were argued through school buildings – an unprec-edented phenomenon in architectural history.Figure 1 Interior of typical classroom at Hunstanton Secondary Modern School (left) and Aboyne Lodge Infants’ School, St. Albans, Hertfordshire (right). Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection.From the perspective of education history, these same buildings were selected toanswer a different set of questions. In studies of the English school such as Seaborneand Lowe’s The English School, its Architecture and Organization (1971), StuartMaclure’s Educational Development & School Building: Aspects of Public Policy 1945–73 (1984), or Peter Cunningham’s Curriculum Change in the Primary School Since 1945(1988), the architectural object figures as a document of educational history and govern-mental policy. Often what is taken for granted by architectural historians as a positiveattribute – the fidelity of the Hertfordshire programme to the values of progressive educa-tion – is problematised. In Cunningham’s account, the Hertfordshire school model wasused by the central government to superimpose its agenda of child-centred educationupon the geographically fragmented, pedagogically diverse local education authorities(LEAs); in Maclure’s account, the progressive aspects of school building are shownto be incorporated in so far as they correspond with the governmental pressure to reducecosts of school construction nationwide through standardisation and economisation. Asfor Hunstanton, it is interesting to note that while architectural historians who specialisein school buildings follow Saint and criticise it as a negative example of architecturalstyle trumping educational needs,8 Seaborne and Lowe condone its formalist approach– since it conferred civic dignity to the institution of the school which the Hertfordshireinspired schools lacked due to their anti-monumental ideology.9

This brief and incomplete survey of how each scholarly discipline has tradition-ally appropriated the discussion of educational environments raises the question of‘medium specificity’ – might the analysis of schools suggest itself to methods andquestions that are unique to this building type and the population it serves? One direc-tion that can produce valuable insight into the intersection between architecture andeducation is to inquire into the conditions of possibility in the structures of knowl-edge and power that allowed the convergence of ‘the New Education’ and the ‘New

8A typical example is Mark Dudek’s critique of Hunstanton as inhuman in its projection ofraw technology. Mark Dudek, Architecture of Schools: The New Learning Environment(Boston: Architectural Press, 2000), 32.9Malcolm Seaborne and Roy Lowe, The English School, its Architecture and Organization,Vol. II 1870–1970 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), xvi.

Figure 1 Interior of typical classroom at Hunstanton Secondary Modern School (left) andAboyne Lodge Infants’ School, St. Albans, Hertfordshire (right). Architectural Press Archive /RIBA Library Photographs Collection.


Architecture’ to bring about new types of knowledge environments, as the openingquote by Alfred Roth suggests. It is their claim to be based on a more psychologicalunderstanding of the child that will draw special scrutiny in this essay, as pertainingto a broader shift in modes of knowledge and power that define the subject inpsychological terms, and act upon its interiority.

Power and subjectivity

This mode of power was explored by Nikolas Rose in his Foucauldian analysis of thewelfare state in Governing the Soul (1990). Rose argues that postwar govermentalityoperates through modes of knowledge and networks of power that assess and modifythe subjective existence of people and their relationships one with another. It requiredthe subject’s consent and commitment to assuming the responsibilities of citizen-ship.10 Rose situates the emergence of the mode of power that regulates the subjectivecapacities of the population in the Second World War, when war effort on the HomeFront required the participation and consent of civilians and their will to endure thehardships and deprivations which followed the wartime mobilisation of the economy.A relevant example is the evacuation of more than a million children at the beginningof the war. The evacuation was planned years in advance, beginning in 1931, toprevent mass panic in case of air attack. The plan dealt with the logistics of transport-ing people to safe areas. The following anecdote epitomises the conception of childrenas objects that can be moved by bureaucratic fiat: Churchill briefed R.A. Butler (theauthor of the 1944 Education Act) upon his nomination as the president of the Boardof Education in 1941: ‘You will move poor children from here to here.’11 The failureof the evacuation policy to anticipate the problems arising from separating childrenfrom their families led to a reconsideration of how government operates. The 1941Cambridge Evacuation Survey is an example of a study of the effects of bureaucraticdirectives on actual subjects’ emotions. Undertaken by child psychologists andpedagogues, among them Susan Isaacs, Melanie Klein and John Bowlby, the surveyconcluded with the statement that:

… a true understanding of the feelings and aims of ordinary human beings is an essentialcondition of success, whether we are concerned with the replanning and rebuilding of ourgreat cities … the humanizing of our town schools, the training and teaching of youth.12

After the war, the subjective features of human life were increasingly integrated intothe calculations of planners. While Rose barely discussed the role of architectureand space,13 nor did he examine the institution of the school, his historical insight isindispensable to the central argument of this essay: that in the postwar spaces of

10Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge,1990), 2–10.11Michael Hill, The Welfare State in Britain: A Political History since 1945 (Aldershot: E.Elgar, 1993), 1.12Susan Isaacs, The Cambridge Evacuation Survey: A Wartime Study in Social Welfare andEducation (London: Methuen, 1941), 11.13Rose’s sole analysis of the spatial dimension of the ‘technologies of the self’ was Gesell’sYale Psycho-Clinic. It brings up themes that were later explored by Ning de Coninck-Smith inher Foucauldian study of the architecture of the Child Study Center at Berkeley. Rose, Governingthe Soul, 142–9; Ning de Coninck-Smith, ‘The Panopticon of Childhood: Harold E. Jones ChildStudy Center, Berkeley’, Paedagogica Historica 4, nos 4–5 (August 2005): 495–506.

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childhood, power did not operate by dominating or disciplining subjects who were bytheir nature free; rather, it operated by activating subjects and making them aspire tobe free. In classrooms, as well as playgrounds, children were incited to appropriatetheir environments and express their interiority through playful, self-initiated activity.The role of the adult was to observe the child’s individual and group activity, evaluateit and indirectly modify it. In this arrangement, spaces of knowledge are also spacesfor producing knowledge on subjects, and even their formal and material propertiesbecome encoded with the power to impact children’s behaviour and perception – theybecome educative in themselves.

The starting point of this essay is the analysis of the role of rhythm and motion inpostwar education. These are partly examined as social technologies, followingPeim’s suggestion that ‘the techniques that organize space are complemented by tech-nologies that organize time and movement’.14 The aim of physical education policywas to train English children in a new set of techniques of the body that both producedknowledge about children through observation, and in themselves were inscribed withaesthetic forms of knowledge. This essay also argues that the pragmatic, process-oriented philosophy of education also influenced or, at the very least, was matchedwith a parallel shift in architectural thought from an idealism of form, aligned withFroebel’s mimetic attribution of transformative powers to symbolic forms (severalinfluential modernist architects were associated with Froebelian pedagogy – amongthem Walter Gropius), to an empirical, time-sensitive and sensual approach, alignedwith Dewey’s and Whitehead’s stress on process and rhythmic change.

The introduction of the question of aesthetics suggests that that object of analysisbe regarded both as a document of social history, one which exemplifies the spatialpractices and social relations embedded in the institution of the school, and as a monu-ment of a creative aesthetic practice, one which has implications for the ways in whicharchitecture conceptualises its methods for generating forms, spaces and meanings.The architectural manifestation of this aesthetic turn will be examined through thecase of a unique school building, the Hallfield Primary School in Paddington, London,from 1952.

Rhythmic self-regulation

The notion of education as a rhythmic, fluctuating process in time originates in theeducational philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. His epistemological research intophysics and geometry, and especially his concept of the ‘event’ as a substitute to thetraditional interest in ‘mass’, has been introduced to architectural theory through thewritings of Sanford Kwinter; this essay seeks to direct architectural interest to hiswriting on education. In The Aims of Education from 1916, Whitehead defined educa-tion as the stimulation and guidance of the self-development of the individual towards‘the most complete achievement of varied activity expressing the potentialities of thatliving creature in the face of its actual environment’.15 This is a pragmatic and vitaldefinition of education, equal to John Dewey’s statement that education is ‘a processof living and not a preparation for future living’.16 Whitehead stressed the importance

14Peim, ‘Towards a Social Ecology’, 629.15Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York: Free Press,1967), 39.16John Dewey, ‘My Pedagogic Creed’, School Journal 54 (January 1897): 78.


of activity and receptiveness over rote learning of information, an attitude which wasincorporated in England into the Hadow report from 1931: ‘the curriculum is to bethought of in terms of activity and experience rather than of knowledge to be acquiredand facts to be stored’.17 Arguing against the prevailing model of education as a linearprocess of growth through gradual and hierarchical stages of development, Whiteheadreasoned that the learning process has a ‘rhythm’, that it is cyclic in nature:

Life is essentially periodic…. That is why I have chosen the term ‘rhythmic’, as meaningessentially the conveyance of difference within a framework of repetition.18

Whitehead defined these cycles as the stages of romance, precision and generalisation.At the stage of romance, the subject is stirred to desire to learn, as ‘there can be nomental development without interest’. The stage of precision introduces exactnessand technique; the stage of generalisation is aimed at the enjoyment of culture andintellectual activity, or what Whitehead called ‘the art of life’.19 To infuse art intoeveryday life, he suggested that every educational activity, including the study ofscientific subjects, was to be performed with ‘style’. Whitehead defined style as atechnique for self-disciplining the senses and emotions, as ‘the fashioning of power,the restraint of power’.

If, for Whitehead’s generation, aesthetic education was part of a humanist endeav-our of enrichment, the postwar generation redefined its politics as a technique forbuilding a more peaceful society. In Education through Art (1943) Herbert Read, apolymath thinker who wrote on education, the visual arts, architecture, literature andpolitical theory, pinpointed the causes for the two world wars in authoritarian, inhib-iting educational practices: ‘the secret of our collective ills is to be traced to thesuppression of spontaneous creative ability in the individual’.20 Seen as a psycholog-ical mechanism for sublimating aggressive emotions, art was valued for its transfor-mative impact on a subject engaged in art activity, as opposed to a spectator that istransformed by it through ‘passive’ contemplation; second, Read advanced the notionthat art could be used to construct a more balanced and stable personality by habitu-ating children in harmonic forms during ‘the sleep of reason.’ Read sought to revivethe Greek conception of aesthetic education, as formulated by Plato:

All grace and harmony in life – which form the moral basis of the human soul itself –are determined by aesthetic feelings, by the perception of rhythm and harmony in musicand games.21

This statement was frequently quoted in postwar school building manuals, and mighthave informed, together with Rudolf Wittkower’s influential study of Renaissanceharmonic theory in Architecture Principles in the Age of Humanism, the revival ofClassical design principles in buildings such as Hunstanton.22 Read considered bodily

17The Hadow Report: The Primary School (London: HMSO, 1931), 93.18Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York: Free Press,1967), 17.19Ibid., 39.20Herbert Read, Education through Art (New York: Pantheon Books, 1945), 202.21Quoted in Roth, The New School, 213.22Rudolf Wittkower’s study, which included a chapter on Palladio’s incorporation ofharmonic musical ratios in his buildings, appeared in 1949. Both the architects and Banhamacknowledged the book’s influence on Hunstanton’s design. Banham, The New Brutalism, 14.

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motion as a potent medium for communication and self-expression, and suggested thatthe most important aspect of school design was to provide environments that ensure‘freedom of movement, freedom to roam. The senses are only educated by endlessaction … and action requires space.’23

These diverse ideas on rhythm and movement became incorporated into Englisheducational policy and school design during the period of postwar reconstruction, ina manner that corresponds with Rose’s thesis. Story of a School, an educationalpamphlet published in 1949, provides a remarkable demonstration of motion as asocial technology. It narrates the experimental introduction of Rudolph Laban’s dancemethod at Steward Street, a socially disadvantaged school in Birmingham.24 Duringthe war, Laban gave dance movement seminars to schoolteachers, who found hisexpressive yet abstract dance technique to correspond with their pragmatist educa-tional philosophy. Pragmatism rejected predetermined forms of expression – such asfolk dance – since those limit the agency and creativity of the child. Laban’s vocabu-lary of motion, which allegedly arose from the body’s own biological rhythm, allowedamateur dancers to ‘discover’ and express to others their authentic self. Failure tomove in a manner that expressed the subject’s innate creativity was attributed topsychological inhibition. Arthur Stone, head teacher at Steward Street, reflected that:‘It took some time before we could free the child from his inhibitions, but, when thatdid occur, the children made their own patterns in the space about them as dictated bythe individual ideas they wished to express.’25 Timid, violent or destructive behav-iours were attributed to a ‘fear of freedom’, a concept developed by Erich Fromm andpopularised by Read. The task of the teacher was to liberate subjects from such fearin order to ‘enliven the contact between the self and the world’. This process ofmaking subjects receptive to experience was sequenced according to Whitehead’scyclic model of education: Initially the child’s body was engaged in repetitive, rhyth-mic movements. Next, the child was encouraged to express the self through motion,then to use it to communicate with others. Finally, the enactment of conflict whilestaging a dramatic play allowed children to release internal aggression and becomesocialised.

An education based on cycles of immersion and dramatic openings, rather thanupon a linear, uniform progress, entails the development of observational techniquesfor identifying the moment the student is ready to pass from one stage to the next,or when repetition is no longer productive. The text provides an example of howobservation is used in a feedback process to adapt instruction to the subjective state ofthe student:

One child, maybe, would reach this saturation point very quickly in colour, but could go onvery much longer before reaching that point using clay … if we kept the child’s interest,concentration and imagination at work, there would develop this self-discipline whichwould carry him through a greater period of time before he reached saturation point.26

23Read, Education through Art, 292.24For a thorough analysis of Story of a School and its impact on English education, seeCatherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, ‘Stories of a School or the Steward Street SchoolExperiment “Education through Art”, 1940–1950’ (unpublished manuscript), and CatherineBurke and Ian Grosvenor, ‘The Progressive Image in the History of Education: Stories of TwoSchools’, Visual Studies 22, no. 2 (September 2007).25A.L. Stone, Story of a School, Ministry of Education Pamphlet no. 14 (London: HMSO,1949), 14.26Ibid., 9.


The illustrations accompanying the text depict children immersed in activity withoutadult supervision. The physical environment of the school – corridors, floors,walls and furniture – is appropriated in ways that transcend their intended purpose(Figure 2]. Architects would incorporate such flexibility into the interior organisationof the postwar school by placing movable partitions between classrooms and thecorridor, allowing it to become a teaching space.Figure 2 Scene from Story of a School titled “When they were completely absorbed, the results were always satisfying.” Courtesy of the Institute of Education Archive.A two-volume study published by the Ministry of Education, Moving andGrowing (1952) and Planning the Programme (1953), integrated the experimental useof movement at Birmingham into a suggested physical education curriculum for allprimary schools.27 Authored by Diana Jordan, who was personally acquainted withStone’s educational work, the pamphlet substituted the romantic, confessional accountof Story of a School with an impersonal, empirical method for evaluating the child’sbodily movement. It presented the substitution of the mass movement of the drill withindividualised forms of physical exercise as more suitable for the postwar notion ofactive democratic citizenship, since ‘it is found that this independence gives a betteropportunity for the development of self-discipline than mass movement, whichdemands little more than passive obedience’.28 Apart from its symbolism, free move-ment was considered more productive as an instrument of knowledge, as it allowedthe teacher:

27Ministry of Education, Physical Education in the Primary School, Part 1 and Part 2(London: HMSO, 1952, 1953).28Physical Education in the Primary School: Part One; Moving and Growing, EducationPamphlet no. 24 (London: HMSO, 1952), 42.

Figure 2 Scene from Story of a School titled “When they were completely absorbed, there-sults were always satisfying.” Courtesy of the Institute of Education Archive.

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To see the difference between individuals and to observe the pace set by the children forthemselves, the enterprise of one child and the repetitiveness of another, or the fatigueand listlessness which, under a uniform régime, may go unnoticed.29

This culture of empirical observation redefined the relation between bodies and citi-zenship: it stressed the imperfections and variations between children, rather thanideal types. As a consequence, gender could be presented as superficial and insignifi-cant since, from an empirical standpoint, ‘differences between boys and girls are nogreater than the differences found among a group of either’.30

Following Whitehead’s conception of aesthetic education, the manual disseminatedLaban’s ‘grammatical movement’ to render the child’s movement while walking, inter-acting with others, and performing everyday chores such as cooking and home-making,harmonious and graceful. The new style of movement appeared to arise from the child’snatural ‘exuberance of expression’, and teachers were asked to value the child’s naturalvitality, rather than subdue it as an ‘undesirable and uncivilized’ mode of behaviour.31

In what can appear to be a contradiction to the ideals of observational clarity andharmonic grace, Moving and Growing also sought to intensify the expressivity ofmovement. Often staged in dramatically illuminated interiors (Figure 3), the photo-graphs illustrating the pamphlet evoked the archaic origins of drama and dance, bodilyarts that the text claims arise from ‘the need felt by people to come to terms with theirexciting experiences and to put them into shape or pattern of their own creation’.32

This Dionysian conception of collective movement provided the future citizen of thewelfare state with an expressive language with which to fashion an energetic ideal ofthe self, and to forge communal attachments based on shared, embodied sentiments‘during the sleep of reason’.Figure 3 Photograph from Moving and Growing illustrating a section titled “Movement as an art”.To conclude the exposition of the educational significance of movement, there isa remarkable, undated transcript of Christian Schiller’s lecture to physical educationteachers entitled ‘Time and Space on a Summer’s Day’. Schiller, who in his role asHM Inspector of Schools supported the Hertfordshire child-centred approach toschool building, established in his lecture a conceptual distinction between personalspace (subjective space in which the child moves and explores) and common space(the space the child share with others, the abstract, geometric space), and betweenpersonal time (the child’s own perception of duration) and common time (the objec-tive time of the clock and school routine). The process of growth is described as themastery of time and space:

Movement happens in time, but it takes place in space … I believe that young childrenfrom the earliest times are busy exploring space…. Lying on their back they kick lustily,pushing space away; they stretch out with their arms lovingly, embracing space; theycrouch into the smallest space possible, withdrawing from space. With these and othersimilar movements they explore and experience space, and express towards space theemotions they feel.33

29Ibid., 39.30Ibid., 28.31Ibid., 37.32Ibid., 67.33Christian Schiller, ‘Time and Space on a Summer’s Day. Spoken at Lady Mabel College ofPhysical Education, Wentworth Woodhouse, Rotherham, Yorks’. Institute of Education,London, Schiller Archive, DC/CS/0/1/(1). The undated manuscript is most likely dated to theearly 1950s.


Following Whitehead, Schiller conceptualised movement as having a rhythmicpattern: ‘almost from birth the mind–body behaves easily in a rhythm’. The task of theeducationist is to synchronise the child’s subjective perception of time–space withhow these categories operate in the external world. Schiller, who was profoundlyinfluenced by the experiment at Steward Street, argued for providing opportunity forfree expressive movement through which the child could become socialised. Using

Figure 3 Photograph from Moving and Growing illustrating a section titled “Movement asan art”.

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terms similar to Herbert Read’s, he located physical education within the psycholog-ical discourse of social reconstruction: ‘Awareness and command of time and space… is a major problem for on its solution depends the growth of balanced men andwomen who can contribute creatively to civilization’.34

Schiller’s poetic discourse of movement indicates that space and time becomemeaningful categories for educational practice, paralleling a similar development inarchitectural discourse: theoreticians such as Siegfried Giedion defined time, spaceand motion as fundamental categories of modern architecture.35 But the use of similarwords does not indicate conceptual affinity, as Giedion developed these terms inrelation to his conception of architecture as an expressive and representationalmedium of ‘high’ culture. In contrast, English educationists and architects understoodthese categories as pertaining to the experience of the ‘user’.

The architecture of educare

The authors of Moving and Growing suggested that the school ‘should be regarded notas a place of instruction, but as an instructive environment’.36 The environmentalunderstanding of architecture was simultaneously embraced by educationists andarchitects, leading to a period of intense collaboration between the two disciplinesduring the reconstruction period. There are several implications to this way of concep-tualising the space in which education takes place; in what follows, I will examinethose pertaining to movement, and how they permit a revision of the history of modernarchitecture in England, by rethinking the polemical opposition between the Hertford-shire and Hunstanton schools examined at the beginning of this essay as pertaining totwo different modes of functionalism that are associated with contrasting models ofthe subject.

During 1947 and 1948, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and theMinistry of Education jointly organised a series of conferences, publications and exhi-bitions to prepare the architectural profession for the massive school buildingprogramme required after the war. On the one hand, school experts such as DenisClarke Hall promoted the functional approach typical of the interwar period, in whichthe organisation of the school is derived from the objective analysis of quantifiablestandards for providing adequate amount of daylight, or the optimisation of the layoutto reduce inefficiencies in structure, building materials and space. Hunstanton followsthe guidelines laid out by Clarke Hall, who incidentally was the sole assessor of theHunstanton school competition (see Figure 1).37Figure 4 Hallfield Primary School, Bishop’s Bridge Road, Paddington, London. Lasdun Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

34Ibid.35Giedion’s ‘Space, Time and Architecture’ (1941) argued for an affinity between the theoryof relativity and modernist compositional techniques such as transparency andinterpenetration. In Mechanization Takes Command (1948) he claimed that ‘our thinking andfeeling in all their ramifications are fraught with the concept of movement’. SiegfriedGiedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 14. Adiscussion of motion in modernism is found in Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).36Ministry of Education, Physical Education in the Primary School Part 1, 43.37Hall provided diagrams analysing the most efficient classroom layout for providing thestandard quantitative requirement for light and ventilation, while reducing the amount ofstructural steel needed; these were applied to the letter in Hunstanton’s design. Denis ClarkeHall, ‘Secondary Schools’, RIBA Journal 55, no. 1 (November 1947): 7–12.


In contrast to this impersonal discourse, architects employed at Hertfordshire andother counties based their design of schools upon a subjective and qualitative evalua-tion of the experience of the occupant, the child. This had two different manifestations:the reconsideration of the school’s environmental systems according to a new scien-tific understanding of the subjective, time-sensitive attributes of sensory perception,and the shaping of the spaces of education to affect the child’s emotive interiority, inaccordance with the rhythmic conception of education.

The RIBA conference on schools hosted experts from the Building ResearchStation (BRS) who introduced the architectural public to a newly developed psycho-physical science of sensory perception to adjust environmental aspects such as light-ing, heating or acoustics to what children subjectively perceive as comfortable. Asdescribed in Towards a Social Architecture, illumination experts developed at theBRS methods for measuring the quality of light, and especially the subjectivephenomena of glare, which was first implemented in the design of lighting fixturesand windows in schools. Returning to the theme of rhythm, architects came to regardthe eye as a living muscle that requires its own cycle of concentration and relaxation– in opposition to the mechanical conception of the eye as a camera-like apparatus.This organic understanding was incorporated into the design of schools by addingvariety to invigorate the visual perception that otherwise might become desensitised.Hence the practice of shaping the layout of the outdoor school grounds to reduce glareand provide the eye with varying distances and light intensities and patterns to focuson (see Figure 1). David Medd, a Hertfordshire architect who later headed the Devel-opment Group at the Ministry of Education’s Architects and Building Branch, associ-ated such vibrant light quality with the experience of being alive:

This play and movement of light and shade brings life to our interiors. As the sun andclouds move, so does everything in a room move a little. It is important in education thatwe do not make people indifferent and insensitive to this manifestation of life.38

Complementing the treatment of light was the use of colour. In tandem with pragma-tist theory, colour perception was understood to be time sensitive and cyclic. Likeodour, it can initially invigorate, but this effect tends to fade in time or, conversely,become disturbing. Hues in spaces where children spent long durations weresubdued, while circulation spaces were painted with contrasting and sparklingcolours. Another parameter informing colour design was its reflective value, tocontrol glare and light ambience. The combined effect of light and colour wasdesigned to establish a vibrant, animated environment, in contrast with the earlierpractice of applying colour ‘defensively’ to protect walls from vandalism and dirt, orsymbolically, to represent the identity of the school. Postwar architectural environ-ments reflect the attempt to scientifically assess the effect of the environment on thechild’s senses, and organise its effects in space and time in a rhythmic manner, sinceit appeared to correspond with the underlying physiological and biological laws thatgovern ‘life’.

In addition to the promotion of a psychophysical understanding of the environ-ment, the conference included a presentation of the educational theme of growth. Theeducationist Molly Harrison defined to architects the purpose of progressive education

38David Medd, ‘People in Schools: an Attitude to Design’, RIBA Journal 75 (June 1968):268.

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as providing ‘the best opportunities for growth and to remove hampering influ-ences’.39 Harrison, who used the term ‘educare’ for the welfare state’s conception ofeducation as nurturing rather than scholastic,40 advanced the metaphor of the schoolas a place of ‘life’, suggesting that the school would be ‘a place full of life, activityand happiness’, but also that the building itself would be a living organism that could‘grow’ with the changing needs of children. In addition, she argued for a deterministiccause and effect relationship between the aesthetic properties of building and thechild’s behaviour:

No one who has much contact with children would deny that they are very strongly influ-enced by their immediate environment. In a pleasant, harmonious and appropriatebuilding they tend to behave in a much more civilized manner and actually become betterbalanced and more sensitive than they do if they grow up in an ugly, ill planned ormerely neutral environment.41

Architects were attracted to the architectural potential of expressing the conception ofthe child as a growing organism, as it corresponded with their conception of ‘organic’architecture, and were receptive to the idea that children are more sensitive than adultsto the aesthetic qualities of the school.42 John Harrison, the Chief architect of SurreyCounty Council argued that:

If the primary aim of education is to provide the most favourable conditions for growth– of body as well as mind – then the buildings must display the twin qualities of lightnessand grace, and the children’s awakening sense of beauty should not be stunted by aformidable and oppressive environment.43

Postmodern architectural and educational criticism was invested in deconstructingthe rhetorical association between certain formal modernist traits (such as ‘lightness’)and the psychological well-being of the child. But the point is not to evaluate the ‘truth-fulness’ of such a claim on behalf of children, or to criticise it as following a ‘deter-ministic’ mode of reasoning, but rather to uncover the practices of power and knowledgethat it puts into place. To adjust the layout of the school to the definition of the childas a growing organism, architects employed the same observational techniques usedby educationists to observe how children inhabit space. Harrison said that ‘The architectmust examine the daily programme and routine of the schools … [and] know whenthe floor ceases to be the toddler’s play space, and when the teacher becomes the focalpoint of audible teaching’.44 As seen in Story of a School, the meaning of space is related

39Molly Harrison, ‘The Educational Background’, Architects’ Journal 107, no. 2780 (May1948): 457. Harrison was a pioneer of museum educational programmes at the GeffryeMuseum.40This term reflects a debate over the meaning of education: its ambiguous etymology couldbe traced either to the Latin root educare, which refers to maternal nurture at home, or toeducere, which refers to instruction of knowledge by men.41Harrison, ‘The Educational Background’, 457.42An ‘organic’ current in modern architecture was identified after the Second World War bythe architectural historian Bruno Zevi in Towards an Organic Architecture (1945, Englishversion 1950). Zevi brought together the work of distinct architects such as E. Mendelssohn,F.L. Wright, and A. Aalto to advance a more ‘humane’ alternative to the machine aestheticstypical of interwar modernism.43John Harrison, ‘Nursery, Infant and Junior Schools’, RIBA Journal 55, no. 1 (November1947): 16.44Ibid., 15.


to its active appropriation by children. Second, and even more pertinent to the argumentof this essay, architects began to think of space itself in terms of cycles of immersionas experienced by the subject. In the words of David Medd:

To a child the floor can be home sweet home, or the Atlantic Ocean. I want a tinyspace in which I can be quiet and undisturbed with only a handful of people … I wanta chair on which I can balance and experiment; I want a chair in which I can curl upwith a good book.45

This subjective conception of space corresponds with the notion of an educationalrhythm made of cycles of concentration and relaxation, openness (the ‘ocean’) andinwardness (‘home’).

A building that displays how such ideas and practices have been crystallised in formis the Hallfield Primary School, Paddington, designed by Drake and Lasdun in 1952.Unlike Hertfordshire’s vibrant, lucid architecture of modular rectangular prisms, it wasinformed by the dramatic and expressive aspects of motion in Moving and Growing.Its animated layout represents education as a time-sensitive, dramatic process of rhyth-mic growth through interaction with the environment, and the oscillation between thesubjective states of openness and inwardness: the building is made to appear as if it isaffected by external forces as much as directed by its inner nature (Figure 4). It adapts

45Medd, ‘People in Schools’, 266.

Figure 4 Hallfield Primary School, Bishop’s Bridge Road, Paddington, London. LasdunArchive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

710 R. Kozlovsky

to its surrounding by folding and changing its form to preserve the existing mature trees,while the earth is moved in response to its curves, representing in formal terms White-head’s definition of education as the ‘achievement of varied activity … in the face ofits actual environment’. Ironically, it seems to recoil from the housing estate designedby the same architects some years before.

The school’s design engages with motion and emotion, bringing in equilibrium theopposing claims of rhythmic repetition and dramatic epiphany. The maze-like circu-lation of the building is a metaphor of education as a process of transformation anddiscovery of the self, following Whitehead’s non-linear conception of growth. For thekinetic subject, it renders motion self-conscious. The plan allows for two alternativepaths for accessing the classrooms – in the infant wing of the school, one can eitherfollow the curvilinear corridor or take a shortcut through a set of intimate outdoorspaces. In part, this is a practical solution that avoids long corridors for an urban schooltwice as large as the typical suburban Hertfordshire school. Such corridors werecondemned by educationists (and child-centred architects) as being ‘institutional’,hence oppressing growth; but this layout is also designed to invigorate the senses byexposing the child’s body to the outdoors. In the Junior section of the school, the corri-dor is curvilinear and cannot be seen at once, and has to be discovered in motion. Tointensify the experience of motion, its fin-like louvres provide two different prospects,depending on the direction of movement (Figure 5).Figure 5 Hallfield Primary School, Bishop’s Bridge Road, Paddington, London: passage on the first floor between the juniors’ entrance hall and the crush hall. Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection.Returning to the Infant school, the entrance to the leaf-like classroom and exit tothe garden are placed on the opposite side of an axis, a dynamic arrangement which isfurther animated by the spacing of two oblique corners between the three orthogonal

Figure 5 Hallfield Primary School, Bishop’s Bridge Road, Paddington, London: passage onthe first floor between the juniors’ entrance hall and the crush hall. Architectural Press Archive/ RIBA Library Photographs Collection.


corners (Figure 6). The classrooms are fitted with trapezoid tables which can begrouped in different combinations. Lasdun offered two comparative arrangements –frontal and group layout, signifying a shift from frontal seating arrangement whichfocuses the attention of static children exclusively on the instructor, to group seatingin a dynamic, multifocal classroom space, in which the teacher observes the self-initiated activity of the child; the plan describes seven different activities taking placesimultaneously. It resembles in its underlying logic another innovative institutiondealing with children from the same time period, the formless, open-ended activityspace of the adventure playground, where self-initiated and participatory activity isprescribed to endow subjects with agency while rendering their interiority into anobject of knowledge and expertise.Figure 6 Typical plan of an infants’ school classroom, Hallfield Primary School, Paddington.The most discreet demonstration of the indirect mode of power theorised by Roseis inscribed into the lavatories. In the same issue of the Architects’ Journal whereHarrison presented to architects the ideal of educare, Lasdun contributed an essay onthe design of nursery schools. It suggested that ‘a fixed observation window in thewall separating the playroom from the lavatories is recommended. This will allowsupervision without movement from the playroom.’46 The elevated window providesthe child with a sense of privacy needed for self-mastering the techniques of hygienewhile allowing the teacher to observe from the corridor.

Hallfield employed symbolism, narrative and the phenomenological properties ofmateriality and space to embody educare, following Herbert Read’s statement that ‘Theschool in its structure and appearance should be an agent, however unconscious in itsapplication, of aesthetic education’.47 The aim of its orchestration of movement wasnot to harmonise and enlighten through clarity, as in the Hertfordshire school, but todramatise, contrast and differentiate, by mimicking the vital forces of life and growth.

46Denys Lasdun, ‘Nursery Schools’, Architects’ Journal 107, no. 2780 (May 1948): 462.47Read, Education through Art, 291.

Figure 6 Typical plan of an infants’ school classroom, Hallfield Primary School, Paddington.

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Conclusion

The interest in the architecture of the postwar school reflects its relevance, not so muchas a model for emulation but as critical lens for examining the contemporary conditionof both education and architecture. As childhood is privatised as the obligation ofparents to prepare their children to succeed in a competitive globalised economy, andas education is increasingly shaped by the requirements of testing, the postwar schoolstands out as a monument for a time when the prospects of imagining a more humanefuture were channelled into children and their education. Equally so in architecture,when such sensuous, socially active environments may be evoked, as monuments, tocritique the contemporary tendency to produce and consume architecture as visualmedia. But one should keep in mind that it was precisely for the ambivalent status ofchildren as not yet citizens, as objects of social rights but not subjects of political rights,that they could become subjects of such technologies of aesthetic self-modulation. Itis not by chance then that the ideal subjects of postwar architectural functionalism werechildren, who, due to their immaturity, were more readily naturalised with biologicalmetaphors of enrichment and growth.

AcknowledgementsThe author wishes to thanks the editors for their generous assistance in developing the essayfor publication.

Notes on contributorRoy Kozlovsky is an assistant professor at the Northeastern University School of Architecture,Boston where he teaches architectural history and theory. He received his PhD in history andtheory of architecture at Princeton University in 2008. He is currently working on a manuscriptentitled ‘The Architecture of Childhood’, a study of environments designed for children suchas schools, playgrounds, clinics and housing estates during the postwar period in England.

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