Here Comes the Sun

Here Comes the Sun

Architecture and Public Space in
Twentieth-Century European Culture

Ken Worpole

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Copyright © Ken Worpole 2000

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Printed and bound in China

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Worpole, Ken,
Here comes the sun: architecture and p'ublic space in twentieth-
century European culture
1. Public spaces - Europe - Design 2. Public spaces - Social aspects -
Europe 3. City planning - Europe 4. Urban landscape architecture-
Europe 5. Architecture and society
I. Title
711.4'094' 0904

ISBN 1 86189 073 7

Title page: 'Look - the Sun!': cartoon by Arthur Wragg.

 Contents

Acknowledgements 7

The Body and the City:

An Introductory Essay 9

1 Here Comes the Sun: Port Sunlight,

Town Planning and the New Life 25

2 Our Northern Hearts: Architecture,

Design and the Art of Right Living 35

3 Live Out of Doors as Much as You Can:

The Architecture of Public Health 49

4 Bring the Landscape into the House:

Housing for the New Society 69

5 Parks, Pleasure Gardens and the

Democracy of the Open Air 86

6 Summer in the City: The Cult of the Lido 113

7 Limits to Growth: Nature

and Society Restored 129

Coda: Beneath City Skies:

New Parks in Europe 141

References 155
Index 165
Photographic Acknowledgements 168

This book grew out of a personal research project
which I undertook as the result of being awarded a
bursary by the Foundation for Urban and Regional
Studies in 1996, and I am grateful to Professor Ray
Pahl and his colleagues for that award, without which
it would never have got started.
Since then much of it has been written In
between bouts of paid work as a freelance researcher,
writer and policy adviser, particularly in the field of
urban policy and more specifically around issues to
do with public space, landscape, architecture and
environmentalism in the modern city, working for a
variety of different organizations. As a result, this
book is located in a field of crossed connections and
overlapping discourses and conversations. It is not a
work of architectural or social history per se, but
rather an attempt to elaborate on a passion for the
civic spaces and landscapes of the city, and to describe
some of the more robust achievements of European
social democracy in the provision of public health
and leisure in the twentieth century. It is about learn-
ing from history so that we might do things differ-
ently, and possibly better, when we come to do them
again. Because it was written from the standpoint of
someone who has one foot in research and the other
in policy, at times the writing seemed to move too
easily between description and prescription, an occu-
pational hazard of someone who is frequently
Acknowledgements
obliged to end an essay or position paper with a ten-
point action plan. I hope I have managed to avoid
this here, in order to allow the richness of the evi-
dence to make its own claims on the political imagi-
nation.
In the past four years in which I have been think-
ing about this book, and writing it, I have been
greatly assisted by advice and help from many quar-
ters, including people working on research projects
and studies in quite different policy areas or disci-
plines. I am therefore grateful to the following people
who knowingly or unknowingly helped shape this
book: Alan Barber, Charlotte Buys, Timo Cantell, lan
Christie, Hazel Conway, Gillian Darley, Roger
Deakin, Jan Gehl, Lars Gemz0e, Sten Goransson,
Patsy Healey, Maarten Hajer, Doreen Massey, Geoff
Mulgan, Robin Murray, Sylvie Nail, Jon Pape and
Katherine Shonfield. I also drew much inspiration
from the Town and Country Forum, an informal
seminar group that has now been meeting in London
for over three years, bringing together people from
quite different disciplines and political affiliations to
discuss issues of landscape, politics and identity,
organized by Roger and Sophie Scruton, together
with Anthony Barnett.
A special debt of thanks is also owed to Liz
Greenhalgh, Richard Hill, Tanis Hinchcliffe, David
Morley and Colin Ward, who read the final draft and
7
made invaluable comments on the text. In doing so
they rescued me - and more importantly the reader -
from a number of misinterpretations and errors of
fact. It is often a thankless task prising a writer away
from his (or her) fixed ideas and understandings, and
where they have not succeeded, I take full responsi-
bility for the resulting errors of accuracy or opinion.
I am grateful to Phillipa Lewis for invaluable assis-
tance with finding archive photographs.
Finally I want to thank my wife, Larraine, who
not only contributed most of the photographs repro-
duced in this book, but who has been a steadfast
companion on the journey - and journeys -
throughout. Whether we share the same interests and
passions because we have been together for so long,
or we have been together so long because we share
the same interests and passions, is simply one of life's
conundrums. But this book has been a labour of love
in every way.

8

And gradually, in this young city entirely dedicated
to the happiness of possessing good health, the
face of the doctor would fade, leaving a faint trace
in men's memories of a time of kings and wealth,
in which they were impoverished, sick slaves.
All this was so much day-dreaming; the dream
of a festive city, inhabited by open-air mankind, in
which youth would be naked and age know no win-
ter, the familiar symbol of ancient arcadias, to
which has been added the more recent theme of a
nature encompassing the earliest forms of truth -
all these values were soon to fade.
MICHEL FOUCAULT, The Birth of the Clinic, 1976 1
Architects, urban designers and landscape archi-
tects do not seem to feel at ease when confronted
with each other. A dialogue between representatives
of the ecological, historical and modern movements
THE BODY AND THE CITY: PUBLIC HEALTH AND
THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC SUBLIME
This book is about the (democratic) body and the
city; about life in the open. It is concerned with how,
at the beginning of the twentieth century, social
reformers, planners and architects tried to remake
the city in the image of a sunlit, ordered utopia. It
deals principally with developments in Northern
The Body and the City:
An Introductory Essay
has yet to begin. The various countries from north-
ern and southern Europe do have entirely different
backgrounds and no common language, even if
English is universally understood.
GERRIT SMIENK, Modern Park Design, 1995 2
Parks are life's parentheses, park-gates the lunulae,
within which you enter expansively if temporarily
upon yourself... Parks are life's leafy truces, inter-
regnums, pauses for thought; life's instant mini-
holidays, its little Venices where you wander round
and round sifting, savouring, worrying at your past,
worrying at your future, beginning at last to plan
anew, as you find your tracks coming back to meet
you and see your shadow rearing ahead, like a pre-
mon ition of you r life.
PAUL DRIVER, 'Parenthesis on Parks', 19963
Europe, though these were influential far beyond. A
prodigious spread of demand for new institutions
and buildings in Europe in the early years of this cen-
tury arose directly from the rise of democracy. A
newly enfranchised citizenry and its political organi-
zations created pressures for better housing, health,
education, transport, public landscapes and even
leisure facilities.
9
 Growing affluence and technical innovation also
aided this process, creating unparalleled opportuni-
ties for architects and planners. There is no question
that radical developments in architecture in Europe
quickly came to have global impacts and repercus-
sions. It was widely believed by architects and plan-
ners at the time that there was a new world to win,
and a completely new pattern-book of buildings and
landscapes that needed to be invented. With the
exception of the early and significant international
influence of Frank Lloyd Wright, it remains largely
the case that 'Europe gave the world this new archi-
tecture'.4
Much has already been written about architec-
tural modernism, and how the ideas, designs and
buildings of people like Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier,
Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright changed
the shape of towns and cities throughout the world.
This book concentrates less on the buildings
(although it does deal with some of them in the early
chapters) and more on the planning of the spaces in
between: the vital public connective tissue of the
twentieth-century city, whether in the form of parks,
public squares, playgrounds, open-air museums,
promenades, lidos and other public leisure facilities.
It seeks to find a way of talking about history, archi-
tecture, planning and social policy that is, to use the
words of the architectural historian Andrew Saint,
'somewhere between the blinkered tradition of judg-
ing buildings by appearance alone, and a perspective
of such social breadth as to allow no focus at all'.5 My
own recent work with colleagues on issues of public
culture and public space has also helped to formulate
the ideas in the pages that follow. 6 Rather like Ray-
mond Williams, whose book The Country and the
City has been an intellectual companion for many
years, I also feel these buildings and landscapes as a
10
kind of 'personal pressure', because, as a child of the
post-war social democratic settlement, I was formed
in and by them.
The rise of social democracy in the twentieth
century, particularly in Europe, is widely studied in
political theory. Surprisingly little attention, how-
ever, has been given to the question as to whether
social democracy ever developed an aesthetic. I
believe that it did, and that it was a civic aesthetic
focused on collective provision allied to modern
design, and strongly predicated on a belief in the
benefits of clean water, sunlight and fresh air. It was
an aesthetic based primarily on public health and the
reform of the stunted, malnourished bodies of the
worker and his family. For a while social democracy
seemed to form a natural alliance with architectural
modernism, although this was as much to do with
their common universalizing energies in this period,
as it was with a shared set of ethical or cultural
beliefs. Certainly, the principal actors involved in
both movements had little in common personally,
one suspects: the social democratic politicians were
more likely to have emerged from trades unions,
nonconformist religious backgrounds and left-wing
social movements; the modernist architects were
more likely to have come from well-educated, bour-
geois families, rich enough to afford the lengthy aca-
demic and technical training. While it lasted,
however, the two forces together created a whirlwind
that changed for ever the faces of towns and cities
throughout Europe.
Parallel to these ideals was the social-democratic
mission to secure the health and well-being of the
people from the cradle to the grave, an interest not
without a large degree of paternalism. As Alison
Ravetz and Richard Turkington have noted in the
case of British social policy, 'In 1914, the state could
not even reliably know how much people earned;
when it emerged victorious in 1945 there were very
few areas of life, including the interior of the home,
into which it had not intruded'.7 The growing impor-
tance of urban design and provision was interwoven
with the growth of the local and national state.
This modernizing project was about trans-
parency and accessibility too, and was intent on
opening the doors and windows of the dark and for-
bidding buildings of the old order, and letting the
new light in. The young Lenin, for example, was
given to pronouncing that 'the light of the new world
shines through the windows of the old.' However,
after 70 years of command Communism, the grim
Lubianka remained land-locked at the junction of
Novaya Ploshchad and Teatrainy Proyezd in
Moscow's decaying inner circle, the light of that par-
ticular new world Lenin glimpsed long eclipsed. It is
a characteristic of buildings and landscapes that they
often outlast the belief systems and political cultures
that brought them into being, remaining a kind of
sedimented geological layer in the changing and
developing historical landscape. This is why cities are
so fascinating, as archaeologies of power and chang-
ing cultural mores.
The new urban institutions and spaces were
regarded as the key public settings for the creation of
an active public culture in what were becoming more
pluralist societies. I have written elsewhere of the his-
torical relationship between the growth of the 'public
domain' and the development of public space and
public culture, noting that definitions of the public
always have political, institutional, architectural and
spatial characteristics in modern cities. 8 Indeed it is
often the case that pluralist values first emerge in
conflictual forms over the use of public space and
public resources - sometimes violently so - before
they are negotiated and resolved over time through
legislation and adaptation. The processes of negotia-
tion and adaptation of spaces and places in the city
always seem more interesting and important to me
than the processes of planning and regulation.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that a celebra-
tion of the free, unregulated and elemental space of
the city park, and the many pleasures and solaces it
offers to the urban congregation, leavens this book.
More so today, when the park's fluid rhythms and
seasonalities are contrasted to the airless gloom and
occasional glitter of that other great gathering-point
of the modern city - the shopping mall. In these new
palaces of modern consumption, the lighting levels,
interior colour schemes and background music are
consciously arranged to induce a semi-narcoleptic
trance, reducing the average human eye-blink rate of
32 per minute to 14 per minute until it is time to pay.9
One intuitively feels that in the modern city these
two cultural spaces stand at opposite ends of a great
cultural arc or spectrum, and at some point in the
future we may have to choose between them.
A QUESTION OF SPACE
Time and again in the pages that follow we shall
come to the issue of space, and it is in the nature of
space - its social construction, so to speak - that it is
largely given meaning by use, and that this use itself
is structured and patterned by time. It is the people
who use space who 'create' it just as much as do those
who design it; indeed, arguably more so. Reflecting
on the design of space without taking into account
the dynamics of its use is not very helpful, and as
Doreen Massey has observed, we need a way of
thinking about the dynamics and social relations of
space that 'releases the spatial from the realm of the
dead'.lO
11
 Yet this is still largely how architects, planners
and landscape architects continue to think about
public space. Hence the predominance of pho-
tographs published in architectural and landscape
journals that exclude the human presence. People
tend to go missing in the pristine imagery of archi-
tecture and design, where life's untidiness is regarded
as an aesthetic intrusion. It is often argued that the
invention of photography significantly damaged the
practice and culture of architecture, for in an instant
it seemed to shift the focus of attention from the use
and enjoyment of buildings and settings to a preoc-
cupation with the visual aesthetic.
So little has been the value accorded to public
space in the recent past, that planners simply used
the acronym SLOAP (Space Left Over After Plan-
ning) as a catch-all descriptive category of this vital
urban resource. In a city like London, for example,
the hard surfaces of roads, car parks and pavements -
let alone green spaces - cover as much land as do all
the houses, flats and buildings, but receive only a
fraction of the attention. ll
Yet, as Christopher
Alexander has pointed out: 'Without common land
no social system can survive.'12 Public space is there-
fore of the utmost social and political importance,
since it inescapably structures the ways in which peo-
ple physically relate to one other in the daily transac-
tions of life. Like air and sunlight, public space is one
of the vital elements that allows us to survive and
flourish as citizens and social beings.
The principal concerns of planners and archi-
tects have usually been for the buildings per se, with a
particular interest in the exterior fa<;ade (which plan-
ning' increasingly a form of development and con-
trol, is often keen to regulate or veto). The public
domain has often been an afterthought: some poly-
chrome paving, a few catalogue low-maintenance
12
trees or shrubs, some hanging-baskets, a vandal-
proofbench or two, and the job is done. Compound-
ing this problem is the fact that the design of public
space is sometimes the work of planners, sometimes
of architects, and sometimes of landscape architects:
the lack of professional clarification about spatial
typologies, histories and morphologies reflects the
low status in which much public space, and therefore
its design, management and maintenance, is held
today.
Yet some of the problems that attend the debate
about the value of open space derive from issues of
definition. While trying to offer some provisional
definitions of my own, I am aware that many words
and phrases are often used interchangeably. For my
purposes, open space includes green open space, but
also covers the city's paved and hard surfaces too.
Public open space is that which is legally accessible to
the public, although as we know, some parks are
locked from dusk to dawn, and there are a number of
spaces in the modern city that the public may believe
to be open to all, and de facto are, but are legally in
private ownership. Public space is much the same as
public open space, but the term is also used to
describe spaces within municipal buildings, such as
museums, galleries and libraries. Sometimes refer-
ences are made to the public realm or public domain
in its physical rather than intellectual form, so that
while the reference is still largely to public space, it is
given a richer cultural inflection.
These confusions multiply in translation. In the
UK, open space usually means green space, whereas in
Sweden, green space is always called that specifically.
The Swedish law of Allemansriitt, for example, allows
anybody to walk anywhere and even to camp any-
where - even in private gardens - for one night. The
laws relating to land, commons, property and access
are complex, and are likely to remain so, and vary
from country to country. Similarly, notions of 'pub-
lic' and 'private' are equally fluid in today's urban
lifestyles. In recent research into park use and policy
in the UK, my colleagues and I were surprised to hear
people describing their local park as a private and
intimate space where they went for sanctuary and
reflection, contrasting this to the overly public nature
of the modern home, which at times they found to be
noisy with intrusive communications. If the public
park is now sometimes seen as a private place, and
the private home a public place, then we have to be
adaptable in our use of language. In the pages that
follow I try to adhere to my own definitions, but this
is not always possible.
In retrospect it seems that at the high point of
modernism, many planners, architects, landscape
designers and city administrators passionately shared
a common vision of the good life, an integrated
understanding as to how cities might work in all their
aspects, including the integration of indoor and out-
door life. They did not always succeed in their inten-
tions' but they worked together to try. With the
collapse of modernism, and of a modernizing poli-'
tics, various urban design professionals have
retreated into their own intellectual constellations -
self-referential orbits of conferences, technical jour-
nals, learned institutions and even superstar cultures,
endlessly rotating, rarely connecting. Planning has
become defensive, preoccupied with control and the
avoidance of risk; architecture has become a global
star system for technical wizardry; landscape archi-
tecture has, in the UK at least, either retreated into a
kind of academic horticultural fastidiousness or,
even worse, a catalogue culture of standardized street
furniture and municipal hanging-baskets. Mean-
while, environmentalists stutter and rage from the
sidelines. Many claim to love the cities they have
helped create, but whenever possible escape them for
the felicities of the rural idyll.
This is why I find the observation cited at the
opening of this chapter by the Dutch landscape
architect Gerrit Smienk so prescient. It was made at a
European colloquium of architects and landscape
designers held at Rotterdam in February 1992,
although significantly without any British represen-
tation. Nothing today could be more urgent in the
field of urban planning than to bring together the
social, the ecological and the architectural in an inte-
grated and dynamic way in the renewal of the mod-
ern city, yet this ambition remains elusive. That same
colloquium was also largely in agreement with the
view that, until very recently, there have been distinct
Nordic and Latin approaches to these questions. The
Nordic approach has been more functionalist,
increasingly ecological, and more interested in the
urban fringes and suburbs, while Latin cultures
remain more concerned with creating convivial
spaces in the heart of the city. Today there is greater
integration of these two approaches in many cities,
though often without any overarching rationale.
A shared understanding of how cities now func-
tion, of the essentially democratic nature of urban
public space, of an urban landscape aesthetic that is
also an ecological and ethical system, is badly needed
today. So too is a recognition of the importance of
bodily health and well-being in the planning of
urban affairs. These things are important because
they arise from an understanding of modern urban
life in the open, en plein air, rather than from what is
the principal architectural interest - the design and
structure of volumetric; enclosed space. Despite the
many counter-attractions of the Arcadian, I remain
fascinated by the life of the street and public square,
13
whether in the noisy urban parade of a summer's
night or during the dog-walking, stale beer-scented
quiet of a Sunday morning. I am similarly captivated
by the brightly coloured sports teams in the munici-
pal park, as well as by the lovers strolling arm in arm
past an ornamental park lake. The street games of
children continue to intrigue and give pause for
thought to city dwellers like myself, as I am sure do
the episodic street-corner conversations one catches
in the wind, or the funeral processions that unex-
pectedly arrest the traffic and human flow. These
urban settings, while doubtlessly romanticized, still
teach a lesson in human diversity and adaptability,
and these are the architectural settings that delight
me most - more so than the architectonics of the pri-
vate house, the apartment block, the office building,
school or factory, to which most architectural litera-
ture is devoted.
MODERNIZING THE BODY
Life in the open was a particular concern of the early
town planners and social reformers, with their
dreams of popular release from the crabbed confines
of overcrowded slums and terraces. They pictured
the good life as the youthful, working-class body
made muscular by exercise, fluid and sleek from
aquatics and swimming, and made golden by the
health-giving rays of the sun. Out of the darkness
and miasma of the nineteenth-century European city
came a dream of health, sunlight and the body
reformed.
Yet from the outset this project was fraught with
danger. The body in question was generally assumed
to be white. While some advocates of the new role of
the body in European culture referred back to the
ideals of ancient Greece, the fons et origo of human
physical and intellectual perfectibility, others privi-
14
leged a concept of the Aryan body, managing to con-
flate racial histories of Nordic and Germanic peoples
into a single genetic lineage. There is no doubt that
the concern with the perfectibility of the body was
often interwoven with a concern for the new 'science'
of eugenics, and that every image of the body
reformed was ambiguously also an image of racial
superiority, and even physical triumphalism. Within
this set of cultural assumptions, illness itself came to
be seen as decadent and morally culpable. Further-
more, the frequent emphasis on seeking out the
purer air of the mountains and forests was also often
a search for a more essentialist national identity and
destiny.
The seemingly unproblematic espousal of bodily
perfection within early twentieth-century white
European culture was of course put into question by
the rise of Fascism, particularly in its German
National Socialist form. Nazism's preoccupation
with racial purity culminated in the genocidal poli-
cies designed to erase all possibilities of miscegena-
tion' as well as the extermination of many already
suffering from physical and mental incapacitation or
weakness. The chasm-like fault-line in the ideology
of racial superiority became evident at the 1936
Berlin Olympics, when the black American athlete
Jesse Owens won so many gold medals, to the con-
sternation of Hitler and the National Socialist Party.
Even so, it wasn't until the liberation of the concen-
tration camps in 1945 that the full horrors of such
racially determined ideologies became finally clear
for all the world to see.
It has subsequently become difficult to explore
this particular strand of European history and cul-
ture, notably the alliance between modernity and
bodily perfection, as in retrospect it appears so sus-
pect and malign, as well as having gone so disas-
trously wrong. Yet at the time, these concerns about
health and fitness, and the social policies that arose
out of it, were thought to be progressive and enlight-
ened. And in many ways they were. But culture and
barbarism, as Walter Benjamin noted on more than
one occasion, are two guests in the same house. One
of the realizations that political maturity brings is
that intentions and outcomes are rarely the same
thing, and that every attempt to make it new - eco-
nomically, politically, culturally - is fraught with the
possibility of disaster. But each generation carries on
trying.
Despite such reservations, the movement to
bring together planning, architecture and social pol-
icy is a remarkable, if in parts disastrous, episode in
the making of modern Europe, and one still worth
telling. The modernist dream of the sunlit utopia is
also interesting because it was still a vision of the city,
a dynamic, active city, not a model suburb or self-
contained community, nor even those post-war
estates and banlieux which the French critic Fran<;ois
Maspero dismissed bitterly as (a landscape delivered
in bulk'.1 3
ARCHITECTURE, LANDSCAPE AND THE MODERN
SUBLIME
The wish to integrate planning and urban policy
quickened at the beginning of the twentieth century.
By 1909 in the UK, for example, there was a School of
Civic Design established at Liverpool University,
with a Chair funded by the philanthropist William
Lever that was occupied by Thomas H. Mawson, a
professional architect and landscape designer. Maw-
son, a prodigious and energetic professional,
assumed that there was a body of thinking and prac-
tice that combined a social philosophy of urban plan-
ning and architecture, with an interest in landscape
and horticulture, sport and public health. Among
many other achievements, he was jointly responsible
with Patrick Geddes for the famous (Dunfermline
Plan', which sought to integrate town planning and
public health, along with a deeper understanding of
local life and culture. 14 Today, almost 100 years later,
such a vision and body of thought about civic design
would still be regarded as radical; in many ways
developments since then, particularly since the Sec-
ond World War, have been stalled, or even forced
into retreat.
As we shall see, the health centre, the sanato-
rium, the public housing estate, the open-air school,
the sports park, the lido and even the cemetery
became chosen commissions and projects for many
of the early modernist architects. Some of the most
innovative social, architectural and landscaping ideas
radiated outwards from the Scandinavian countries
(and from The Netherlands also), described by G. E.
Kidder Smith in 1962 as (the architectural paladins of
the modern movement for thirty years'.1 5 There is
more about the North and Centre of Europe in this
book than there is about the South, and the differ-
ences between the separate urban traditions remain
fascinating and complex.
The impulse to explore these themes arose as a
result of a wintry and sobering visit I made in 1996 to
the Stockholm Woodland Cemetery (illus. 1). I had
travelled in Scandinavia many times before, but dur-
ing that visit this single landscape got beneath my
skin and came to haunt me. For it seemed a peerless
attempt to weld together democratic ideals with a
sense of the ineffable and illimitable, the undulating
forms of the pre-historic with the hard-edged mod-
ern, the natural and the civic, the serene and the dis-
quieting. It has silenced all critics since by its sheer
emotional power: a rare glimpse of what I like to
15

think of as 'the social democratic sublime'. With its
judicious use of natural materials and the finely
judged handling of space and sightlines, every detail
offers and exerts many levels of meaning and associa-
tion on whoever visits it. It is culture and nature
merged triumphantly.
As someone who started out by teaching English,
and later turned to writing about politics and litera-
ture, I came rather late to an interest in architecture,
urban place-making and the pleasures of topography.
Yet it is clear that town planning was among the most
significant innovations of twentieth-century social
thought and policy, the influences of which now per-
meate and structure the ways in which millions of
people live, not just in Europe but throughout the
world. Ideas about the relationship between human
ideals and the built forms required to express them
have a long history. European thought from the time
ofRousseau, Goethe, Coleridge and other Romantics
included the belief that man could regain his natural
16
1 Stockholm
Woodland Cemetery,
one of the architec-
tural and landscap-
ing masterpieces of
the 20th century.
Architects: Erik
Gunnar Asplund and
Sigurd Lewerentz.
Constructed between
1915-61.
innocence in the right settings, and there was then a
great intellectual interest in the idea of model com-
munities. A number of attempts were made by Euro-
pean emigrants to engage in such experiments in the
Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
There were also experiments, some of which were
utopian in spirit, to order human affairs through the
built design of model communities in the UK, such as
New Lanark, Port Sunlight, Saltaire and Letchworth
Garden City.'6 In France there were the highly
influential communitarian ideas of Charles Fourier
(1772-1837), as well as those of the architect Claude-
Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806), who had anticipated such
model communities in his plans for an ideal city at
Chaux in the late eighteenth century. In Italy 'The
Ideal City' of Vincenzo Scamozzi was actually built,
along perfect geometrical lines (illus. 2,3). Town plan-
ning, we surmise, often expresses and embodies
deeply held intellectual and political convictions.
Every configuration of built space, and its relationship
to the street and the city beyond, always expresses a
model or ideal of social relationships - a vision of the
better life. Even today, much social policy takes its
bearings from an ideal imaginary community,
whether the urban village, the vibrant downtown eth-
nic quarter, the mixed-tenure apartment block, the
new town or even the electronic 'Sim City:
Stockholm Woodland Cemetery
The original design by Erik Gunnar Asplund and
Sigurd Lewerentz was called simply 'Forest', or
Tallum (tall is Swedish for pine-tree). 'Forest
space' informs and characterizes much Scandina-
vian architecture of the twentieth century, with its
free rhythms and asymmetries, creating the free-
dom to move through a changing set of markers
and parallaxes. From without, however, such
designs acquire a density and solidity. Knowing
the difference between the wood and the trees is
central to understanding a peculiarly Scandina-
vian sense of the relationship between the individ·
ual and the collective, or the self·absorbed urban
flaneur and the teeming crowd. One is always a
part of the other.
Apart from the return to pre-historic forms,
the influences were also rather painterly. On enter-
ing the main gate, all that can be seen is a view of
a gentle but massive snow-covered grass knoll and
an uninterrupted view of the iron-grey sky. One-
third/two-thirds: the classical landscape propor-
tions, connected only by a vast granite cross that
locks earth and sky together. The symbolic mean-
ing of the cross remains in dispute. It is based on
While much has been published on competing
ideologies of architecture and the built form, rather
less has been written about the spaces in between, and
while Charles Jencks is quite right to describe archi-
tecture as the quintessential political art because 'it is
utterly implicated in the public realm',17 today it is
urban planning together with landscape architecture
a recurring image in the paintings of Caspar David
Friedrich (1774-1840), generally assumed to be
German but in fact a Swedish national by birth. In
many of Friedrich's landscapes there is at least
one wayfarers' cross, a sign of hope in an other-
wise abandoned world. Asplund and Lewerentz
claimed that the cross was open to non-Christian
interpretations, and quoted Friedrich himself: 'to
those who see it as such, a consolation; to those
who do not, simply a cross'.
To the side of the cross is a path that leads up
the hill to the Monumental Hall, a vast, angular,
open-plan colonnaded temple in a style that
mixes National Romanticism with a rather aggres-
sive functionalism. The views everywhere are of
artificial ponds, earth mounds, oak circles, elm
groves and natural pine forest, and it is deep in
the last that the insignificant memorials and
grave-markers are mostly hidden. The fact that an
incipient social democracy, allied to a developing
architectural style, could so effortlessly create
such a haunting and benign setting continues to
haunt my own political imagination.
17
2 'The Ideal City': Palma·Nova,
plan of the fortified city
designed by the Italian
architect, Vincenzo Scamozzi
(1552-1616).

3 'The Ideal City': aerial

photograph of Palma·Nova.
- in constant tension with commercial interests and
global design imperatives - that now provides one of
the most dominant influences on the shape and feel of
where and how people live. The modern city is being
transformed daily by new development, yet whether
there is any overarching philosophy of democratic
planning or set of guiding principles about what it is
we want from cities, remains disputed.
If the forms of building and the spaces within fre-
quently reflect social relations and can be socially con-
stitutive of them, then the spaces beyond equally
pattern the social relations of everyday life. If one were
to consider just some of the landscape and planning
types and configurations still present in many con-
4 Deer park in Clissold Park, east London. This 18th·century park still exists in what is
now one of London's most densely populated inner·city boroughs.
temporary urban townscapes, one realizes how much
of the material world that we inhabit is layered and
patterned by earlier formations: the walled city, the
deer park (illus. 4) and the royal chase, the country
house drive, the university quadrangle, the imperial
avenue, the Georgian town square, the village green,
the eighteenth-century urban rookery, the cathedral
close, the North American democratic street grid, the
Bismarckian villenkolonien (villa colony), the Hauss-
manesque boulevard, the nineteenth-century indus-
trial working-class 'back to backs', the Dutch
traffic-calming woonerf, the Jeffersonian commons,
the pitiless ten-lane Moscow expressways, the Las
Vegas 'strip', the nineteenth-century German burger-
19
park and its twentieth-century successor, the
Volkspark, the garden suburb, the allotment-gardens
(in Germany the Kleingarten; in Denmark the koloni-
haven: illus. 5), the edge city, Main Street, the Stock-
holm urban parkway system, Barcelona's 150 new
public squares (planned under Franco but only built
under the .conditions of social democracy), Karl-
Marx Hof and the workers' flats of 1920S Red Vienna,
the New York brownstone and the Harlem stoop, la
ville radieuse and the unite d'habitation, the gated
community, the urban ghetto, the executive estate,
and now an inhabited Disney village - each configu-
ration possesses its own weltanschaung, its semiology
and way oflife, its very 'structure of feeling'.
5 Nokken Allotment Colony and Self·Build Community, Copenhagen.
20
Yet much political and intellectual theory has
generally eschewed serious consideration of the built
or planned form as an overwhelming influence on
social and political life. For example, in what is
regarded as a magisterial study of the early twentieth-
century European zeitgeist, H. Stuart Hughes in Con-
sciousness and Society (1979) only explored the work
of philosophers, sociologists and literary figures.
There was no mention of Frederich Le Play, Ebenezer
Howard, Patrick Geddes, Camillo Sitte, Le Corbusier,
Hendrik Petrus Berlage, among others, whose ideas
and material achievements especially helped to shape
the fabric and texture of European life and culture
from the turn of the century right up until the pre-
sent day. The architectural historian Thomas A.
Markus has noted the same tendencies towards his-
torical exclusion, finding that 'Historians and art
critics dealing with the creative arts have excluded
architecture.... How is it that both the historians and
the critics of art and society deny buildings the power
to transform society?,18 I happen to believe that land-
scapes and townscapes shape individual and collec-
tive destinies even more than individual buildings
do. Fortunately, in recent years the contribution of
geographers and cultural historians has focused
attention on the spatial characteristics of modern
economic and social life.
Similarly, recent work of an anthropological or
structuralist nature on landscape and built forms has
been invaluable to a more experiential way of under-
standing what goes on in cities, and the types of
space that cities themselves have generated. As Karen
A. Franck and Lynda H. Schneekloth have suggested
in a fascinating and provocative collection of essays,
'At the approach of the next millennium, we live in a
world that has been transformed from mostly found
9
to mostly constructed.'1 In their persuasive argu-
ments for using 'type' constructs as a way of under-
standing how space is structured, they argue that
types and ways of typing are used to produce the
material world and to give meaning to the human
presence in it, and yet while they guide and constrain
how people think about space, 'they remain implicit
and largely invisible.'
As a distinct form of knowledge about the world,
and one that needs to be much more developed
within the discussion about place-making in archi-
tectural theory, types can refer not only to a whole
range of existing places, but to ones that have still to
be invented. The use of such imaginative forms in the
production of categories of space and place helps
guard against the continuous drive within planning
discourses to over-define, categorize and then rigidly
control new typologies of place, especially when the
processes of separation and exclusion come into play,
as in zoning, for example.
Modernism was certainly not without its major
faults in this regard, although what was most inter-
esting about the early years of modernism in Europe
was the dynamic struggle between the vitalism and
eurythmic energies of the bodily culture it espoused,
and its counter-tendency to rationalize and separate
out the distinct zones of home, industry, commerce
and leisure at the same time. Similarly, while classical
and Baroque architecture had very clear typologies of
form and function in building types, it was mod-
ernism that took the initiative in breaking down the
boundaries between indoors and outdoors in much
more conscious ways. So while I am deeply interested
in these typological ways of thinking about space, I
am also still intrigued by the social and political rela-
tions and forces that continually seek to modify or
transform them.
THE POETICS OF PLACE
This symptomatic failure by much social and politi-
cal theory, until very recently, to take seriously the
work of those intellectuals and professionals who
sought to improve or mould the landscapes, cities,
streets and buildings in which people live out their
lives remains remarkable. It has been left principally
to literature and film to explore the relationship
between place and emotion, or the many forms of
transference and projection between sensibility and
setting which structure so much of how we think and
feel about being at home in the world, or in the city.
When I first visited Stockholm in 1964, the first of
many visits to a city that fascinates and unsettles me
21
In equal measure, I had already read Graham
Greene's England Made Me, which helped fix for ever
my experience of the city and its night-time bridges
and waterside boulevards. I had also seen Ingmar
Bergman's film Summer with Monica, with its dream-
like evocation of an illicit boat journey from Slussen
out to the. archipelago in the pale light of dawn. I
cannot think about Stockholm without recourse
either to the novel or the film, both of which helped
me construct and distil an interior narrative about
that city and my memories of it.
In the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo thought
that the novel had displaced architecture as the prin-
cipal means of representing metaphysical and civic
ideals. Today it is likely that our sense of nineteenth-
century Paris or London derives as much from the
novels of Balzac or Dickens as it does from Viollet-le-
Duc or Richard Norman Shaw. In the twentieth cen-
tury one thinks selectively of James Joyce, Virginia
Woolf, Alfred Doblin, Heinrich Ball, Georges
Simenon, Raymond Chandler, Joan Dideon, Don De
Lillo, Buchi Emecheta or lain Sinclair as writers who
in different ways help us visualize and understand
the distinct morphologies and living characteristics
of various cities.
Architects and film critics have in recent years
begun to discuss the extent to which cinematic
imagery now structures our way of looking at cities
and urban cultures, citing the work of film directors
such as Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, Federico
Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais, Jean-
Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Aki Kaurismaki,
Abbas Kiarostami and Martin Scorsese as among the
most influentia1. 20 Films such as Godard's Alphaville
(1965), Ridley Scott'sBladerunner (1982) and
Matthieu Kassowitz's La Haine (1995) have shaped
the way we think about the modern city in a period
22
of social crisis. Moving images now count for more
than drawings and elevations, or artists' impressions.
When we dream of cities we dream of teeming and
amorphous emotions, of powerful currents, force-
fields and dark eddies, not of plans, grids or clear
sightlines.
A number of architects I have spoken to admit
that film-makers, novelists and poets often under-
stood the city and urban processes much better than
they did. They welcomed the growing efforts to link
architectural theory and film theory, referring posi-
tively to such pioneering studies as Siegfried
Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler, which looked at
how the early German Expressionist film-makers
(and set-designers, those architects of the simu-
lacrum) had portrayed the city and its labyrinthine
spatial and political terrors.
Indeed, since the invention of film, the city and
the life of the street have been among the most con-
stant subjects for exploration and representation.
Film-makers became interested in architecture
because the majority of early films were studio-based
and thus required sets to be built: facsimiles of castle
interiors, bourgeois apartments, tenement houses or
run-down streets. In films such as Die Hintertreppe
(Backstairs, 1921), director Leopold Jessner and film
designer Paul Leni created a sinister, non-naturalistic
street setting of crooked tenements and twisted stair-
cases, lit in a grotesque chiaroscuro of shadow and
light. The 'haunted street' became a cinema genre in
its own right. 21 So too did the 'symphony of the city'
in carefully edited montage films such as Fritz Lang's
Metropolis (1926), Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les
heures (1926) purporting to show daily life on the
streets of Paris, WaIter Ruttman's Berlin, the Sym-
phony of a Great City (1927) and Dziga Vertov's The
Man with the Movie Camera (1929). In these films it is
the relationship between the built form of the city
and the way people use it that comes to the fore, and
in ways that still photography rarely addresses.
The additional element that film has brought to
the representation of architecture is time. Many of
these films are constructed precisely to show the life-
cycle of the city, the changing patterns of use, the
frenzied rhythms as well as the dolours and hiatuses
of the urban experience. Some film-makers have
sought directly to represent the Nervenleben of urban
life, which they had found expressed in Georg
Simmel's classic analysis of the psychological effects
of urban living on mental life. By contrast, the semi-
documentary film Menschen am Sonntag (People on
Sunday, 1930) made by Robert Siodmak and Billy
Wilder portrayed a group of young working-class
Berliners in their leisure time, enjoying each other's
company, travelling out of the city to the woods and
the beaches of the Wannsee to swim and sunbathe, to
flirt and to play. Such filmic images of city life, which
came to the fore again in the cinema-verite of French
new wave directors such as Truffaut, Godard and
Melville, or the Italian directors of film cartolina
(moving postcards), for example Nanni Moretti's
delightful Dear Diary (1995), remain more resonant
and affecting than the static, two-dimensional repre-
sentations of architectural and landscape imagery.
Both film and fiction, then, drew some of their
generic forms from architectural typologies, whether
from the street, the tenement block, the rooming-
house, the public housing estate or suburban villa.
Elsewhere I have written about how the shape of 'the
London novel' in the twentieth century can be
related to the move from the street to the interior,
and of how the many variants of London life are
explored through the drama of the tenement build-
ing or the seedy rooming-house through to the
'Hampstead novel' of more recent times. 22 Ways of
understanding cities today through their 'imageabil-
ity' and 'readability', to use two phrases suggested by
Kevin Lynch, borrow directly from this filmic, mise-
en-scene approach to urban topography, rather than
from a reductionist analysis of building types, orders,
styles and histories.
The subjective experience of space is still largely
absent from architectural debate, except for certain
kinds of basic functionalist understandings about
ergonomics, workplace efficiency or the separation
of powers and functions within the domestic setting.
Only very recently have issues of time intruded seri-
ously on discussions about architecture and urban
planning. Lifestyles and working patterns today
change faster than the designs of buildings, and so
adaptability and improvisatory elements have begun
to creep into architectural debate. At the other end of
the scale, the recent discussion of the '24-hour City'
also poses time issues as being fundamental to urban
planning today, a debate that is far more advanced in
France, Italy and Germany, for example, than it is in
the UK or North America. 23
Yet physical settings over time develop ideal
types, a personal repertory of landscapes and interi-
ors, which often become the mise-en-scene of many
of our most personal dreams and nightmares. Inner
landscapes cannot but be taken from the topogra-
phies of childhood: idealized suburbs for some, bleak
bomb-damaged cities for others. Dickens, ill in
Geneva in 1844, wrote to a friend in London explain-
ing that his sickness was 'attributable, I have not the
least doubt, to an absence of streets'.24 Only recently
has serious work begun on the relationship between
the body's orientations and morphologies and that of
a sense of place and the literalness of our existential
being-in-the-world, physically as well as mentally.25
23
The landscapes and townscapes of childhood mark
us indelibly for life, a subject that continues to be
explored by writers in particular in books as various
- within the modern English-language tradition
alone - as Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford,
D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, or in Ciaron
Carson's recent and exquisite memoir of Belfast, The
Star Factory.
These settings are the result of human agency.
The body of thought - and the social ideals generated
by it - which characterized the early European town-
planning movement in its utopian dreamings was
remarkable in its intellectual consistency and energy.
Since then no single other unifying architectural or
plat:tning ideal has gathered such momentum, or has
had such a lasting effect on the places we inhabit. It
may be that the principle of environmental sustain-
ability will do so in the new millennium, and this is
the central theme of the last section of this book.
Despite a long interregnum, the vision of the radiant
city may give rise to a new vision of the ecopolis -
equally unattainable - but still a star to set one's com-
pass by in the long voyage of utopian thought. Social
democracy, renewed again in Europe, has the oppor-
tunity to develop a new urban aesthetic, this time
tinged green rather than red.

24

The late-nineteenth-century idea of the garden city is
the starting-point for our story. This was an extraor-
dinary vision, combining political ideals, a strong
sense of human agency and a radical sense of spatial
relations and connections in the fabric of human life.
Ebenezer Howard's pioneering plan for a new model
of urban housing, Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real
Reform, was originally published in 1898, setting in
motion the Garden City movement, still active today.
Howard, who founded the Garden Cities Association
in 1899 (renamed the Garden Cities and Town
Planning Association in 1909, finally becoming the
Town and Country Planning Association in 1941 and
still extant), had himself been influenced by several
earlier experiments in creating model communities,
notably Port Sunlight, Cheshire, and Saltaire,
Yorkshire, and had been challenged - as had William
Morris in different ways - by Edward Bellamy's
utopian novel Looking Backward (1888). He would
also have known of earlier Chartist attempts to
establish model communities - O'Connorville in
Hertfordshire, Lowbands in Worcestershire, Charter-
ville in Oxfordshire, Snigs End in Gloucestershire
and Great Dodford in Worcestershire in the 1840S -
and of Ruskin's involvement 20 years later with the
Guild of St George, which supported four model
communities based on a form of agrarian socialism.!
There were also anarchist communities at Clousden
1 Here Comes the Sun:
Port Sunlight, Town Planning
and the New Life
Hill and Norton, and Tolstoyan colonies at Purleigh
in Essex and at Whiteway in the Cotswolds. The 2
utopian origins of all of these attempts to establish
new communities was, and remains, a continuous
strand in town planning.
The most innovative housing experiment of
Howard's era, however, was Port Sunlight village
(illus. 6), started in 1888 by the industrialist William
Hesketh Lever. Port Sunlight was a model communi-
ty (or (company town' for those of a cynical disposi-
tion) established for the workers of Lever's
soap-factory near Birkenhead, complete with allot-
ments' meeting-rooms, swimming-baths, parks and
bandstands, and which survives to this day, even
being described by the designer Theo Crosby in 1978
as (the first and only good housing estate in
England'.3 There were no pubs, for temperance rea-
sons. In this period social reform was very much
allied to the Temperance Movement, even more so in
Scandinavia than in the UK, with some unusual con-
nections between the two. In the Fife coalfields in the
first decades of this century, for example, there was a
chain of pubs run by the Gothenburg Public House
Society that imported the Swedish idea of operating
pubs which attempted to turn customers into teeto-
tallers. The interiors of the Society's saloons and bars
(were deliberately made plain and uncomfortable';
profits, which, oddly enough, these pubs continued
25

to make, 'went towards the construction of whole-
some amenities such as libraries and bowling-
greens'.4
The influence of Port Sunlight was widespread,
and its impact abroad was largely disseminated
through the writings of Hermann Muthesius
(1861-1927), an architect attached to the German
embassy in London between 1896 and 1903, whose
book Das englische Haus was published in three vol-
umes in 1904-5 and highly regarded, especially in
Northern Europe. For Muthesius,
Port Sunlight will always be honoured with the
highest recognition. For it is here that the gates
of a new world were first opened; in place of the
dismal appearance of utilitarian buildings we
were shown a new vision; in the place of the
misery associated with the barren rows of
26
6 The Lyceum in Port
Sunlight, built
between 1894 and
1896 and used as
the first village
school. Architects:
Douglas and
Fordham.
workers' terraces we find joyfulness and
homeliness. 5
Yet the Garden City movement in the UK - inex-
tricably linked with Ruskin and Morris and the Arts
and Crafts Movement - was often interpreted as anti-
urban, although its founders had genuinely believed
they were planning for a new generation of cities. In
practice Garden City ideals too often became garden
suburb developments of low-density housing, each
unit with its own garden, surrounded by hedges and
tree-lined streets, creating a semblance of a rural
idyll, even within the sound of the factory sirens. The
model was emulated everywhere. Within a decade of
the construction of Port Sunlight and soon after the
publication of Howard's revised tract, Garden Cities
of Tomorrow (1902), George Benoit Levy, the French
social reformer and disciple of Le Play, Ruskin,
Morris and Tolstoy, had set up the Association des
Cites-Jardins de France in 1903 and published La
6
Cite-jardin in the following year. In Germany the
Gartenstadtgesellschaft was set up in 1902, bringing
together (anarcho-socialist, literary and reformist
movements'/ although more imbued with the spirit
of the Volk rather than the urban proletariat, and
Bernhard Kampffmyer published Aus Englischen
Gartenstadten in 1910. The Russians quickly fol-
8
lowed. There is no doubt that the British had been
busy proselytizing the virtues of this new invention,
for in July 1904, the British Garden City Association
convened the first International Garden City
Congress in London, also taking delegates on a tour
of Port Sunlight, Bournville, Letchworth and some
London County Council (LCC) suburban estates. In
1913 the International Garden Cities and Town
Planning Association was founded at a congress in
Scheveningen in The Netherlands. Reproductions of
9
the Port Sunlight cottages were erected at interna-
tional exhibitions in Paris (1900), Glasgow (1901) and
Brussels (1910).
Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire was
designed by Barry Parker (1867-1947) and Raymond
Unwin (1863-1940), both teetotal socialists who had
set up in business together as architects and planners.
Unwin had attended Ruskin's lectures in Oxford, was
a friend of Edward Carpenter, had met William
Morris and had contributed to Morris's socialist
journal, Commonweal. lO Central to the layout of the
Letchworth houses - work started in January 1904 -
was the creation of a living-room that ran from the
front to the back of the house, providing opportuni-
ties for sunlight at both ends, whatever the orienta-
tion. Sunlight was (looked upon as an absolute
essential, second only to air-space.'l1 Each garden city
was to be surrounded by sufficient agricultural land
to feed the population. A year after starting
Letchworth, Unwin was appointed planner of
Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London.
Unwin's influence on housing design in the UK and
beyond has been incalculable, even though his follow-
ers sometimes diluted his ideas to the point of medioc-
rity. To a large degree, Unwin - a genuine intellectual
with a keen interest in sociology, aesthetics, history and
social reform - invented the profession and practice of
town planning. However, he also had a personal dislike
of apartment living or high-density urban lifestyles, as
well as a penchant for rustic interiors. His pamphlet
Nothing Gained by Overcrowding, published in 1912,
and in favour oflow-density housing, (was later to pro-
duce some of the UK'S dullest housing estates from the
drawing boards of local authorities and speculative
builders in the inter-war years'.12
Unwin's favourite interior detail was the
inglenook hearth, a thorough-going symbol of the
domesticated privacy that he thought represented the
ideal life, an almost monastic withdrawal from soci-
ety. Yet the country cottage motif was paradoxically a
direct inheritance from the pages of Morris's News
from Nowhere and late-nineteenth-century socialist
versions of the Simple Life. I3 In a lecture given in
Vienna in 1926 he had argued that (we must give the
individual a place in which he can live, and meditate,
retire from the bustle and noise of life, and live what
I call a human life.'I4 It seems particularly ironic that
such sentiments should have emerged from someone
who earlier in life had been deeply attached to a
political philosophy founded on the notion that
(Fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death.'
ORGANICISM AND MODERNISM
Giant though he was in many respects, on some
matters William Morris was decidedly wrong and
27
his influence ill-advised. I share Elizabeth Wilson's
scepticism about him, especially his refusal to come
to terms with the psychology of modernity.ls To a
marked degree Morris seems to have cleaved to an
ideal of a world beyond difficulty and conflict, a ver-
sion of hard but rewarding labour in the fields,
homely fare, storytelling, and early nights after a dis-
cussion at the Labour Club. Anybody who could
argue so vehemently against the hard-won complex-
ities and psychological explorations of literature, as
Morris clearly does in the canonical News from
Nowhere, is in denial about the reality of human
affairs. In News from Nowhere, first published in
1888, the characters are already in that second child-
hood he thought the world should try to realize.
What Morris yearned for was a world without
tragedy or human despair, in the very era that writ-
ers such as Balzac, Conrad, Ibsen, Strindberg, Synge
and Zola (not to mention Marx and Freud) were
exploring the development of that irredeemably
modern, fractured consciousness that was develop-
ing in the teeming cities, and which never again
could be captured and reinserted into a medieval
romance.
In News from Nowhere's utopia, the beautiful
Clara, firm and well-knit of body (could it be other-
wise?), proudly discourses on a world that has
become too beautiful to need, or benefit from, books
of any sort:
As for your books, they were well enough for
times when intelligent people had but little else
in which they could take pleasure, and when
they must needs supplement the sordid miseries
of their own lives with imaginations of the lives
16
of other people.
28
She then rails at length against the tendency of
fictional characters to manufacture a long series of
(sham troubles (or mostly sham) of their own mak-
ing, illustrated by dreary introspective nonsense
about their feelings and aspirations'. It is the (dreary
introspective nonsense' that in the end turns one
wholly against Morris, and the sheer regressiveness of
the project to deny or seek to strip out the memory-
haunted, fraught nature of human consciousness,
which was developing in the second half of the nine-
teenth century and came to fruition in the twentieth.
(To argue for the better surely exacts a full look at the
worse,' argued Conrad with greater insight a few
years later. The argument between a collectivist
organicism and a more individualistic modernism
has continued down the years.
Other battle-lines were drawn, particularly
between the decentralist town-planning tradition
exemplified in the Garden City movement, and the
urbanism of the Jane Jacobs school, which has often
been interpreted as being primarily about housing
densities, street culture, modes of public transporta-
tion and the siting of industry. In reality it has proba-
bly had more to do with the cultural differences
between those who favour settlements that empha-
size the primacy of domestic life and the architectural
details of domestic settings, and those who remain
mesmerized, as in their turn Defoe, Dickens,
Baudelaire, Benjamin and the Situationists were, by
the deracinated vitalism of the unruly city - a vital-
ism that also, according to Elizabeth Wilson, offered
women new opportunities for greater personal free-
dom and pleasure. 17 W. R. Lethaby once formulated
this dilemma quite simply, and with greater pre-
science than his mentor, Morris: There is a cham-
pagne and a late-night supper ideal, and a brown
bread and dewy morning ideal, and in the end, just
for the sake of our health we chose the latter. 18 This is
more honest, and describes a fault-line that runs
right through architectural and planning discourses
in the twentieth century, often with particular indi-
viduals simultaneously aspiring to both.
The success of the Garden City ideal in the UK in
many ways embodied, but also itself shaped, a
uniquely British distaste (although a number of
architectural historians exclude Scotland from this
equation) for Continental apartment life and forms
of tenure. In Ebenezer Howard's original vision, a
feature of these new model communities was a high
level of provision of shared or collective services -
laundries, meeting-rooms, public baths, libraries,
parks, theatres and schools - which there were at
Letchworth and to a lesser extent in Hampstead.
The first Russian garden city, at Kazan, had its
own theatre, hospital, TB asylum and rest-homes
together with other collective facilities, and later
Russian developments provided even more services
in common. 19 The plan of 1918 for a Greater Helsinki
that the architect Eliel Saarinen presented was
financed by a city politician and businessman, Julius
Tallberg. Known as the Pro Helsingfors Plan, it was
one of the earliest known adaptations of the Garden
City principle to an existing city. Its influence on
planning in Helsinki has continued to this day.
Unfortunately, the rapid transit system proposed by
Saarinen has not been built, and the new outlying
communities, with the exception ofTapiola, are mere
dormitory suburbs, without the community centres
20
envisaged by the architect. This problem has been
replicated in many other cities throughout the world.
Once residential areas have been left sequestered,
unconnected to the main urban centre and its facili-
ties and without social amenities of their own, they
often become very inward-looking places in which to
live. When large-scale unemployment or some other
catastrophe strikes, such places are easily vulnerable
to social disintegration.
Over time, the Garden City influence became
ubiquitous, yet also over time many of its collectivist
or communal aspects were lost. In 1946 a new edition
of Garden Cities of Tomorrow was published in the
UK, with an introduction by Lewis Mumford.
Mumford felt the need to restate quite categorically
that Howard's original vision was not a 'loose indefi-
nite sprawl of individual houses with immense open
spaces over the landscape: it is rather a compact, rig-
orously confined urban grouping'. More than that,
constellations of such cities in close proximity could
also bring about the urban advantages of amenity
and diversity on a larger scale. For Mumford,
Howard's vision was of epochal significance:
At the beginning of the twentieth century, two
great new inventions took form before our eyes:
the airplane and the Garden City, both
harbingers of a new age: the first gave man
wings and the second promised him a better
dwelling place when he came down to earth. 2I
One hundred years later, the model is as power-
ful as ever, and is now being proposed again to solve
the UK'S housing needs. Yet the garden city always
presupposed a high degree of self-selection among
the new residents or large-scale social engineering by
the planning authorities in order to achieve a degree
of social mix. Like some suburban areas, they have
often been prone to cultural uniformity, and lack the
opportunities (often in the form of redundant build-
ings or run-down ex-industrial districts) in which
new improvisatory forms of living, and even
economies, can emerge. This process of city-building
29
is quite different from the way in which existing -
and often unplanned - cities arbitrarily become the
home for many different lifestyles and cultures, giv-
ing them a creative energy and cultural pluralism
that is self-renewing, even if at times fractious. The
very notion of the planned settlement, with all its
functions predetermined and spatially configured
straight from the plan, is even more difficult to com-
prehend today, given the accelerated pace of econom-
ic, social and cultural change. In this century, our
understanding of urban time and space has become
much more complex and reflexive.
THE FELLOWSHIP AND THE NEW LIFE
The influence of Ruskin and Morris on town plan-
ning is also evident in the work of Patrick Geddes
(1854-1932), often referred to as the 'father of town
planning'. Early in his life Geddes, a Scots biologist,
developed an interest in social surveys, which he used
to inform a more deliberative approach to the design
of new settlements. He was associated with The
Fellowship of the New Life, in the 1880s, and when
that movement split into 'mutualist' and 'dirigiste'
wings, Geddes opted for the former. While the
Fellowship sought almost to institutionalize these
new sentiments, the idea of the 'New Life' has older
foundations, being described by Fiona MacCarthy as
'a potent element, constantly recurring, endearingly
persistent, in the intellectual life of the last century in
Britain'.22 The 'New Life' was variously associated
with the Simple Life, with the dignity of rural labour,
and on other occasions with urban socialism. 23 It had
implications not just for people but for things too -
preferably the absence of things (which was thought
more desirable). Such furniture or belongings
deemed essential should combine stringent func-
tionalism with simplicity, and as MacCarthy points
30
out, bore a remarkable resemblance to the character-
istic craft styles of the Shaker communities of New
England. 24 Later, in both England and America, such
influences worked their way into the functionalist
purity of architects such as W. R. Lethaby and Frank
Lloyd Wright.
The Fellowship was founded by political (and
sexual) radicals who included Edward Carpenter and
Henry Havelock Ellis, and it owed a good deal to the
inspiration of the American poet Walt Whitman. It
literally saw a new life coming that would be quite
different to anything that had gone before, and its
.members in their own lives tried to live differently to
others too. Not only did those associated with this
movement have views on economics, on land reform,
on arts and crafts, but they also had strong ideas on
how sexual relations and attitudes to the body might
be reformed. In time, however, the municipalists and
electoral radicals gained the ascendancy, causing the
novelist E. M. Forster many years later, while on the
subject of Edward Carpenter, to note that
The labour movement took another course, and
advanced by committee meetings and statistics
towards state-owned factories attached to state-
supervised recreation grounds. Edward's heart
beat no warmer at such joys. He felt no
enthusiasm over municipal baths and
municipally provided bathing drawers. 25
Geddes remained closely associated with anar-
chist and socialist movements, and on at least one
occasion Morris stayed at his house. His greatest
contribution to planning theory was the insistence
on respecting the topography and history of each
site or setting, believing that the culture of a place
or of a people was the pre-eminent consideration
when making anything anew. Hence the insistence
on social surveys, on mapping and talking, on
anthropological fieldwork, and subsequently on
civics, regionalism and local and national identity.
Yet he, too, remained at heart an organicist, if not a
ruralist. As Helen Meller has pointed out: 'Geddes
... always thought of himself, first and foremost, as a
gardener.'26
Town planning very quickly became an interna-
tionalist, modernizing movement. By the 1920S the
very word 'International' was charged with cultural
as well as political meaning, and its espousal by
architects and planners was usually a conscious polit-
ical choice. 27 The exhibition entitled 'The Inter-
national Style' organized by Philip Johnson and
Henry-Russell Hitchcock that was held at tiIe Museum
of Modern Art, New York, in 1932 effectively branded
the new functionalist, anti-historicist and culturally
anonymous style as the architecture of a new world
order. 28
A favoured mode of dissemination throughout 7 Advertising mast and press stand at the 1930 Stockholm
Exhibition: Swedish design and democracy capture the world's
this period was the international exhibition (which
imagination. Principal architect: Erik Gunnar Asplund.
in turn generated related international congresses),
which in the late nineteenth century and early twen-
tieth was one of the most formidable engines of DISEASE AND DEGENERATION

international communication, development and
intellectual exchange. There is no doubt, for exam-
ple, that the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 overnight
put the 'Swedish model' - a mixture of social democ-
ratic and folkhemmet welfare-ism together with an
enthusiasm for modern design - onto the world
stage, catapulting Sweden's international image from
that of a rural backwater into that of a model for the
new world to come (illus. 7).2 Town planning thus
9
became both an engine of modernity and a platform
for international understanding.
There are other important trajectories that need to
be traced out. The Paris Exhibition of 1867 devoted
considerable space to the issue of social reform, pro-
moted by Le Play and associated French Positivists,
Comteans and others, an event that later Geddes was
to describe as the first 'civic exhibition' and the stim-
ulus for international urban reform. 30 By the end of
the nineteenth century, international planning
movements were closely linked with international
peace movements, often underpinned by the
prospect of moving towards an international parlia-
ment ofsome kind or, better still, a world government.

31
Anthony Sutcliffe's study of town-planning move-
ments in this period devotes considerable space to
these common causes, noting that there was often a
strong overlap between domestic social reform and
internationalist sentiment. This was the case with the
City Beautiful movement in North America and the
peace movement there, between the Garden City
movement and social reform movements ('garden
cities of social peace') in France, as well as in the
activities of anti-slum campaigners in the UK, such as
W. T. Stead, who was also leader of the British Peace
31
Movement.
Such urban planning movements were often
inspired by a widespread feeling that industrial cities
were unhealthy breeding grounds of vice and disease,
and that only the shift of urban working-class popula-
tions into new, modern settlements and houses would
avert serious social and moral problems. In 1875 Sir
Benjamin Ward Richardson, in his Presidential
Address to the Health Section of the Social Science
Association, set out a model for a new kind of city,
subsequently published as a book - Hygeia: A City of
Health - advocating cleanliness as the principal con-
cern of sanitary reform. 32
Many people had one foot in the planning camp
and the other in the more dubious camp of social
hygiene. The 1876 Brussels Congres Internationaux
d'Hygiene et de Demographie created a platform for
the debate about poverty, health, bad housing and
public morality, introducing the notion of 'social
hygiene' into the vocabulary of politics and planning.
The 1904 Congres Internationaux d'Hygiene et de
Demographie set up a permanent committee, fol-
lowed by the establishment in Rome in 1907 of the
Office International d'Hygiene Publique. The wide-
spread unease about the demoralizing influence of
city life on the poor is well treated by Andrew Lee,
32
who has noted that such fears were expressed both on
the Right and the Left. 33
The concern with the idea of 'race deterioration'
in the UK was first publicly debated at the time of the
Crimean War (1854-6), when over 42 per cent of
town-bred recruits were rejected as unfit for the
army, compared with 17 per cent of rural recruits. 34
During the Boer War (1899-1902) and the Great War
of 1914-18, similarly high rates of unfitness were
recorded, causing concern to establishment opinion.
Some argued that such high levels of ill-health and
physical infirmity were actually the result of misguid-
ed sanitary reform, which had allowed some of the
weakest to survive, whereas 'natural selection' would
have finished them off more expediently. The first
issue of the Eugenics Review (April 1909) argued that
much social legislation was 'penalising the fit for the
sake of the unfit', or as a correspondent to The Times
put it more directly: 'We take the human rubbish and
give it compulsory education, Housing Acts, inspec-
tion of all sorts and at all seasons....'35 The body of
opinion that became known as Social Darwinism
viewed health reform with suspicion, and foresaw the
day in which the unfit classes would outnumber the
fit, due to permissive and over-protective welfare
reforms. The more moderate elements of such opin-
ion preferred to argue that if social reform was neces-
sary it would be better to concentrate on improving
individual health and fitness through diet and exer-
cise, rather than in expenditure on large-scale social
infrastructure.
Across Europe similar alarms at the unhealthy
nature of city life were allied to powerful sociological
fears of individual and social degeneration, encapsu-
lated in Max Nordau's famous text, Degeneration,
published in 1892. Degeneration theory was an
admixture of eugenics, racism and anti-Semitism,
fear of sexual difference, and a horror of the unbind-
ing of the social hierarchies and constraints that
might result from social movements intent on pursu-
ing egalitarianism. Some of its most morbid adher-
ents even foresaw the extinction of the human race as
the end result of uncontrolled fertility and racial mis-
cegenation. The city was associated more strongly
with such promiscuous interminglings, while the
countryside was more likely to be seen as a place
where racial identities and the genetic stock might be
36
better preserved.
Geddes himself worried publicly about 'town
children', believing that the countryside was a far
preferable setting for bringing up children than the
unnatural town. 37 He was a lifelong supporter of
national and international youth movements,
including both the Boy Scouts and the Woodcraft
Folk. He also co-wrote with J. A. Thomson a book
38
on The Evolution ofSex, published in 1889, part of the
new interest in sociobiology and genetics, and it has
to be said that there are clear links between his
espousal of the organic, the natural and notions of
racial vitality that disturbingly influenced the
Fabians and other 'progressive movements', as they
were then called. 39 It has been argued that such con-
stellations of attitudes have never been completely
expunged from the contemporary environmental
40
movement. However, short of moving everybody
out of the city into the countryside, the thrust of
urban planning policy had to be directed to making
cities healthier places, a debate that echoes down to
this day.
HERE COMES THE SUN
In 1901 a Birmingham councillor, J. S. Nettlefold, first
chairman of the council's housing committee wrote
that:
Millions of English town children have no
playground within practical reach except the
streets.... The women have no place to go out to
where they can enjoy an odd hour, and often
find no better choice than the front door step, or
the nearest public house. We cannot, by
legislation, make people healthy and happy, but
we can give our town dwellers fewer temptations
to ii-rational excitement, and more opportunities
for beneficial enjoyment than they have at
present. We can, ifwe will, let light and air into
our towns; we can, ifwe will, make the most of
and not the least ofthe sunshine [italics added]. 41
The growing use of such vocabulary brings into
focus one of the abiding themes of modernist plan-
ning, what Manfredo Tafuri notes as 'the "medicalisa-
tion de la ville" so intrinsic to physiocratic thought',
or in more modern terms, seeing the city as a sanato-
rium. 42 In the nineteenth century the principal fears
about public health centred on cholera and water
quality, but in the early twentieth century the main
concerns were with fresh air and sunlight -largely a
response to the widespread scourge of tuberculosis.
The 1870s, for example, saw a proliferation of Acts in
the UK designed to address public health questions
through sanitary reform. notably the Public Health
Acts of 1872 and 1875, and the Artisans' and
Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act, also of 1875.
The argument for sanitary reform was that in the
long term the prevention of infections and diseases
would cost less than treating the effects of such terri-
ble levels of sickness, thus giving rise to the heuristic
notion of 'civic economy'. 43 Growing knowledge
about the ways in which infections and diseases were
transmitted and spread placed greater emphasis on
domestic hygiene and the need both to tackle over-
33
crowding within buildings and create spaces between Crane's Triumph of Labour with its May-bedecked
buildings, and encourage activity outdoors. By 1871 farm wagons and golden lads and lasses) to the steel
the Registrar-General could write confidently about and glass idioms of modernism (Le Corbusier's Ville
the final 'discovery of the laws of public health'. Radieuse and the 1933 ClAM Athens Charter, which
In the wider sphere of town planning, Geddes's included in its manifesto the proclamation that 'The
Dunfermline Report of 1904 remains significant. su~, which governs all growth, should penetrate the
This resulted from a commission by the Scottish- interior of every dwelling, there to diffuse its rays,
American multi-millionaire Andrew Carnegie to without which life withers and fades.') The whole
investigate ways in which environmental improve- orientation of modernist town planning, and of a
ments in his native city could be brought about. certain kind of social aesthetic, was to turn the faces
Geddes intended to combine environmental and the bodies of the urban working class towards
improvements with social reform, with proposals for the sun.
new parks, swimming-baths and sports facilities, a
craft school and a College of Hygiene and Physical
Culture. In addition to these proposals for public
facilities, he also advocated that every house should
have an 'out-hung sleeping cage', so that people could
sleep in the open air to improve their health. 44 This
was a very early example of the cross-over from med-
ical architecture and ways of thinking to their adap-
tation as general principles of domestic life. In the
same way that health reform split into two camps,
one preferring to concentrate on providing new facil-
ities and a healthier built environment, the other pre-
ferring to concentrate on the individual health
regime, diet and moral probity (the German word
Lebensreform expresses this better), so in architecture
the reform movement prompted both an interest in
new kinds of buildings such as sanatoria, new forms
of public housing and schools, while others preferred
to look at promoting life and architecture outdoors.
A passion for reform swept across Europe. The
sunless industrial towns and cities had now to be
broken apart and rebuilt so that the sun could flood
in and irradiate the lives of the people. Town plan-
ning had astonishingly created a bridge from the
rural idioms of Arts and Crafts imagery (Walter

34

From Ruskin onwards, architectural theory was
given a strongly Northern, Protestant, plainsong
inflection. The great ur-text of this movement was
Ruskin's chapter on (The Nature of Gothic', first
published in The Stones ofVenice (1853). This was not
so much a descriptive appreciation of an architec-
tural style as it was a manifesto and set of architec-
tural prescriptions and injunctions. For Ruskin
there was the possibility of a total fit between archi-
tectural form and human spirit in the Gothic style,
and his essay sought to trace out (this grey, shadowy,
many-pinnacled image of the Gothic spirit within
us; and discerning what fellowship there is between
it and our Northern hearts'.l (The intellectual
sleight-of-hand by which Ruskin diverted the Gothic
Revival from the embroidered Catholicism of Pugin
is another story.)
Gothic architecture embodied a dislike of sym-
metry, of repetition, of elegant fac;ades or classical
columns, and was strongly in favour of using local
materials and respecting vernacular building tradi-
tions. Its naturalism was that of the cave or the for-
est, in which the inner spaces and functions were by
far more important than the outer fac;ades. Build-
ings were much more likely to be designed from
within than without. It is no surprise, therefore, that
it was the Gothic, Protestant tradition that led more
readily to the functionalism of Bauhaus modernism.
2 Our Northern Hearts:
Architecture, Design and
the Art of Right Living
Indeed the architectural historian Gillian Naylor is
quite explicit on this connection, arguing that
It was this concern to see the problems of design
within a social context that was to have the most
significant influence in the twentieth-century
design thinking; Van de Velde, Mutheseus, Loos
and Gropius, in fact the majority of the
(pioneers' who formulated the principles of the
Modern Movement, were all stimulated by this
British precept and example to work towards the
creation of an environment that would both
serve and express people's needs. 2
Similarly, Peter Davey, would claim that (the
early Bauhaus was in many ways a direct descendant
of Lethaby's Central School'. William Richard
Lethaby (1857-1931) had been one of the principal
architects and theorists of the British Arts and Crafts
Movement, working for a while for Morris & Co, and
a convinced socialist, whose gravestone epitaph was
the wholly Morrisonian trope (Love and labour are
all'. He became Principal of the London County
Council's Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1896,
where he encouraged an open house atmosphere,
making of the college syllabus a meeting place
between trainee architects, builders, crafts workers
aiming towards common ends. 3 Lethaby has been
35
somewhat overlooked, but his book Form in Civilisa-
tion, a collection of essays first published in 1922, has
remained stubbornly influential on the role that
architecture plays in shaping human life and culture.
In an introduction to the 1957 edition of this book,
Lewis Mumford also argued that the influence of the
Arts and Crafts Movement carried on well into the
core of modernism:
It would, however, be a misreading of history to
describe the decline of the Arts and Crafts
movement as a complete dethronement. Many
of the best products of the twenty years that
followed the 1918 armistice, from workers'
housing estates to the posters that made the
London Underground famous, to say nothing of
the new stations built for the Underground by
Adams, Holden, and Pearson, are a debt to this
movement, and not least to the broadening of
its objectives by Lethaby himself. 4
Mumford was also keen to point out that 'no one
ever put the case for functionalism better than
Lethaby did long before Le Corbusier's manifestos
appeared: all the better because he saw that it was an
ordering principle in all aspects of life'. 5
But there were other clear influences and conti-
nuities between the Arts and Crafts Movement in the
UK and developments on the Continent. These can be
seen in the enormous impact of Charles Rennie
Mackintosh (1868-1928) on the artists and designers
of the Vienna Secession, who collectively established
the Wiener Werkstatte in 1903, another prototype
Bauhaus, and in the work of Peter Behrens
(1868-1940), who started out as a leading member of
an artists' colony in Darmstadt, partly inspired by the
English Arts and Crafts Movement, who later went to
work as a consultant for AEG, the German electrical
company, while also maintaining a private architec-
tural practice in which Charles-Edouard Jeanneret
(Le Corbusier), Walter Gropius and Mies van der
Rohe all worked at one time as Behren's juniors. 6
LINES AND LINEAGES
At this point some definitions of the main styles and
schools of thought within architecture should be
attempted, even though fixing labels to such a wide
variety of buildings and styles of decoration is invidi-
0us' as well as being a hostage to fortune. In the
period that this book covers, from the end of the
nineteenth century to the present day, a number of
architectural schools and building styles came to
prominence, many of them overlapping and occa-
sionally indistinguishable from one other. The
Gothic Revival is the starting-point of this study,
from which emerged the Arts and Crafts Movement,
which in turn shared some of the same spirit and
political concerns with what in Scandinavia became
known as National Romanticism, and occasionally in
The Netherlands, where it was even described as
Expressionist (as in Michel de Klerk's extraordinary
public housing development in Amsterdam Eigen
Haard ('Our Hearth'), dealt with later. 7
Along with the English Free School of architec-
ture, these styles emerged at a time when a whole
new range of building types and institutions, such as
museums, public libraries, schools and railway sta-
tions were coming into being. They were able to
make their mark on the urban pattern-book with
great and immediate effect. In turn such styles were
themselves overtaken by various forms of mod-
ernism including what some might term Organic
Modernism (Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto
notably, but also in Germany Hugo Haring and Hans
Scharoun) and Classical Modernism (Le Corbusier,
Mies van der Rohe). In the interregnum between var-
ious organic, national styles and fully-blown Interna-
tional Modernism came other approaches,
predominantly what was described as Functionalism.
Many architects worked within or borrowed from all
of these stylistic schools, and some moved through
several distinct phases, and even changed their affili-
ations in the course of their lives.
Peter Davey's Arts and Crafts Architecture is par-
ticularly helpful on such stylistic eddies and swirls
throughout Europe in this period, usefully distin-
guishing between Northern and Southern European
attachments and lines of development and noting
that between 1890 and 1910 artistic links between the
UK and the German-speaking countries were particu-
larly close. The reaction against Classicism through-
out Europe undoubtedly owed something to the
popularity of Ruskin's ideas and the reputation of
William Morris. Davey argues that architects as dif-
ferent as the Dutch romantic H. P. Berlage and the
French leader of Art Nouveau, Hector Guimard,
acknowledged the influence of Ruskin, and Morris's
designs were well known on the Continent by the
1890s. Another source of anti-Classicism came
through the writings of the great French Goth,
Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-Ie-Duc (1814-70), though
Viollet-Ie-Duc made Gothic out to be a much more
scientific and rational system of construction,
proposing various ways of using iron structures
according to Gothic principles. His writings had
great influence, even in America where the young
Frank Lloyd Wright was one of his many disciples.
Davey concludes that
By 1900, the European anti-Classicists could be
divided broadly, and with many exceptions on
each side, into two camps by a line running
roughly along the Dutch/Belgian border and
down through Munich to Vienna. To the south
was the territory of Art Nouveau with its
sinuous intertwined curves; its profusion of
elaborate ornaments; its structures curved and
twisted to take the shape of bones and plants. To
the north, a much more protestant spirit
prevailed. Structures were simple,
straightforward and clearly expressed; ornament
was restricted and, where it was used, it tended
to follow the stiff, heraldic forms of the English
Arts and Crafts movement. 8
To the north the English Arts and Crafts Move-
ment held sway; to the south Art Nouveau gained the
ascendancy. Yet there is always a danger of creating
binary opposites within architectural debate, such as
Classicism and Modernism (some Modernism was
very Classical) or Romanticism and Functionalism
(as we have already noted, there were clear lines of
development from Morris and Lethaby to the
Deutscher Werkbund and then on to the Bauhaus).
Even Art Nouveau developed in two distinct
directions, with the florid, curvilinear style of the
French and Belgian artists and designers contrasting
strongly with the more austere and rectilinear style of
Mackintosh that was admired by the members of the
Vienna Secession and later the Wiener Werkstatte. 9 In
North America, Art Nouveau was succeeded by Art
Deco, particularly suited to beach resorts and coastal
cities such as Miami Beach and Palm Beach, where
later various sub-Deco styles emerged, variously
called Zig-Zag, Moderne, Streamline, Depression
Moderne, Mechano Deco and Cinema Style. And lO
while both Nordic and Hellenistic cultures wor-
shipped the same sun, as Protestants and Catholics
37
worshipped the same God, they did so in different
ways.
THE RETURN TO NATURE
Throughout this early period, a number of shared
interests and concerns emerged among artists, archi-
tects and planners, notably in the (re-discovery' of
the countryside and rural idioms, a theme convinc-
ingly adumbrated in his pages on architecture in
Martin J. Wiener's study of the English cult of rural-
l1
ism. In the 1880s, at a time when Morris was rhap-
sodizing about the magnificent thirteenth-century
tithe barn at Great Coxwell, Oxfordshire, (the finest
piece of architecture in England', and the craftsman-
ship of the medieval Cotswold churches and farm
buildings, the plein-air movement among artists
grew up in the UK, inspired by the example of the
French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage. All over Europe
painters left the cities to portray life in the open, par-
ticularly the lives of farm labourers or fishermen and
their families, as well as other aspects of life of the
agricultural and coastal poor. In imitation of artists'
colonies in France, such as Pont-Aven, Barbizon or
Gres-sur- Loing, in the UK similar colonies were
established at Newlyn in Cornwall, Staithes in York-
shire and at Brig O'Turk and Cockburnspath in Scot-
12
land. One of Morris's most devoted followers, C. R.
Ashbee, moved his crafts workshops and workers
(150 men, women and children) from east London to
the Cotswold village of Chipping Campden in 1902,
where, sadly, it failed to prosper.
At the end of the nineteenth century, architects
such as Richard Norman Shaw, C.F.A. Voysey and
Philip Webb were designing large country houses in
the (Old English' or (Domestic Revival' style set in
large grounds, and stylistically alluding to medieval
buildings, whether stone-walled Cotswold farmhouses
or the timber-framed yeoman's halls to be found in
the north-west of England. 13 The rediscovery of the
English village as an ideal in English life prompted the
widespread publication of works of rural nostalgia as
well as country guides, anthologies and other texts
which argued that life was healthier and more natural
in the countryside. 14 Such publications promulgated
the rustic cottage motif as the ideal form of dwelling,
which has since been an ever-present feature of Eng-
lish domestic architecture to this day.
There was also at this time a cult for (tramping'
literature - stories and snippets of hedgerow philoso-
phy connected with those who had taken to life on
the open road. The early socialist movement had also
been a firm advocate of fresh air and exercise, and the
benefits of life away from the city. Robert Blatchford's
Clarion Fellowship led to a proliferation of cycling
clubs throughout the UK, and in 1906 one of the Clar-
ion enthusiasts, John Fletcher Dodd, established an
annual summer camp for socialists at Caister in Nor-
folk, with as many as 1,000 people holidaying on the
site, cooking their own food, and attending lectures,
dances and organized activities. 15 This was a forerun-
ner of the holiday camp movement, and Dodd him-
self was still running Caister's in 1949, though by
then it was housed in chalets and had a resident
dance band and weekly cinema shows. Several
changes of hands later, the camp is now run as the
Ladbroke's Caister Supercentre, making the political
journey from guild socialism to casino capitalism in
three generations on the same site.
It wasn't only artists and political enthusiasts
who wanted a change of lifestyle. The rediscovery of
the simple life became an aspiration among sections
of all classes. At the turn of the century in the UK a
number of seaside (bungalow villages' began sprout-
ing along the coasts, one of the first being at Shore-
han1 in Sussex, established between 1896-1902.16 The
rise of the bungalow town was partly attributable to
changing attitudes towards sea-bathing. Mixed
bathing was first officially allowed in 1901 at Bexhill,
Sussex, and gradually more of the body was exposed
to the sun as attitudes shifted. These bungalow
colonies began to be associated with Bohemian liv-
ing, with liberal attitudes towards sexual matters,
allied to a strong belief in the healthy life-giving
properties of the sea and sun. In his novel In the Days
of the Comet, H. G. Wells portrays such a village:
This place ... was a fruit of reaction of artistic-
minded and carelessly living people against the
costly and uncomfortable social stiffness of the
more formal seaside resorts of that time.... The
thing had become a fashion with a certain
Bohemian-spirited class; they added cabin after
cabin, and these little improvised homes, gaily
painted and with broad verandahs and
supplementary lean-to's added to their
accommodation, made the brightest contrast
conceivable to the dull rigidities of the decorous
resorts. 17
The morality and aesthetics of such makeshift
communities is also one of the central themes of
Winifred Holtby's South Riding, first published In
1936, a rare book that manages to make local govern-
ment and local authority planning policies the central
dramatic devices of a richly charactered novel. 'The
Shacks', as they are called in South Riding, consisted of
various caravans, railway coaches, huts and a con-
verted bus, and 'hummed with exuberant life', partic-
ularly in the summer months. A sub-culture
involving young people, semi-nudity, babies, motor-
bikes, gramophones playing loud music, goats,
chickens and parties indicates that this kind of exper-
imentallifestyle was established within British culture
well before the hippies in the 1960s, a point made time
and again by Denis Hardy and Colin Ward in their
erudite and good-humoured Arcadia for All: The
Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape (1984). Recourse to
the Bohemian life is a leitmotif of twentieth-century
Englishness. These fringe communities usually occu-
pied or colonized marginal pieces of land, often on
the fringes of the town or city, or on neglected coastal
sites, and were neither fully nor conventionally rural-
ist. Nor were they deeply urban: the cultural and
topographical space they occupied was a hybrid of
both, as was the self-build vernacular architecture
they constructed or adapted from other elements,
usually vehicles of one kind or another - pantechnicon
vans, motor-coaches, railway carriages and even
unseaworthy boats. These makeshift communities
exuded an air of endless remaking, as well as the pos-
sibility that one day they might simply up and move
on to the next caravanserai.
The 'careless sensuality' of bungalow life was no
aberration. Though short-lived (1899-1901), The
Bungalow magazine edited by Max Judge was an
important vehicle for 'artistic, literary, topographical
and Bohemian' debate, and a keen advocate of the
simple life, as well as making frequent references to
the ideas of Morris and Ruskin. It is surely quite rare
for a journal taking its name from a specific building
type to be quite so free-ranging and socially con-
scious as this one was, but it does demonstrate how
the cultural connections between architecture and
social movements were very productive at the time.
Meanwhile in Germany, two people who became
among the most influential modernists, WaIter
Gropius (1883-1969) and Bruno Taut (1880-1938),
lived for a while in artists' colonies isolated from the
39
city as well as being involved in the Wandervogel
movement, in which young Germans took to walking
in the hills and forests as a way of rediscovering an
essential Germanic identity. Taut even published a
book in 1920 calling for (The Dissolution of the
Cities' (Die Auflosung der 5tiidte) .18 As Anna
Bramwell has noted in her pioneering historical
study of the international ecology movement, a
number of the Modernists in Germany in the 1920S
were also strong proponents of decentralization,
19
including back-to-the-land movements.
In retrospect it is clear that the various archi-
tects' planners, artists and intellectuals usually
grouped under the label of Modernism between
them held as wide a variety of personal beliefs as any
other geographically and sociologically disparate
group of people, perhaps more so. This was a time of
great (and often fissiparous) political and intellectual
ferment, before centralist political parties had finally
lined up and catalogued every issue of social concern
into the straitjacket of a single party line or pro-
gramme from which there was expected to be little or
no dissent. Some modernists hated the countryside,
while others rhapsodized about it. Some modernists,
especially those who had been influenced by the
Futurists, exalted the rise of the motor-car (and
machine civilization in all its manifestations). Oth-
ers, quite differently, decried the car's displacement
of the chaotic street life ofthe teeming city, the febrile
vibrancy of which was the very essence of the mod-
ern condition. Some were austere rationalists, others
mystical organicists. In her study of British suburban
life and culture between the wars, for example, Ali-
son Light argues persuasively for a concept of (con-
servative modernism', an apparent oxymoron that
nevertheless allows us to see how the suburban home
became an (entry into modernity' for manywomen. 20
40
Many so-called Modernists changed their opinions
and politics radically in the course of their lives.
Modernism was a dynamic, not a school of thought;
a social project rather than a detailed plan; a force-
field, not a pattern-book. Many of its impulses to
action and change were shared, but the outcomes
and styles developed varied enormously.
Not all simple living was by choice. The Viennese
architect Adolf Loos learned about housing need and
the principles of self-management in more drastic
circumstances. At the end of the Great War, the city
of Vienna became home to a large number of (wild
settlements', a mixture of allotment gardens, squatter
camps, and tent colonies, established by people who
had lost their homes or been in other ways dispos-
sessed by the conflict. In 1918 there were over 100,000
people living in shelters in Vienna they had built for
themselves, and the Social Democrats, with Loos
among them, established the basis for the coopera-
tive housing movement from among these settle-
ments, and out of this movement came the (Red
Vienna' of the 1920S and 1930S and its internationally
famous public-housing developments. 21
In this period Germany also witnessed the
beginnings of the youth hostel movement, when in
1907 a Westphalian schoolteacher, Richard Schirr-
man, turned his school rooms into a hostel for local
children during the summer holidays. In 1909
Schirrman proposed a national chain of overnight
hostels, and the first opened in 1910 in a small castle
called Burg Alkena. By 1911 seventeen hostels, or
Jugendherbergen as they were called, were estab-
lished; by 1914 there were 200, and by 1928 no less
than 2,187 hostels were scattered throughout Ger-
many. The principal aim of encouraging young peo-
ple to spend their weekends hiking in the hills and
forests was, according to Schirrman, that (Just like
plants, humans also need sunshine and pure air to
make them grow, especially the children: 22
Similar movements emerged in other countries.
In the UK, one of the most strangely named also
became one of the most influential, and still active to
this day - the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry (now
known as The Woodcraft Folk), set up in 1916.23 This
organization was founded during the Great War by
Ernest Westlake, who believed that (boys and girls in
the cities needed the experience of living together in
the woods and hills of the countryside where they
could confront some of the conditions which their
forebears in prehistoric times had to adapt and con-
trol in order to survive.)2 4
Westlake's beliefs accorded with the theory of
(recapitulation) then popular at the time, which
argued that all children need to re-live, through play
principally, all the historical stages of human devel-
opment, from caveman to sovereign Enlightenment
individual; and so elementary living and self-suffi-
ciency were early and necessary stages in the growth
of the fully formed individual. Interestingly Adolf
Loos based his famous essay (Ornament and Crime),
one of the key documents of twentieth-century
functionalism, on this theory: (When man is born,
his sensory impressions are like those of a newborn
puppy. His childhood takes him through all the
metamorphoses of human history. At two he sees
with the eyes of a Papuan) at four with those of an
ancient Teuton) at six with those of Socrates, at eight
with those of Voltaire.) For Loos, human evolution
was, in aesthetic terms, the story of getting rid of
ornamentation, from tattooing to over-elaborate
dress and handicraft design. In short, he proclaimed
(I have made the following discovery and I pass it on
to the world: The evolution of culture is synonymous
with the removal or ornament from utilitarian
objects'.25 By now the road to functionalism and Exis-
tenzminimum was already mapped and signposted.
Westlake's Order of Woodcraft Chivalry also
spawned breakaway groups such as the Kibbo Kift
Kindred (1920), and eventually his son set up the
Forest School in 1929 to promote his father)s pacifist
and child-centred values on a permanent basis. One
of the first pupils at the school, Eliza Banks, remem-
bered that
It was much more outrageous than anything
that you see going on nowadays. The rest of
society was very much more staid and
structured. In those days you)d be outraged to
see how we were out of camp. We were
swimming, my dear, naked. As children we
never noticed until people came to visit the
school and said, (Oh!) We hiked through the
lanes and roads of villages and things, people
stared at us and jeered at us, and children
laughed. It was co-ed. That in itself was pretty
daring. We slept in the same rooms.
Another Forest School Camps activist, Charley
Hall, who came from a mining village, remembers
that his Communist father disdained the Scouts and
Girl Guides and encouraged his own six sons to
camp by themselves from an early age. (In my family,
a communist father could cook, clean, bath babies,
change nappies, he was an enlightened follower of
Edward Carpenter.)26 Paul and Marjorie Abbatt, later
to be famous for their wooden toys, some of which
were designed by Erno Goldfinger, met through the
Order of Woodcraft Chivalry.
One of the best accounts of such movements into
the countryside in this period is in David Matless)s
Landscape and Englishness, where he describes the
41
8 A Fabian open·air meeting shown in a photograph taken for Picture Post in 1943: Radical politics
were often associated with the pleasures of open·air life, giving rise to the National Parks Bill of
1949, 'a people's charter for the open air'.

9 The Fabians taking the plunge at a study weekend: another Picture Post photograph.
broader culture of urban incursions into the country-
side as including 'communist ramblers, scouts and
guides, saucy satirists, health campaigners, chara-
bancers, modern dancers, youth hosteller and nature
mystics'.27 Matless explains this new social and cul-
tural phenomenon as being framed within a wider
political debate on the 'art of right living', a set of
understandings that from both Left and Right, sought
to set issues of health, leisure and open-air culture
within the context of citizenship.
Quite quickly many of these activities were insti-
tutionalized' so that in 1930 the Youth Hostel Associ-
ation (YHA) was established, very much modelled on
the German movement. In 1935 The Ramblers' Asso-
ciation was formed. The YHA was a rather top-down
organization, in which rule-book behaviour was
firmly advocated and policed: single-sex dormitories,
no cigarettes or alcohol, doors locked at set times,
and lights out and silence similarly timed and moni-
tored. Yet after the Second World War, membership
of the YHA increased dramatically, from 50,000 in
1940 to 230,000 in 1948. A number of senior members
of the 1945-50 Labour government, such as Barbara
Castle, Hugh Dalton, Chuter Ede and Lewis Silkin,
had been, and some still were, members of the YHA or
The Rambler's Association, and enthusiastically
advocated the cause of open-air enjoyment of the
countryside as part of the socialist vision of the good
society. When Silkin introduced the second reading
of the National Parks Bill in 1949, he concluded that
'This is not just a Bill. It is a people's charter - a peo-
ple's charter for the open air.'28
The connection between open-air and ruralist
movements, and the leading intellectuals attached to
them in both the UK and Germany, flourished in the
early decades of this century (illus. 8, 9). D. H.
Lawrence was strongly influenced by the republican
atheism - but also the nature worship - of the Ger-
man thinker Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) who founded
the Monist League and developed an organic philos-
ophy of life, including the concept of 'ecology' that
he coined in his book Generelle Morphologie of1866. 29
For example, when Walter Gropius'sThe New Archi-
tecture and the Bauhaus was published in the UK in
1935, it contained an introduction by Frank Pick,
famous as the head of the London Passenger Trans-
port Board and the principal commissioner of its
modernist architecture and design works in the
1930S, but also an Executive Committee member of
the Council for the Protection of Rural England
(CPRE). A year before, in 1934, Gropius had been
introduced to Henry Morris, then actively promot-
ing the Cambridge Village College movement, and
Gropius agreed to design a new college at Impington,
along with Maxwell Fry. Work on this building was
carried out between 1938 and 1940, and an interesting
example of what Matless asserts was a continuing
rapprochement between many eminent ruralists in
this period and the cause of modernist architecture.
HEALTH AND EFFICIENCY
In the 192os, again particularly in Germany, the cult
of the body became pronounced, although before the
Great War the Freikorperkultur ('free body culture')
had existed with its emphasis on macrobiotic diets,
nature cures and the cult of nudism. One of the most
influential books across Europe in this period was
Hans Suren's Man and Sunlight, first published in
Germany in February 1924, and which had gone into
61 editions by April 1925. The English edition, pub-
lished in 1927, was described as an authorized trans-
lation from the 67th edition. 30 Because this book was
so profusely illustrated with photographs of naked or
minimally clothed men and women singly or collec-
43

10 An illustration from Hans Suren's Man and Sunlight (1924).
tively engaged in various gymnastic exerCises or
poses, issues of prurience and moral dissipation were
raised at the outset (illus. 10). In a Foreword, a well-
known British health expert, C. W. Saleeby, astutely
called on what we might call 'the Greek defence' (that
is to say, if it was acceptable to Aristotle and Plato it
ought to be acceptable to the modern world):
At a public dinner, I had heard my friend the
Dean of St Paul's, who was presiding on that
occasion, utter sentiment in approval of the
Greek view of the human body - which is, after
all, incomparably the highest material object in
the known Universe - and of what Hippocrates
meant by Gymnastics which is to release the
body and restore it to its natural environment of
air and light.)l
There is some reason nevertheless to think that
the publication was well-intentioned rather than
prurient, given that it was published in the UK
company which manufactured sun-ray lamps, Sollux
Ltd. Suren's text, perhaps amplified by the transla-
44
tion, is rhapsodic and overwrought. The opening
words are 'Greeting to you, you who are sun-lovers!
You bear ardent longings in your hearts! Longings
after warm sunshine, blue skies, light and nature;
after victorious strength, spiritual loftiness, and
childlike faith.' Suren himself was formerly Chief of
the German Army School for Physical Exercise, and
many of the photographs in the book are of himself -
sleek, oiled, deeply tanned and muscular, dressed
only in a miniscule loincloth, designed by himself
and with instructions on how to make one provided
at the end.
In his introduction to the 67th edition Suren felt
obliged to reassure his readers that he was thoroughly
German, and that members of his family had served in
the Prussian army since the time of Frederick the
Great - this after his surname had been questioned as
being insufficiently Germanic. From the evidence of
the text alone, it seems that Suren was sincere and
universalist in his beliefs, rather than rabid and
eugenicist. He writes approvingly of the ideas of the
widely admired Indian writer and mystic Rabinan-
drath Tagore, as well as writing approvingly ofvarious
African and Asian cultures that devoted much time to
dance and movement. The very first photograph in
the book illustrates a young, clothed woman in one of
the characteristic movements of the Laban Dance
school. But nakedness is Suren's principal theme:
Views on the so-called 'cult of nakedness' are
very divergent. The term threatened to become
an expression for the worst excrescences of our
morally debased civilisation; it became almost a
catch-phrase for the degrading naked dances in
by a cabarets and saloons. This obscene nakedness
mostly has the effect of mere exposure and
therefore coarseness, in contra-distinction to
 natural nakedness in the midst of sunlight and
Nature, as may be recognised from this present
book with its pictures of sunlit happiness. 32
Suren was adamant that public nudity is not
against the law, and describes in some detail the best
stratagems to avoid causing offence to be taken by
individuals or groups who wish to exercise or wan-
der in natural surroundings fully unclothed. The
cult of nakedness was not new to Germany, with
pioneering books on nudity published in the 1890s,
such as Heinrich Pudor's Cult ofthe Nude and Hein-
rich Ungewitter's Nakedness. The first 'Freilichst-
park' (open-air park) for nudists was opened near
Hamburg in 1903. Suren also sharply reminded
readers that during 1922 in Germany alone, over
100,000 people died of tuberculosis, a condition
that could have been moderated if not cured by
greater access to sun and fresh air. The popularity of
his book in Europe was no doubt in part because
many readers would have found the photographs
provocative, even erotic. Suren never mentions any
connection between nudity and sexual matters.
Indeed he writes a whole book as if the body itself
was a completely asexual object: yet another
machine for living in.
What then became known as Lebensreform
movements embraced nudism, vegetarianism, ratio-
nal dress and a formidable cult of the outdoor life.
Lebensreform shared some of the same preoccupa-
tions as 'the art of right living', though the latter also
embraced civic virtues as well as personal ones.
Already in the UK by 1921, the National Association
for the Prevention of Tuberculosis had produced a
film called Air and Sun arguing for a return to natural
life, useful work and bronzed skin:
By direct contact with Air and Sunlight, the skin
which clothing has made tender like a hothouse
plant, recovers its natural functions. By
systematic training the children become so
hardened that even in the depth of winter they
can play naked in the sun. Their bronzed skin is
a natural clothing. 33
In 1923 the magazine Health and Efficiency reported
the setting up of the English Gymnosophical Society,
and the following year the Society held the first nudist
gathering in the UK at Wickford in Essex. The first
nudist resort in the UK, called Spielplatz (Playground)
was established in 1929 near St Albans in Hertford-
shire, and still exists as a residential naturist colony
today.34 Nudity was strongly associated with exercise
and sport, in Greek fashion. A Swiss architectural
magazine, ABC, run by Mart Stam and Hans Witter
carried an article in an issue published in 1926 on 'Die
neue Welt' by the Swiss architect and principal teacher
of architecture at the Bauhaus, Hannes Meyer, who
apart from emphasizing straightforward functionalist-
collectivist principles, eulogized the fact that
The stadium has carried the day against the art
museum, and physical reality has taken the
place of beautiful illusion. Sport merges the
individual into the mass. Sport is becoming the
university of collective feeling. 35
Already the wayward and non-conformist spirit
of the pioneer naturists and advocates of free move-
ment was being channelled into a regimented and
ordered form (illus. 11).
When Stephen Spender first visited Germany as a
young man in 1929, he stayed in Hamburg. For the first
few weeks his life was one of swimming, canoeing, al
45

fresco parties and the company of sincere and enthusi-
astic young people who were seeking an alternative to
the war-exhaustion of German life and culture.
The sun - symbol of the great wealth of nature
within the poverty of man - was a primary
social force in this Germany. Thousands of
people went to the open-air swimming baths or
lay down on the shores of the rivers and lakes,
almost nude, and sometimes quite nude, and
the boys who had turned the deepest mahogany
walked amongst those people with paler skins,
like kings among their courtiers.
The sun healed their bodies of the years of
war, and made them conscious of the quivering,
fluttering life of blood and muscles covering their
exhausted spirits like the pelt of an animal: and
their minds were filled with an abstraction of the
11 The cult for keeping fit
reaches epic proportions
outdoors: mass exercise
at New Brighton Lido on
the Wirral near
Birkenhead. which
opened in 1934.
sun, a huge circle of fire, an intense whiteness
blotting out the sharp outlines of all other forms
of consciousness, burning out even the sense of
time. During their leisure, all their powers of
thought were sucked up, absorbed into the sun, as
moisture evaporates from the soil,36
In this period, according to David Matless, one
'can identify four key dimensions of the open-air
body; discipline, exposure, healthy regularity and
choreography'.37 While this is substantially true of
many of the Northern open-air movements and cul-
tures, it cannot be said of those naturist movements
that oriented themselves to a more Hellenistic view of
bodily pleasures. The hedonism of some sun-worship
cultures in the UK and other parts of Europe at this
time, including the 'bungalow' arcadias and progres-
sive youth movements such as the Forest School
camps mentioned earlier, with their deliberate flout-
ing of routine and formality, provided evidence of a
more open attitude towards sexuality. The Women's
League of Health and Beauty, established in 1930,
eschewed an overly regimented approach to physical
exercise, and was linked with contemporary develop-
ments in eurythmics and expressive dance move-
ments, such as those developed by Rudolf Laban.
Yet when the state took action to promote fit-
ness, it was invariably in the interests of national con-
cerns and forms of regulation. In 1937 the National
Fitness Council was set up to instigate a National Fit-
ness Campaign, emphasizing the promotion of a
(mass physical culture'. In 1939 the former Chief Med-
ical Officer, Sir George Newman, published The
Building ofa Nation's Health, commending life in the
open air, nature study, gardening, sunbathing, danc-
ing and singing: something of a mix between the
instrumental and the expressive. By 1939, however,
with preparations for war beginning and attention
being given to the prospect of mass evacuation, the
Government gave serious consideration to the cre-
ation of a national network of camps, partly
prompted by the growing number of local authori-
ties who had established holiday camps for their citi-
zens. Indeed a Camps Act was passed in 1939 and the
National Camps Corporation Ltd established by Par-
liament, though few were actually built. 38
Colin Ward has suggested that while the cult of
semi-nudity in the 1930S was (an affectation of the
intelligentsia', and of individuals and organizations
associated with progressive political movements, it
was the arrival of the commercial holiday camp in
this period that spread these new ideas about health
down the social pyramid. When Billy Butlin opened
his first holiday camp (at Skegness in 1936), he
quickly realized that a random collection of campers
from different parts of the country would need to
bond together - remembering that earlier traditions
of mass camping had usually been organized by
social or political organizations with a strong sense of
collective identity and purpose. So he introduced
organized team games, and even mass fitness exer-
cises as a start to the day.39 The ubiquitous presence
of the swimming-pool as a focus of activity at each
holiday camp made it more acceptable that men and
women would spend more and more time dressing
in swimming clothes or shorts, with the men fre-
quently topless even when wearing long trousers.
The holiday camps democratized the body in an
institutional setting, as the beach had democratized
it decades earlier in a state of nature.
It would also be difficult to regiment nudism or
espouse it in the cause of national discipline (one
remembers the 1960s hippie belief that wars would not
be fought if soldiers had to go into battle naked). Nud-
ism slowly gained some degree of respectability in the
UK in the 1920S, but never reached the proportions it
did in Germany, where it was estimated that there
were 3,000,000 people belonging to nudist clubs and
circles in 1930, a practice banned when Hitler came to
power in 1933. A series of incidents that prompted a
debate about public nudity in the UK were the (Welsh
Harp Sun-Bathing Riots' in June 1930 in north-west
London, when 40 naked sunbathers, both men and
women, were attacked by a crowd. 40 Right from the
beginning the issue of nudity in the UK was riven by
factionalism, principally divided into two camps:
those who describe their culture as naturism, with
associated vegetarian and physical culture aspects (and
with a penchant for adopting and using Greek-derived
labels such as (gymnosophy' or (heliotherapy', but who
continue to insist that there is no connection between
social nudity and sexuality), and those who recognize
47
that nudism is a part of a wider recognition of the
body's centrality to personal identity, with the sexual
implications of this fully recognized.
More liberal attitudes towards the naked or
semi-naked body, particularly when exposed to the
sun, developed into the cult of 'the body beautiful',
and the beach became the place for beauty contests
and expositions of male physique. In 1931 the
swimwear industry was transformed by the intro-
duction of Latex, a patented rubberized material that
hugs the contours of the body, and it was even
claimed that Latex smoothed out anatomical defects
as it did SO.4 In North America in the 1930S, suntan-
1
ning became almost an ideology in its own right,
with Dr Shirley W. Wynne, Commissioner for Health
for the City of New York exuberantly claiming that
'The sun-tan fad is the best thing that has happened
to the people of America.... The sun is the greatest
2
bottle of medicine in the universe.'4
Good health therefore became associated with a
bronzed, muscled and finely proportioned physique,
and the corollary was that those who suffered from
ill-proportioned bodies or any form of ill-health
were at fault in other ways too. The uneasy relation-
ship between modernism and concepts of individual
and social hygiene recurs throughout this period.
Even today in Germany, nudism has ideological over-
tones. In the former East Germany there are still
many beaches bearing the sign FKK (the acronym for
Freikorperkultur), and those brought up in East Ger-
many remain much more at ease with nudism, and
resentful that West Germans want to close all the
nudist beaches. 43 In Tiergarten, one of Berlin's main
public parks, nudism is still common in some areas,
despite many attempts to ban it.
Exposure to the sun's bountiful rays became a
central tenet of mainstream modernism, and Le
Corbusier had also famously rhapsodized about sun-
light, arguing that the principles of La Ville Radieuse
were 'sun, sky, trees, steel, in that strict order of
importance'. Without this distinctly participatory
and modernist espousal of open-air recreation and
exposure to the life-giving properties of the sun,
there would have been no ClAM (Congres Interna-
tionaux d'Architecture Moderne) Athens Charter in
1933, which included in its manifesto the proclama-
tion that, 'The sun, which governs all growth, should
penetrate the interior of every dwelling, there to dif-
fuse its rays, without which life withers and fades.'44
However, two recent critics of such beliefs, Fer-
enc Feher and Agnes HelIer, have argued in Biopoli-
tics (1994) that modernism made illness seem
decadent, and thus suppressed biology and bodily
vulnerability in the name of ideology, with serious
consequences. The perfectibility of society, the per-
fectibility of the human body, and the perfectibility
of a rational, streamlined and functional architecture
and urban planning were all part of the same mod-
ernist ethos for some ClAM supporters, which they
also shared with the excesses of Communist mil-
lenarianism. In the antiseptic and dazzling spaces of
the Existenzminum apartments, the sanatoria and the
bourgeois homes designed as 'machines for living in',
the darker side of life was assumed to have been abol-
ished. Yet as Susan Sontag has written, 'Illness is the
night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship.'45 Ill-
ness is not a metaphor, but an irreducible part of the
human condition, as is organic degeneration and
death, and architecture could no more banish death
than it could hold back the night, or delay the onset
of winter. Too often, then and now, architects have
believed their own pristine, idealized social imagery,
denying the irreversible principles of ageing, entropy
and the never-ending passage of time.
 3 Live Out of Doors as Much as You Can:
The Architecture of Public Health
The scourge of tuberculosis impacted on every aspect
of life in this period, including architecture. In the
first decade of the twentieth century, tuberculosis
was responsible for one death in every eight, and was
the single greatest killer of males in the UK.
l
It had
been thought for some time that fresh air and sun-
light could help alleviate the symptoms of those suf-
fering from tuberculosis. In 1876 a prototype
sanatorium was opened in the Taunus mountains,
north of Frankfurt-am-Main, followed quickly by
another at Nordrach in the Black Forest by Otto
Walther. This latter establishment was much more
influential, according to Roy Porter, and Walther's
(Nordrach theories', based on a belief in a prolonged
and systematic exposure to the elements, especially
sun and fresh air, were taken up in many other parts
of the world. Robert Louis Stevenson, an early recip-
2
ient of this treatment, spent the winter of 1880 in
Davos, Switzerland. The first of a new type of tuber-
culosis institution in the UK based on (open-air treat-
ment' was founded by Sir Robert Philip in 1889 in
Edinburgh: the Royal Victoria Hospital for Con-
sumption.
Although children were somewhat less exposed
to the conditions causing tuberculosis, a significant
number were excluded from schooling because they
were suffering from infectious diseases or were con-
sidered too (delicate', and the first open-air school in
the UK designed to accommodate these needs was
opened by the Lee in 1907 at Bostall Wood, Plum-
stead, in south London. 3 The fear of tuberculosis also
influenced the design of domestic housing, and in a
book on the planning and design of cottages pub-
lished in this period, Lawrence Weaver, confidently
asserted that (a tuberculosis germ will live for two
years out of the direct rays of the sun and not more
than ten minutes in the sunlight. A typhoid germ has
the same life out of the sun and two minutes in the
sun.'4 Such beliefs grew out of the alleged bactericidal
properties of sunlight, propagated by the Danish
physician Niels Finsen in the last decades of the nine-
teenth century. 5
In 1908 the pioneering sisters Rachel and Mar-
garet Macmillan opened London's first School Clinic,
noting that (the children of the poor, as well as the
well-to-do, need sunlight and freedom for develop-
ment'.6 In 1914 the sisters set up a permanent camp
for sick children i? the garden of Evelyn House in
Deptford, also in south London, which became an
open-air school in which the children lived and slept
wholly under canvas during their stay. Exposure to
the bracing conditions of the elements could be taken
to extremes. At some of the open-air schools even
heating was frowned on, and one such school in
Northumberland recorded a temperature of just 30
degrees fahrenheit in November 1915. Belief in this
49
kind of treatment nevertheless continued, and by
1937 there were 96 open-air day schools in England
and S3 open-air residential schools.
The Macmillan sisters were passionate advocates
of (child-centred' education, the origins of which lay
in the Romantic belief that children were born inno-
cent, and that it was society which imprisoned their
minds and bodies at an early age and corrupted them
into cynical adulthood and ill-health. The writings of
Blake, Wordsworth, Rousseau and others were
enlisted in the cause of restoring to childhood a pris-
tine state of open-eyed wonder and bodily freedom,
before the shades of the prison-house closed in. This
movement was particularly strong in England in the
early twentieth century, and new forms of education
were proposed that emphasized the importance of
allowing the child to develop and to discover its
latent identity and personality from within.
The English romantic tradition was subse-
quently joined to ideas from other countries, from
Comenius, Froebel, Montessori and Dewey, and a
number of independent kindergarten, nursery
schools and other kinds of experimental educational
projects were set up in the 1920S and 1930S, generally
under the rubric of (progressive education', and often
associated with bodies such as the New Education
Fellowship. The kindergarten notion, as the name
suggests, came from Germany, where progressive
thought proposed that early education should take
the form of a garden, or a pre-Iapsarian Eden, where
virtue could grow untrammelled (illus. 12, 13). Not
surprisingly the emphasis on learning through play,
on the exploration of all the senses, on kinaesthetics
and movement, all had implications for architecture
and the use of interior space, as well as the need to
provide access to sunshine and fresh air as much as
possible.
so
The practice of architecture and the principle of
learning through play both shared a common inter-
est in games of construction. The nineteenth-century
interest in educational toys, including many that
involved various forms of construction and model-
building, helped induce a delight in the elementary
forms of architecture. The German educator
Friedrich Froebel developed building bricks and
wooden shapes that could be used for construction,
and Frank Lloyd Wright admitted that his early play
with Froebel toys (he had aunts who were Froebel
teachers) had an important influence on his subse~
quent wish to become an architect. 7 Witold Rybczyn-
ski's delightful book, The Most Beautiful House in the
World, provides a fascinating account of the histori-
cal relationship between construction toys and the
practice of architecture.
The relationship between progressive pedagogy
and progressive architecture deepened in the early
years of the twentieth century. One of the finest early
modern buildings in Moscow (and indeed all of Rus-
sia) was Aleksandr Zelenko's remarkable school for
the Children's Work and Play Society, built in 1912,
and still standing, though derelict (illus. 14).8 Its
organic, expressionistic curves and turrets, with the
free-form contours of the rough-cast walls, share
many similarities with the work of Gaudi or Mendel-
sohn, though Zelenko probably knew of neither.
That organic style of architecture can still be seen in
some modern school buildings associated with pro-
gressive education, notably Christopher Day's extra-
ordinary Steiner School in Pembrokeshire built in
the 1970S (illus. IS).
The state was always more tolerant of experimen-
tation among the younger age groups, whether in or
outside of the state education system, where, to cite
Andrew Saint, (the clash between a child's develop-
12 Lunch outdoors at a Guildford
model nursery school during the
Second World War: a photograph
by Bill Brandt that was published
in Picture Post in 1941.

13 A return to Eden: Aboyne

Lodge Primary School, St
Albans. 1960.

14 Progressive school in Moscow for the Children's Work and
Play Society in the organic or expressionist style. Architect:
Aleksandr Zelenko. Constructed 1912.
ment and the nation's requirements is muted'.9 The
emphasis in kindergarten and school design was on
light, space and informality - and against monumen-
tality (certainly a feature of the triple-decker London
Board Schools built at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury and still in use today). Two architectural critics
52
averred that 'Monumentality should have no place in
the school today where education, its monumental E
struck down by child psychology, is no longer stern
but smiling.'1O The links between the modern move-
ment and progressive education in the UK were
strong, so much so that by the early 1950S Waiter
Gropius was happy to claim that the UK had the most
advanced new schools in the world." This claim that
the UK led the world in the design of educational
buildings was endorsed by G. E. Kidder Smith in his
well-known book on the new architecture in Europe
published in 1962.
The design of the early sanatoria and open-air
schools both in the UK and Europe drew on the tradi-
tional 'pavilion plan' used in hospital architecture for
its internal layout, based on long corridor wards with
windows on both sides. The design of the wider set-
ting took its cue from Garden City principles." Pap-
worth Village Settlement, for example, founded in
1917 by Sir Pendrill Varrier-Jones and Sir German
15 The Nant·Y·Cwym
Steiner Nursery School,
L1anycefn, Wales, in the
organic style. Architect:
Christopher Day
Associates. Constructed
1970s.
Sims Woodhead, Professor of Pathology at nearby
Cambridge University, was planned as a scaled-down
Garden City, and Ebenezer Howard approved the
application of the garden city model to institutions
combating tuberculosis. The Papworth Settlement
was considered one such model with a hospital, sana-
torium and a village settlement with industries
attached: a self-contained community. Later some
critics would question whether such stand-alone
communities might not produce certain kinds of
institutionalized behaviour and mentalities, making
it difficult for people to adjust if they eventually were
able to return to ordinary life.
Meeting the needs of all patients for equal access
to the sun and air posed genuine design problems,
and experimentations in plan and structure became
quite common. The King Edward VII Sanatorium,
Midhurst, Sussex (1904-6), designed by Charles
Holden with Percy Adams, had an unusual feature in
what was described by a visitor in 1913 as a 'step-like
16 Balconies and light for
all: ziggurat apartments
at Cresset Road,
Hackney, for the Bethnal
Green and East London
Housing Association.
Architect: J.E.M.
MacGregor. Constructed
1937.
fayade, which enabled all patients to have a spacious
balcony in front of their bedroom, and at the same
time did not deprive the room on the floor below of
sunshine'.'3 These kinds of building with a tiered,
stepped-back arrangement of south-facing balconies
were known in Germany (where this architecture
originated) as Terrassenbau. Again the ziggurat
design owed much to the wedding-cake layers of
decks found in the larger passenger liners. Socially-
and functionally-minded architects were attracted to
the design of such buildings, and there is an intrigu-
ing example of the ziggurat design in Hackney, east
London, at Lennox House (illus. 16), built in 1937 for
the Bethnal Green and East London Housing Associ-
ation by the architect John MacGregor (1890-1984).'4
Meanwhile in Finland an early example of the
new Functionalism in architecture was the Taka-
haraju Tuberculosis Sanatorium designed by Onni
Tarjanne in 1902, and in which the open-air balconies
were a new architectural feature. However, it was the
53
Dutch architect Johannes Duiker (1890-1935), a
prominent leader of the New Movement in The
Netherlands who most firmly and robustly welded
architectural principles and social principles, notably
in the beautiful Zonnestraal sanatorium complex in
Hilversum (1926) and the 'First Open Air School for
Sick Children' in Amsterdam, the Eerste Open
Luchtschool voor het Gezonde Kind of 1927-8 and its
imitators(illus. 17-19). The latter still teems with chil-
dren today, and provides a fine example of the endur-
ing elan, and even timelessness, of some of the best
experiments in the modern style.
Duiker was, in his own estimation, a social
reformer first, and an architect second, less con-
cerned with material re-distribution than with phys-
ical well-being: 'more health than wealth'.'5 These two
buildings, elegant assemblies of pure white lines and
masses, panelled with glass, represented the Func-
tionalist ideal of the 'dissolving ofartistry in the engi-
neer's mind.'16 Duiker never described himself as a
54
modernist, but he did adhere to the principles of the
Nieuwe Zakelijkheid (New Objectivity). The
Zonnestraal sanatorium borrowed heavily from
Duiker's interest in the engineering structures and
details of ships and aeroplanes, and long sun-
terraces, balconies, exterior staircases, low horizontal
lines and cabin structures reflected this. His build-
ings were nearly always white. The main building at
the Open Air school again is a straightforward block
structure, with half of each floor enclosed by glass
curtain-walling, and the other half left open as bal-
cony space. Even the glazed rooms had steel-framed
revolving windows that could be opened up entirely.
The main vertical supports in the building were
l.ocated at some distance from the corner of each
wall, leaving the corners free of columns and giving
the floor slabs and balconies a floating appearance.
In 1928 Alvar Aalto visited The Netherlands, and
went to see the Zonnestraal Sanatorium in Hilversum
and tlIe Open Air School in Amsterdam, both of
17 Open Air School,
Amsterdam: 'It joins
Duiker's Zonnestraal in
Hilversum and Van der
Vlugt's Van Nelle factory
in Rotterdam as one of
the masterpeices of this
type of architecture in
The Netherlands.'
Architects: Johannes
(Jan) Duiker and Bernard
Bijvoet. Constructed
1927-8.
18 Open A'lr School,
Amsterdam,

19 Creche Israe'rte
I de, Paris.
k
rue Lamarc • Paris, with
'in
wrap-roun d fenestration
, •
the style of DUlker s
Amsterdam Open Air
School.

which he much admired. 17 In 1933 he completed the
Paimio Sanatorium in south-west Finland, where, as
in Duiker's building, the structural frame consisted of
concrete columns permitting free floor plans (illus.
20). This was regarded as Aalto's first masterpiece, and
was another triumph for socially minded Functional-
ism. Yet, contrary to myth that this kind of architec-
ture was wholly ideological, Aalto said that he started
absolutely from the point of view of the patient:
When I took on the planning I was ill myself, so
I had a chance to do a few tests and find out
what it was really like to be ill. It irritated me to
lie horizontal all the time and the first thing I
20 Balconies at Paimio Sanatorium by Alvar Aalto, regarded as
his first masterpiece. Completed 1933.
noticed was that the rooms were designed for
people who spend their days in the vertical
position, not for those who have to spend days
on end in bed. Like moths round a candle my
eyes were constantly drawn towards the electric
light. A room which is not designed specifically
for people lying horizontal has no internal
equilibrium or real peace. So I tried to design
rooms for non-active patients which gave the
bed-ridden a tranquil atmosphere.1 8
The very best of this period of Functionalism
achieved a successful synthesis of clarity and durabil-
ity, with a strong aesthetic statement declared. The
Paimio Sanatorium, yet another white building, was
set in a pine forest and its clean lines and pristine
'white liner' appearance seemed to find its own aes-
thetic equilibrium in such surroundings. Anyone who
has travelled by boat in and out of the thousands of
islands that make up the Stockholm archipelago, or
through the Norwegian fiords, will know how fitting
a modern white ship can look, seen framed within a
forest or woodland setting. What this highly engi-
neered architecture shared with more classical styles
of large-scale buildings, particularly large country
houses, was that they seemed to appear at their best in
natural meadow or wooded settings, rather than in
formal or laid-out gardens, as exemplified in Erik
Bryggman's Finnish Sports Institute (illus. 21). The
creation of a highly rational and Functionalist archi-
tecture in a natural setting, became admired in the UK
in the 1950S as the great strength of the 'Swedish style',
with one writer, Elizabeth Beazley, declaring that the
Scandinavians
21 Finnish Sports
Institute at Viermaki
1936: white formalism in
a natural setting.
Architect: Erik Bryggman.
showed a genius for the siting of buildings and
the design of the landscape setting. They
showed how splendid modern architecture
could look in just the sort oflandscape town-
dwelling Englishmen most like: wild nature and
left wild by design with birch and pine among
outcropping rock, and short grass running
down to lakes or rivers or inlets of the sea. '9
The influence elsewhere of the Paimio Sanato-
rium was profound. In Hackney, east London, the
new East Wing to the existing German Hospital,
designed by Thomas Tait and built in 1935-6, has clear
echoes of Aalto's first masterpiece, comprised as it is
of a tall, elongated block with sun balconies on each
floor and a roof garden (illus. 22, 23).20
When the young architect Berthold Lubetkin first
arrived in England in 1930 from Russia via Paris, he
was introduced by his friend Godfrey Samuel to Dr
Philip Ellman, the Medical Officer of Health for the
London Borough of East Ham, then, and still, one of
the poorer districts in the capital. Ellman was a spe-
cialist in the treatment of tuberculosis, and a keen
member of the Socialist Medical Association, an orga-
nization that had much to do with the thinking which
laid the foundations for the National Health Service
after the War. Lubetkin's first commission in the UK -
though never built - was a TB Clinic for Dr Ellman. 21
The designs included a glass-walled patients' waiting-
room, anticipating the famous design of the Finsbury
Health Centre some years later.
If the sanatorium became an icon for early mod-
ern architecture at the beginning of the twentieth
century, it also became a literary setting too. During
this period a whole genre of popular fiction devel-
oped that took the sanatorium as an ideal place in
57
22 Aalto's Paimio comes to east London: the East
Wing of the German Hospital, Hackney. 'The design
and detailing and their execution mark the building
out as being in the forefront of modern design in
1930s Britain.' Architect: Thomas Tait. Constructed
1935-6.

23 Balconies at the German Hospital, Hackney.

which to explore human and social relations isolated
and cut off from wider society. Much of this litera-
ture was romantic, even strangely decadent, in its
sensibility, and concerned with individual pathology,
but in some of the short stories of D. H. Lawrence,
and most famously in Thomas Mann's great novel,
The Magic Mountain (1927), the sanatorium becomes
a monastic setting for reflecting on the sorrows of the
world, and the imprisoning vulnerability and unreli-
ability of the susceptible human body. The analogy
that was often made between Functionalist architec-
ture and that of certain kinds of captive or
sequestered settings such as monasteries, liners, and
spa town hotels, only adds to our sense today that the
impulse for the repetitive, cellular residential building,
came both from a sense of rising clear of the sur-
rounding streets into the free sky, but also, rather more
negatively, of locking the body away from the quotid-
ian life in order to preserve it from contagion and
social promiscuity. Indeed, critics of Le Corbusier's
work, particularly his vast housing complex, Unite
d'Habitation, in Marseilles, never fail to point out his
own interest in the life of the monastery and the sim-
plicity of the monk's cell.
The most famous of the initiatives to develop a
new approach to working-class health provision in
the UK was the establishment of the Peckham Health
Centre (originally known as the Pioneer Health Cen-
tre)' which opened in 1935 in south London. This was
the result of the activities of two doctors, Dr Innes H.
Pearse and Dr G. Scott Williamson, who were deter-
mined to promote good health rather than treat ill-
health. The building, designed by Sir Owen Williams,
a well-known engineer, comprised a swimming-
pool, a gymnasium, a theatre, a nursery, dance-halls,
a cafeteria, games rooms, as well as a series of medical
rooms (illus. 24-6). When Walter Gropius arrived in
England in 1937 as a refugee from the Nazis, he said
that it was not merely the best new building he had
seen in London, it was the only one he found inter-
esting. 22
The Peckham Health Centre also subscribed to
the philosophy of 'individual free development', at
the same time as being run as a membership organi-
zation with the members active in the management
of the Centre. The emphasis on popular autonomy
and participation was quite different from the pater-
nalism of state health provision elsewhere. The
building was subsequently used for more main-
stream health administration and recreation. It was
vacated in the early 1990S and in 1998 permission was
granted to convert it into private apartments. Despite
its relatively brief life, the Peckham Health Centre is
still cited as one of the great public-health experi-
ments of the twentieth century in the UK. This either
demonstrates how unique it was or, more soberly,
how infrequently such experiments are attempted.
THE AGE OF GLASS
The use of reinforced concrete - still relatively recent
in its development - to create these new building
opportunities, also extended to the growing popular-
ity of glass as a structural material. A seminal figure
in Germany between the wars was Bruno Taut. His
early Wandervogel romanticism translated itself into
an unswerving belief in the power of the architect to
entirely reshape the world - very much a twentieth-
century idee fixe - together with an enthusiasm for
the new materials of glass, steel and concrete. He
wrote a series of Friilicht (Daybreak) articles for the
German magazine Stadtbaukunst until the editor
could stand no more of the excessive prose. In 1921 he
wrote in the introduction to a new collection:
59
24 Open-air exercises at
the Peckham Health
Centre, south London:
When Waiter Gropius
came to England in
1937, he praised the
Centre not merely as the
best new building but
also as the only one he
found interesting.
Architect: Sir Owen
Williams. Opened 1935.

25 Peckham Health
Centre: Parents look on
at activities in the
swimming pool.
How day will eventually break - who knows? But
we can feel the morning. We are no longer
moonstruck wanderers roaming dreamily in the
pale light of history. A cool early morning wind is
blowing around us; he who doesn't want to shiver
must stride out. and we and all those striding with
us see in the distance the early light of the
awakening morning! Where are all the nocturnal
spectres? Glassy and bright a new world shines
The Peckham Health Centre
The transparency of the architecture was the
dominant feature of the Peckham Health Centre.
The extensive use of glass in both the interior and
exterior walls produced high natural daylight lev-
24
els throughout the building. Moveable glazed
partitions were used extensively for the sub-
divison of spaces, allowing visual contact
between activities and allowing the researchers to
observe the individuals and families using the
Centre. In their description of the building, Innes
H. Pearse and Lucy H. Crocker later wrote that
It may be difficult in the first instance for
the reader to conceive of such a building;
difficult to rid the mind of a picture of a
glass-house with large open spaces in which
little comfort and sociability would be likely
to forthcome. To those of us who use it, it
does not appear like this. The main social
floor looking on to a blue-green swimming
bath, the ripples of water casting their
ceaseless reflections on walls and ceiling,
out in the early light, it is sending out the first
rays. A first gleam ofjubilant dawn. Decades,
generations - and the great sun of architecture, of
art in general will begin its victorious course. 23
It was Taut who designed the first glass-brick
building - glass-bricks becoming the quintessential
semiological 'sign' of modernism - and who was
instrumental in setting up a network of sympathetic
has at once an attraction that is unique. On
the sunny side the building has gently
curved window-bays and everywhere the
large open floor spaces are broken up by
pillars which, besides giving variations of
light and shade, give a number of foci in the
aisles about which intimate groups can
form naturally without interfering with the
continuity of circulation throughout the
building. 25
Despite misgiVings about the anthropological
tone of its founders and administrators, which
was not unduly excessive for its time, there were
many aspects to its management and adminis-
tration that were forward-looking and progres-
sive, notably in its radical and preventative
approach to public health provision in which the
emphasis truly was on encouraging healthy
lifestyles and forms of recreation, rather than on
treating ill-health.
61

architects and designers known as the Glass Chain.
Members of the Chain communicated with one
other through a 'utopian correspondence' of letters,
and their devotional text was the poem by Paul
Scheerbart ('our Glaspapa', Taut called him), in
which each of 14 couplets celebrated the different
qualities of glass, concluding with the final verse:
Das Glas bringt uns die neue Zeit;
Backsteinkultur tut uns nur leid.
Glass will make the future city;
Bricks will just engender pity.'6
It was at this time that Le Corbusier said that 'the
whole history of architecture revolves exclusively
around the wall apertures', although this is usually
translated as 'the whole history of architecture
revolves exclusively around the window."7 The trans-
parency of buildings became a key principle of the
62
26 Peckham Health
Centre, 1999: The
pool is empty and
the building is
closed, awaiting
conversion into
private apartments.
new architecture.,8 The development of frame build-
ings, whether the frame was made of steel or con-
crete, took away the need for the outer walls to be
load-bearing, and so glass could be used as liberally
as possible, though not always without problems, as
was noted in the overheated apartment buildings
criticized at the 1927 Stuttgart exhibition.
Interior temperatures were more difficult to
regulate, and some people found living behind glass
psychologically more demanding. As window space
increased, there was also less need for furniture,
which would block the view unless it was crowded
against the remaining walls. With large picture win-
dows at ground-floor level, the living-room and the
garden were brought into closer relationship. Gym-
nasia were built with ingenious glass walls that
could be folded away to disclose the open air. In
many ways the increasing use of glass radically
transformed not only domestic architecture, partic-

ularly among wealthier sections of the population,
but the ways in which such people inhabited their
houses.
Alvar Aalto saw the importance of using glass as
roof-lighting, particularly for public institutions,
which he developed almost into a new architectural
principle. In his pioneering design for the Viipuri
Library (1927-35), it is the lighting of the reading-
rooms through domed skylights from above that is
one of the most distinctive - and soon to be charac-
teristic - features of Aalto's designs, repeated in the
Stockmann bookshop in Helsinki and in other build-
ings by him. As Michael Spens has written in his
monograph on the Viipuri Library:
He adhered to the fundamental concept of roof-
lighting for the central spaces of public
institutions, developing and articulating the
element in new forms for the remainder of his
27 Maison de
Verre. Paris: 'The
house is
translucent
throughout and is
Iit solely by its
glass· blocked
fa<;ade.· Architect:
Pierre Chareau.
Completed 1931.
career, and with such success that the ideas
became widely acceptable.·9
The most extraordinary glass building of all in
this period was the Maison de Verre designed by the
French cabinet-maker turned architect, Pierre
Chareau for the gynaecologist and campaigner for
family planning, Jean Dalsace, and built in 1931 on the
site of an old Paris town-house in Saint-Germain-
des-Pres. 3o The house is translucent throughout, and
composed entirely of 'Nevada' glass bricks slotted into
a steel frame (illus. 27). The bricks, manufactured by
the French glass company Saint Gobain were still at a
prototype stage when Chareau decided to use them,
and the Company refused to provide any guarantee
that they fulfil all the requirements expected of them by
the architect. Some commentators have subsequently
drawn parallels between the translucency of the build-
ing and its owner's profession as a gynaecologist, with
28 Finsbury Health Centre, London: Echoes of the architect's earlier design for the Palace of Soviets, with
extensive use of glass bricks for the main fa<;ade. Architect: Berthold Lubetkin. Completed 1938.

the latter's need to map the body in vitro, and to subject
the body to the unremitting gaze of the clinical
observer. Sarah Wigglesworth sees the commission as
precisely an example of the modern movement's wish
to clinicize the body and deny the reality of sickness by
forensic forms of design and transparency:
The Maison de Verre has always been
represented as a model of cool Modern
Movement technocracy. This is a very male
view, because you can easily argue that smooth,
technological architecture is also to do with
repressed sexuality, or a male way of trying to
repress or control female sexuality - as, I
suppose, is Minimalism.31
Glass bricks however were here to stay, and
increasingly used in public buildings such as health
centres, for the purposes of achieving greater light
and transparency. In the UK one of the earliest and
successful use of glass bricks as a structural feature
came in Berthold Lubetkin's Finsbury Health Centre
in central London near Clerkenwell, commissioned
by a Dr Katial at the beginning of 1936 and completed
in 1938 (illus. 28-31). Katial was a Councillor in Fins-
bury and had been impressed by Lubetkin's design of
 29 Line drawing of
OPE N P LA N N IN G Finsbury Health Centre

~'
showing how its design
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Lubetkin & Tecton's TB Clinic exhibited at the British The original brief required that the building pro-
Medical Association in 1932. The Peckham Health vide a TB clinic, a dispensary and laboratory, a cleans-
Centre had already been completed at this time and ing and disinfection station, a mortuary, a dental clinic
had attracted a lot of attention, but the two buildings and laboratory, a solarium, a foot clinic, a reception
were designed to achieve completely different ends: flat, administrative accommodation, a lecture hall, as
Peckham to promote health, and Finsbury to fight well as other facilities. The design of the building was
disease. As an article in The Spectator at the time indeed revolutionary, with clear echoes of Lubetkin's
noted: early design of a Palace of Soviets, and allusions to El
Lissiztky's Red Wedge in the shape of a tapered lecture
Finsbury is not really a health centre in the same hall almost hammered into the back of the main
sense that Peckham is. It is a poly-clinic, building. Glass bricks were used on a large scale to cre-
organised for disease. Peckham is organised for ate the main fa<rade and entrance hall. Lubetkin had
health. Finsbury braces itself to fight disease noted in his first design report to Finsbury Council
with the best weapons and in the most efficient that the intention of the glass fa<rade was 'not only
ways that man has yet devised, but insofar as its from the point of view of hygiene but also as a
main operations begin after disease has taken a medium of propaganda of light and air in the homes
hold, its whole existence is an acknowledgement of the patients, and as a powerfully stimulating psy-
of human failure to achieve or retain health. 32 chological factor'.33 On the walls of the main entrance
hall, the artist Gordon Cullen, whose designs and
30 Finsbury Health
Centre: interior showing
the bow·fronted, glass·
walled entrance foyer.

31 Finsbury Health
Centre: interior showing
Gordon Cullen's murals
Fresh Air, Night & Day and
Live Out of Doors As Much
As You Can.
32 New public library in Paris: Mediatheque Jean·Pierre Melville/Bibliotheque Marguerite Durand.
A good example of the greater transparency that glass architecture brought to public buildings.

artistic representations of modern architecture, land-
scape and urban life came to express and capture the
more utopian elements of this more benign form of
modernism in this period, had painted two large
murals exhorting people to 'LIVE OUT OF DOORS AS
MUCH AS YOU CAN' and promoting 'FRESH AIR NIGHT
AND DAY'. Even today, the building still has a futuristic
look to it: a long asphalted gangplank leading to the
entrance of a slightly raised, bow-fronted glass space-
ship. At night the building still glows bright at the
heart of the re-constructed Finsbury settlement.
The development of x-rays ensured that very
soon they became the standard diagnostic tool for
the investigation of suspected and actual tuberculo-
sis. This neatly paralleled the new transparency of
architecture, for just as x-rays allowed the doctor
(though rarely the patient) to see inside and through
the very structures of the body, so the steel and glass
constructions of Pierre Chareau and Mies van der
Rohe allowed the public architectural realm, and its
inner functions, to become more transparent too.
The heavily-draped and private world of the Victo-
rian domestic interior, together with the Victorian
body and mind, were both simultaneously being
opened up to the public gaze. In the twentieth cen-
tury a changing architecture reflected just one of the
many ways in which the individual subject, as well as
the social contract, became more public and trans-
parent, particularly in the design of libraries, schools Likewise the working-class female body only
and leisure facilities (illus. 32). achieved its full sovereignty once fertility and repro-
The analogies between developments in modern duction issues were resolved by effective contracep-
architecture in this 'heroic' period, and advances in tion. Until then it was often regarded as a carrier of
medicine and public health, remain striking, though wider social pathologies. Too fertile, and it was seen
both shared common weaknesses, at times alarmingly as over-burdensome on the state. Too unproductive,
so. For the doctor or the public-health professional, and it was thought to be failing in its patriotic duty to
the proletarian body was an object in need of provide the next generation of the nation's young cit-
improvement and care; the person inside the body izens. The rise of the autonomy and individuality of
was rarely addressed directly, and certainly not as an urban working-class subjects came after modernism
equal. At times the patrician, cloying language of the began its decline. If these social assumptions reflect
health and welfare pioneers was embarrassing, espe- badly on the architectural and medical practices of
cially when on the subject of 'the masses' or 'the the time, they also reflect badly on the politics of
working classes'. So too with architecture de haut en social democracy too. For in retrospect socialist and
base These were grand schemes and great achieve- social democratic politics can be seen to have taken
ments, but they were done to people, not with them. issues of human individuality and sovereignty too
In as much as it would have been rare for a doctor lightly, a mistake that was to rebound politically in
ever to show a patient his or her own x-rays or clinical the years ahead, when such political ideologies found
notes, it was equally rare for the architect or planner themselves unable to respond to the growing individ-
to exhibit the plans for public debate or in other ways ualization of society, and consequently became mar-
consult the would-be users. ginalized for decades.
One might assume from the history of this
period that the body in need of urgent reform lacked
a mind of its own, or indeed a sense of its own
agency. The male worker's body became increasingly
problematic with the rise of unemployment, as it
seemed to lose its overwhelming physical rationale in
the need and ability to engage in physical hard work.
The male worker moved from being a hero and
avatar of the future, to becoming - in the form of an
unemployed young man - a figure of threat and
moral decline. Some of the health arguments
changed from a concern with the recuperation of the
tired and poorly housed body to a concern for physi-
cal exercise as a form of moral discipline - in case
unemployment led to indolence or even worse forms
of compensation and distraction.

68
 4 Bring the Landscape into the House:
At the turn of the century, housing reform became a
serious issue throughout Europe as the poor health
of cramped urban populations made itself evident in
the difficulties with army recruitment as well as in
high infant mortality rates. At the end of the nine-
teenth century the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain
had been told that tuberculosis ran some 50 per cent
higher in back-to-backs than in houses with through
ventilation. A series of Acts were passed and national
l
institutions established throughout Europe at this
time: the Housing of the Working Classes Act, Eng-
land (1890), the establishment of the Societe
Fran~aise des Habitations a Bon Marche (1890) in
France, the German Adickes Law (1901), in The
Netherlands the Housing Act of 19°2, and in Italy the
founding of the Instituti per le Case Popolari (1902).2
The London County Council (LCC)was one of
the pioneers in the provision of mass public housing
for the urban working classes in the UK, and the
Boundary Estate in Shoreditch, designed by young
architects working for the LCC, and in large measure
inspired by the ideals of Ruskin and Morris, created
an estate in 1900 that is still robust and popular
today. Most public housing in London, however, was
created at a considerable distance from the city's cen-
tre, and unlike the Dutch estates of the same period
was often built with few shops, pubs or other com-
munity amenities. For example, the Becontree Estate
Housing for the New Society
in east London grew to a population of 90,000 by
1931, with just six pubs to serve it - one pub for every
15,000 people compared to inner London averages of
one pub for every few hundred people. 3
It was generally agreed that in the first two
decades of the twentieth century, the Dutch did
things differently and better, developing 'an interna-
tional reputation as a mecca for social housing',
according to Nancy Stieber. 4 It was realized at the
time that Dutch society was structured in more com-
plex ways than along simple class lines, and housing
policy was developed to address these different speci-
ficities. Dutch society organized itself through a
process called verzuiling, the creation of a series of
parallel 'pillars' or confluences of religious, political
and social groupings, each with its own schools,
trades unions, newspaper, sports clubs and housing
associations. In modern jargon it would be termed
vertical integration. Working-class housing needs,
therefore, were variously met by socialist, liberal, sec-
ular, Protestant or Roman Catholic housing organi-
zations, depending on which particular pillar the
family identified with or belonged to. These different
pillars also had a distinct approach to the particulars
of housing type and form:
The secular parties, socialists and liberals,
formed subcultures endorsing modernisation in

its many forms. Against them aligned the
antimodernist confessionals: the Roman
Catholic and the Orthodox Protestant pillars.
Housing societies empowered to receive state
financing under the Housing Act divided along
these lines and became the institutional avenues
for competing views on housing design. 5
The eminent architect and planner H. P. Berlage
was responsible for planning the extension of south
Amsterdam between 1902 and 1920, mixing large
apartment blocks with inner courtyards and gardens,
with quiet squares, shops, bars, cafes, schools and
other public institutions. Also in Amsterdam,
Michael De Klerk designed two of Amsterdam's most
enduring and beautiful public housing estates, Eigen
Haard (Our Hearth) and De Dageraad (The Dawn).
Both are outstanding examples of the finest architec-
tural principles and craft skills put to the service of
social policy, and still attract visitors and admirers
70
33 Eigen Haard (Our
Hearth) housing estate,
Amsterdam: 'The
crowning glory of
Amsterdam School
architecture'. Architect:
M. De Klerk. Constructed
1913-20.
from far and wide. Eigen Haard is only a few min-
utes' walk from the central railway station, and one
comes upon it with sudden delight and astonishment
(illus. 33). The development consists of three blocks
(one subsequently known as 'The Ship'), all expertly
built in brick with clear elements of Arts and Crafts
detailing - and sprung into life by a number of unex-
pected and astonishing Expressionist extravagances.
After De Klerk's early death in 1923, a tenant wrote to
the daily newspaper Het Yolk:
He has departed, the builder of our houses.
How shall we workers' wives remember this
unflagging workman for what he has done for
our husbands and children? It is as if every brick
calls out: Come all workers, and rest from your
labours in the homes that await you. Is not the
Spaarndammerplein a fairy tale dreamt of as a
child, as something we children never had?6
34 De Dageraad (The Dawn) housing estate, Amsterdam.
Architects: M. De Klerk and P. L. Kramer. Constructed 1919-22.

Between 1919 and 1922 De Klerk worked with

another architect, P. L. Kramer, to design and build
workers' housing for the socialist housing association
De Dageraad (illus. 34). This development was more
subdued architecturally, but on the corner of one
block there is a landmark fa<;:ade of brick sculptural
detailing rising sheer into the sky.
Another important Dutch architect in this
period was J.J.P. Oud (1890-1963), a pupil of Berlage
and a founder-member of De Stijl, and the City
Architect for Rotterdam between 1918 and 1933. Like
other members of De Stijl, Oud acknowledged the
influence ofFrank Lloyd Wright, principally through
the impact of a collection of Wright's drawings, the
Wasmuth portfolio, published in Germany in 1911.
This edition contained an introduction by C. R. Ash-
bee, the English Arts and Crafts designer and politi-
cal radical, which Wright had invited him to
compose during a visit by Wright to Ashbee's crafts
commune in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, in
1910, another example of the crucial personal and
aesthetic connections between the old visions and
the new'? Oud was attracted to the long, horizontal the Hook of Holland and the Kiekhof designs he used
lines and window openings of America's Prairie De Stijl primary colours - bands of yellow brick, blue
8
School. Along with the work of Jan Duiker and steel railings, white painted upper storeys - with pro-
Michael De Klerk, Oud's designs gained interna- nounced rounded corners, partly glazed. The exte-
tional attention, constituting perhaps one of the rior glazed, rounded stairwell at one end or on the
most lasting and successful attempts to create model corner of the building became a hallmark of this
housing and model communities for the new urban style, elegantly adopted, for example, at Sadler House
working classes. (illus. 36), on Berthold Lubetkin's Spa Green Estate
Oud is famous for the Cafe De Unie (illus. 35) in Islington, north London, and in many other
and the Kiefuoek Estate (1925-30) in Rotterdam, and places.
the Hook of Holland housing estate (1925), all influ- For the American architectural critic Catherine
ential constructions in the canon of modernism. In Bauer, writing in 1934,

71

It was in Holland that the Romantic movement
left its most enduring mark. Berlage and his
followers, influenced on the one hand by the
medievalism of Morris and on the other by the
freer and more original genius of the American
Frank Lloyd Wright, achieved the first real
vernacular of modern architecture. That is, a
'style' whose monuments were not to be found
72
35 The reconstructed Cafe De Unie,
Rotterdam. The design and bold primary
colours of the fac;ade are typical of De
Stijl. The cafe still plays a role in avant·
garde life. Architect: J.J.P. Oud.
Constructed 1924-5 (restored 1985-6).
merely in isolated villas or public buildings, but
in whole blocks and streets of 'housing' and
shops and offices, in plotting and planning, and
within the dwelling of l'homme moyen sensuel as
well as those of the more advanced or Bohemian
literati. This was particularly true in
Amsterdam, where entire districts, including
many low-cost workers' apartments were put up

with official assistance, and also palatial hotels
and schools and bath-houses and bridges, bear
witness to a fresh approach to the modern
world, for the most part quite unified ... The
same sort of rejuvenation (for there was no
complete or revolutionary break with the past
until much later) was going on in the
Scandinavian countries, where the early co-
operative housing has a sort of decent dignity
difficult to discover in the model tenements of
London or Paris or New York. 9
By the mid-1920s however, the baton of housing
innovation had passed to Germany, which then
established itself as the leading centre for the devel-
36 Rounded stairwell at Sadler House, Spa Green Estate,
London. Architect: Berthold Lubetkin, Constructed 1946-9.
opment of modern public housing. While much was
learned from The Netherlands, the German planners
and architects also took a cue from Vienna, where in
1923 a new rent tax was evolved to fund new build-
ings such as the famous Karl-Marx Hof (illus. 37). In
this development designed by the city architect Karl
Ehn (1884-1957), there were over 1,300 flats housing
some 5,000 to 6,000 people, a model quickly emu-
lated in Germany.
Margaret Schutte-Lihotsky was one of the most
energetic architects associated with the Vienna
Housing Movement. She was also the designer of the
'Frankfurt Kitchen', the precursor of the modern fit-
ted kitchen, and at the age of 101 was still involved in
the mid-1990s with the design of the new Frauen-
werkstadt (women's work town) in Vienna, an estate
designed with the particular needs of women with
children in mind. 1O
A typical feature of this new
development is that the communal washing facilities
are cleverly located on a roof terrace, providing
opportunities for sunshine and fresh air as well. One
of the residents told a visiting journalist that
If a man was to have planned this he would have
put the washing room in the basement. This
would have then been rented out as an exclusive
roof-terrace penthouse. But as it is we'll all get
the chance to sunbathe up here. n
In 1923 the Bauhaus held a large exhibition,
which UP. Oud attended, that included an experi-
mental house, the Haus am Horn, designed by Georg
Muche, which demonstrated the new Functionalist
attitude to perfection. The children's room, for
73
 y 37 Karl·Marx Hof, Vienna:
o
- -
-
example, had walls that could be used as black-
boards. The kitchen had what were later claimed to
have been the first suspended wall cabinets, as well as
floor cabinets with working surface tops - but no
kitchen table. The architects had decided that eating
was a separate function from cooking and had to be
done in another room. It was as a result of suchatti-
12
tudes that certain architects revealed themselves to be
either ignorant, or contemptuous, of the patterns
and traditions of working-class life, for it was then
still common for many families to eat in the kitchen,
serving food straight from the cooker or oven onto
the table. The passionate desire to build the world
anew had within it the seeds of a 'year zero' approach
to modernity, attempting to ride roughshod over
older cultural patterns and lifestyles.
Eventually large-scale housing projects became
the norm, principally a result of the efforts of Martin
Wagner in Berlin and Ernst May in Frankfurt-am-
Main, with Bruno Taut additionally responsible for a
74
Workers' flats designed
to act as a social
condenser. Architect: Karl
Ehn. Completed 1927.
number of them. Taut himself had visited Holland in
1924 for a conference on the Garden City movement
and came back impressed, so much so that his early
housing designs were very much in the style of the
Dutch models.'3 In the same year he had published a
study called The New Dwelling: The Woman as Cre-
ator, a collection of essays on domestic architecture,
Functionalism and the machine age, putting the
woman's role at the centre of the new machine for
living in (whether she wished to be so or not, we can
only surmise).'4
Flat roofs, balconies and a functionally divided
internal structure were the principal features of the
new designs, with the exterior invariably painted
white. Another design innovation in this period was to
layout apartment blocks or row housing (Zeilenbau)
in parallel ranks along a north-south grid, rather than
grouping them in squares around central courtyards
and inner quadrangles. This alignment was designed
to give maximum sunlight, and was originally the idea
of Theodor Fascher, who developed a garden city
estate in the Seidlung Alte Heide in Munich in 1919.15
In 1927 the Weissenhof Siedlung (Weissenhof
Estate) was created by the Deutsche Werkbund for its
exhibition in Stuttgart. This was an exhibition of
model family houses and interiors designed by lead-
ing European architects and organized by Mies van
der Rohe, which received up to 20,000 visitors a day
from July until October of that year. 16 J.J.P. Oud, Mart
Stam, Waiter Gropius, Adolf Loos, Max Taut
(brother of Bruno), Le Corbusier and even Mies van
der Rohe himself all exhibited. The dominant, but
not exclusive, style was what was already known as
Existenzminimum (the utility style advocated by the
'mass housing' ideologists and designers), allied to
Taylorism in management and building processes,
together with an emphasis on labour-saving domes-
tic equipment. This response was largely shaped by
the terrible housing shortage in many German cities
at the end of the Great War. Not everybody was com-
pletely happy with the new obsession with glass. One
woman critic wrote that,
Following the motto 'Bring the landscape into
the house', various apartments have windows
extending all the way down to the ground. Some
of the walls are made completely of glass - to
the north and the south in the same room. In
such rooms there is a constant draft over the
floor, a cause for no little concern when small
children are present. These rooms, whose
windows cannot be outfitted with shutters
because they are too big and set too high, are
burning hot in the summer, and the light is so
blinding that small children in the daytime and
somewhat older children in the early evening
hours cannot sleep in them. In some of the
apartments the landscape has been brought into
the larder as well. The window, except for a very
narrow socle at the bottom, takes up the entire
wall, and the larders are facing south!! If the
builders are perhaps assuming that man lives by
curdled milk alone in the summertime, they are
mistaken. 17
The sun-worship that had been an organizing
principle of modern architecture had in this case
been taken too far. While the curative powers of the
sun were appropriate to the design of hospitals and
sanatoria, the orientation, design and layout of pub-
lic housing along the same principles was already
gaining some notoriety, particularly among the resi-
dents themselves, and little attention had been paid
to the psychological effects of living behind glass.
The new housing estates were based on the principle
of the mass-produced, system-built cell, appropriate
to the future of 'hygienic man', and were indeed
regarded as utopian by their designers. 18 In May 1930
Count Harry Kessler, a major German art patron,
recorded in his diary that he had driven the sculptor
Malliol out to one of Ernst May's Frankfurt estates
overlooking the Nidda valley, where
I again told him that this architecture only
expressed the same new sense of life that was
turning the young to sport and nakedness, and
that it drew its warmth from this much as
medieval buildings had drawn theirs from the
Catholic attitude to the world. This new German
architecture has to be seen as part of a comparable
new attitude if one is to understand it. 19
Yet this pioneering spirit did not last long in Ger-
many. In an essay written by Berthold Lubetkin and
75
published in the American Architect and Architecture
magazine in 1937, he wrote that

In Germany, once the foremost country in

constructive innovation, the prevailing political
regime has banished modern constructional
methods and the external characteristics of
modern architecture. The flat roof has become
the symbol of revolt, the mark of political
unreliability; to design horizontal windows is to
attract the attention of the secret police. 20

In this era housing policy was used to tackle -

but in turn was itself susceptible to - the issue of
'environmental determinism', the extent to which
human behaviour could be moulded by a different
kind of architecture and design. In Sweden in the
1930S there had been real fears that bad housing was
38 'Myrdal tenements', Kungsklippan, Stockholm, named after
the eminent sociologists who had advocated new housing for
the people in 1934. Prior to that time, Sweden had some of
the worst housing in Europe. Constructed 1934--8.

causing a serious decline in population, and in 1934

the eminent sociologists Gunnar and Alva Myrdal
published a book on this topic, Crisis in the Popula-
2l
tion Question. If social conditions and the failure of
the housing market to operate in an impoverished
economy seriously threatened Sweden's ability to
reproduce itself, then the state had to step in to res-
cue the situation, which it did in the form of the
Social Housing Commission set up in 1933. A large
programme of municipal housebuilding began, com-
monly of medium-rise apartment blocks with bath-
rooms and balconies, popularly known as 'Myrdal
tenements' (illus. 38).
Not all the new Functionalist housing was
designed for the poor, particularly in Sweden.
Inspired by some of the houses displayed at the 1930
Stockholm Exhibition, a large estate of modern villas
was developed in the Sodra Angby district of Stock-
holm between 1934 and 1939, comprising more than
500 houses - all white - set in a series of heavily
wooded hills leading down to the shores of Lake
Malaren. The houses were freely sited in the land-
scape around roads that followed the contours of the
hills and escarpments, and the original vegetation
was left relatively untouched. The majority of the
houses were designed by one man, Edvin Engstrom,
and here he created what has since been described as
the 'largest unified single-family house area in pure
functionalist style in Sweden, and possibly even in
Europe'.22 Today the estate is regarded as possessing a
striking unity, more than 50 years after it was built.
In the UK after the Second World War, worries
were also expressed about population decline, and a
strong pro-natalist lobby emerged, including some of
the advocates of the garden city and new towns
movement. Such people were critical of urban high-
rise policies, calling apartment blocks 'birth-control
barracks', and advocated proper homes with gardens
away from the city, surrounded by green fields and
fresh air. 23 In all of these debates it was the inhabi-
tants of public housing who had the least say in what
was to be built, and 'unlike other groups, users did
not have a corporate voice but entered the housing
system individually, often from a position of weak-
ness.'2 The tension between what the architects and
4
planners wanted for the people on a grand scale and
the idiosyncratic and singular wishes of a multitude
of individual families became ever more apparent,
and of course eventually became one of the fracture
lines of modernism.
Elizabeth Denby, one of the more astute and
informed commentators on British housing policy in
this period, noted with concern that the new large-
scale housing developments frequently excluded pro-
vision for a public house. 25 She also observed that
between 1919 and 1936 no fewer than 400,000 allot-
ment holders in the UK were dispossessed of their
land, mainly for building purposes. In planning out
the pub and the allotment garden - both staples of a
strand of British working-class life - it would appear
that there was a deliberate policy to enclose the work-
ing-class family members within their new home,
and metaphorically lock the door on them. The plan-
ning of the new model estates seemed designed to
deprive people of opportunities for sociability and
self-sufficiency.
Denby also became an authority on the differ-
ences between housing aspirations and provision in
the UK in comparison to those on the Continent, and
in the mid-1930s she travelled to Sweden, Denmark,
Finland, Holland, France, Germany, Austria, Italy,
Hungary and Czechoslovakia in order to compare
traditions and innovations in public housing. It was
Denby who so clearly saw that tenement life abroad
produced as a counter-balance a stronger public life
centred around the street, cafe, restaurant, park or
funfair, whereas in the UK the single house with its
own garden was inducing a much stronger culture of
domestic containment. She was scathing about the
welfare-ist tradition in British municipal housing
culture that tried to compensate for a lack of social
life or outdoor provision through the provision of
community centres 'with their flavour of patronage
and social service'. City life abroad, claimed Denby,
'is often sweeter and easier'. She praised cities where
it was much more common for people to go out
together to enjoy a meal or an evening stroll en
famille, contrasting this to patterns of British life
where the pub was largely the preserve of the men,
and in which children were not allowed. In Prague
and Brno, Denby observed the thousands of families
from the surrounding countryside who flocked into
these two cities at the weekend in order to visit the
parks and swimming-pools, and she admired the
open-air cafes with their 'dash and fun'.
The debate about the new social problems that
were beginning to emerge from mass public housing
programmes in Europe has since been preoccupied
with the failings of modernist design and mass pro-
duction techniques. Yet one ought also to consider a
much wider set of contributory factors, some of
which have nothing to do with architecture at all. For
example, the decision to exclude public houses and
other amenities from many new estates in the UK,
which Denby noted, was not made on architectural
or planning grounds but was based on political, even
religious, sensitivities and prescriptions. The teetotal
and puritan elements that were deeply embedded in
the early British and Scandinavian socialist move-
ments, and subsequently were strong in local govern-
ment' had much to do with decisions to keep out
77
what were thought to be decadent and corrupting
forms of conviviality. I remember an occasion in the
1970S having lunch with a local Social Democratic
Party boss in a small cafe-restaurant in one of the
failing suburbs of north Stockholm. We discussed the
(crisis' of community spirit on the estate. When I
suggested that things might improve if there were a
few bars or pubs on the estate for people to meet in,
he simply replied that this would only happen (over
my dead body'. Teetotalism was still even then an
active force in the Swedish Social Democratic Party.
There were other historical factors too, especially
in the lack of mutual interest and concern between
the social sciences and the building and planning
professions - something that continues to this day.
The planning historian Helen Meller has argued that
when the British Association for Social Science went
into decline in the 1880s, it was at the very time when
city building and planning issues were coming to the
fore. Thus a great opportunity was lost (to promote
an understanding of the relationship between the
built environment and social and cultural change'.26
Subsequently sociology and planning went their sep-
arate ways, apart from the occasional foray into
housing policy by sociologists, ex-post facto, to see
what had gone so badly wrong.
Modernism was not necessarily the principal vil-
lain in this story. Andrew Saint has levelled charges of
complicity in the excesses of these mass housing poli-
cies against the earlier and equally formidable Beaux-
Arts tradition as well. In his eyes (the simplifications
of Beaux-Arts formalism ... were to persist through
the modernist plans of the 1930S and inflict much
damage in the post-war world. In this way the «lines
on a map" approach to town planning, now so much
discredited, owes a great deal to art as well as to bar-
barism.'27 When the time came to build (homes for
all', the politicians, planners, architects and engineers
were often sociologically and culturally ill-advised
and ill-prepared.
It is important to remember that in this period
the modernist project was not merely about the use
of new materials, or a commitment to certain build-
ing types: social housing, hospitals and schools.
Modernism was a unifying force-field, not just of
aesthetics but of political and cultural belief systems
too, and this partly explains why for a time the disci-
plines of planning, architecture and design appeared
to be so closely interrelated, for they were all caught
up in this vortex. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman
has succinctly described the dynamic of modernism
in this period as almost too powerful for its own
good:
The intellectual ideology of (modernist) culture
was launched as a militant, uncompromising
and self-confident manifesto of universally
binding principles of social organisation and
individual conduct. It expressed not only the
exuberant administrative vigour of the time, but
also a resounding certainty as to the direction of
anticipated social change. 28
Yet there were victories, and enduring ones too.
One of the lesser-known early attempts to apply
modernist architectural principles to older utopian
social traditions in the UK (the latter particularly
strong in the county of Essex) came in the construc-
tion of the Silver End model village in Witham,
Essex, between 1926 and 1932, at the instigation of a
local and successful window manufacturer, Francis
Crittall. The Crittall company had pioneered long-
lasting metal window frames, and might be said to
have had a vested interest in multi-windowed mod-
Silver End Story
At Silver End village in Essex, Francis Crittall
employed the architect Thomas Tait to design a
new village and its buildings, expressly commis-
sioning someone to work enthusiastically in the
modern style, stating that, 'In planning the houses
we decided to sacrifice traditional design in the
cause of light and air and space' ,29 The village
was principally built to provide homes for work·
ers of the expanding Crittall company, and a
number of striking miners had been among
those recruited for the new settlement. During
its first decade Silver End - largely a village of
young people - was cited as the healthiest village
in England, with the lowest death rate and the
highest birth rate.
As another commentator has put it, 'There
was no more surprising sight in rural England in
the 1920s, than to round a bend in the narrow
lanes between Braintree and Witham, plumb in
the middle of the Essex countryside, and come
face to face with 150 Early Modern Movement
houses' ,3D The Silver End estate still survives with
many of its houses pristine, in what became a
small enclave of Labour- and Green-voting com-
munitarians in a generally Conservative-voting
rural hinterland. Although most of the collective
facilities have gone to other uses, there is still a
strong local sense of pride in the estate and its
socially minded origins.
39 Housing at
Silver End, Essex,
part of a model
community
established by the
Crittall Company.
Architect: Thomas
Tait. Constructed
1926-32.
79
ernism. Silver End Village (illus. 39) was intended to
be a total environment, yet another version of the
Garden City, with its own water and power supplies,
allotments, not-for-profit farms, piggeries, dairy,
slaughterhouse, village hall (still the largest in Eng-
land), school, churches, hotel, sports facilities, all run
as a self-sufficient experiment in collective living.
Another striking experiment in housing in the
UK came in 1932 when Jack Pritchard (1899-1992), a
business entrepreneur and pioneer of new uses for
laminated plywood, together with the architect Wells
Coates (1895-1958), set up a company called lsokon
(abbreviated from Isometric Unit Construction).
Pritchard commissioned Coates to design the Lawn
Road Flats in Hampstead, north London, subse-
quently known as the Isokon building and completed
80
in 1934 (illus. 40). This became the home of Henry
Moore, Waiter Gropius, Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy, among
others. Described as the world's first domestic build-
ing made of reinforced concrete, the flats themselves
were rather small and functional, although they had
long ribbon windows. One of its residents, Agatha
Christie, described the building as being like an
ocean liner with its funnels missing. The marine
inspiration took other forms, with kitchens no bigger
than galleys. Another commentator, J. M. Richards,
described it as 'nearer to the machine iz habiter than
anything Le Corbusier ever designed'.)' The housing
block had its own bar, the Isobar, where other mod-
ernist luminaries came to drink and socialize, and a
flat roof available for sunbathing, compulsorily in the
nude, apparently.)2
40 Isokon flats.
Lawn Road, north
London, described
by one of its
residents, Agatha
Christie, as an
ocean liner with its
funnels missing.
Architect: Wells
Coates. Completed
1934.
THE FLOATING WORLD: BALCONIES,
SUN TERRACES, ROOF GARDENS
A key architectural feature of many new buildings was
the inclusion of a balcony, sun terrace or roof-garden.
Hans Scharoun's house for Fritz Schminke in Labau,
Saxony, built in 1932-3 (illus. 41), seems more balcony
than house, and many of his post-war apartment
blocks, notably the 'Romeo' and 'Juliet' blocks in
Berlin (1955-9) make a feature of the balconies as part
of the articulation of the elevation into the town-
scape. While balconies overlooking inner courtyards
33
had been a commonplace feature of buildings for
many centuries, the external public balcony was
rather more rare, and was usually a feature of a large
ceremonial building or palace, a platform from which
41 Balcony for a house for
Fritz Schminke: There seems
to be more balcony than
house. Architect: Hans
Scharoun. Constructed
1932-3.
those in power could look down on the people below.
Within the modernist canon the external balcony was
part of the repertoire of visibility and permeability.
Modernist architects became interested in the
balcony because of the opportunities it provided for
greater access to the sun and air, particularly for
apartment dwellers and their babies (the latter safely
ensconced in cots and prams), and for creating
another way of being part of the public life of the
town or city. Modern medical buildings or sanatoria
were considered incomplete without extensive bal-
conies, verandas or loggias that could be used for sit-
ting in and even sleeping in. This too was another
feature that was borrowed from the design and struc-
ture of the cruise ship or liner, with their rows of
81

42 Each student flat at the Bauhaus was given a balcony.
reclining seats and deckchairs splayed out to face the
sun, and in Australia and the USA the veranda is still
called 'the deck'. Steen Eiler Rasmussen noted that Le
Corbusier's predilection for building houses on stilts
or pilotis represented an attempt to divest architec-
ture of its mass so that the houses and their balconies
'seemed to float on air'.34
The growth of high-rise buildings that offered
no immediate access to a garden or courtyard created
opportunities to explore the provision of balconies,
cantilevered out from the main frame, thus creating a
series of patios or terraces in the sky. The balcony
offered not only an opportunity to enliven an other-
wise flat fa<;:ade, but to provide possibilities for
human interaction with the street below. The urban
82
balcony became like a box at the opera or theatre, a
place from which to observe, but in turn to be seen.
When the Bauhaus moved from Weimer to Dessau,
where Gropius designed a new campus on which
construction began in the summer of 1925 and was
completed by October 1926, each student flat was
given a balcony (illus. 42). As one student said later,
recalling the wonderful community spirit of the early
days, 'All you had to do to call a friend was to step out
onto your balcony and whistle'.35
The balcony, while providing access to the air
and sun for apartment dwellers, simultaneously
offered sun protection to the inner rooms, as tiered
rows of protruding balconies offered shade to the
fa<;:ades below and the rooms within. 36 The provision
of side panels to a balcony offered privacy from adja-
cent balconies, although such privacy was also
achieved by staggering the line of the apartments, as
Arne Jacobsen did at Klampenborg, one of the earlier
and most successful developments in this style (illus.
43, 44)· Another design feature of apartment build-
ings was the formation of a series of loggia, through
designing frequent indentations into the fa<;:ade, thus
also offering an open-air space, though with less fre-
quency of direct sunlight. Balconies could be used for
drying clothes, creating small patio gardens, and eat-
ing al fresco, and in some ways the balcony can be
seen as a forerunner of the patio garden that attained
such popularity in modern housing design.
The Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger has
described the particular interest in the fluid boundaries
between inside and outside, which he regards as a
seminal feature of the Dutch architectural imagina-
tion, noting Vermeer's interest in open doors and
through-views from the front of a house to the garden
beyond, as well as the adjacent connecting alleys. He
sees this particularly in the work of J. J. Duiker and
43 Bellevue Apartments at Klampenborg, near Copenhagen: The staggered line of the rear elevation provided privacy
to each balcony. Architect: Arne Jacobsen. Constructed 1930-35.

44 Glazed stairwells at Bellevue Apartments at Klampenborg.

45 Montage of Motopia by Gordon Cullen for Geoffrey Jellicoe's 1961 book Motopia, a
visionary plan for a New Town in the Thames Valley.
the 'Open-air School' but also in the designs of Gerrit
Rietveld (1888-1964), who often put a small covered
entrance outside the front door with a bench to sit on,
connecting the person outside to the person inside via
a 'Dutch door', or what is also known as a stable door.
In his widely admired housing scheme in Kassel, the
balconies are one of the most famous features.
In the housing scheme in Kassel I tried to make
balconies that always had one double height
zone and one zone that is quite intimate. The
balconies are dimensioned so that the whole
family can sit there, have a chat with the
neighbours or, if you don't feel like that, simply
move back out of sight. From the upper
balconies you can look down, but you cannot
see the people sitting at the back of the lower
balcony. There is a whole system of areas, some
intimately enclosed and others open and
accessible. 37
The veranda had an older history, and first came
into use in the English language in the early eight-
eenth century, and was associated with the Indian
bungalow. J8 It was principally used as a decorative
feature to enliven rather plain buildings, using
wrought iron or latticework. True verandas were seen
to be an extension of the roof, and structurally part
of it, rather than minor additions. The veranda
allowed people to be out of the house and within the
public gaze, while simultaneously they were pro-
tected by being enclosed within the architectural
frame. It was widely adopted for sports pavilions,
providing weather-proof shelter for non-players, but
also in many cases as a privileged space for club buildings in the modern city, particularly hospitals. In
members. What balconies, sun terraces and verandas this unexpected way, the flat roofs that symbolized
shared was the creation of an intermediate space the modernist style also became functional after all.
between indoors and outdoors, public and private
realms, leisure and the routines of domesticity. In
Lubetkin's Highpoint One in Highgate, north Lon-
don (completed 1935), for example, the full-width
sliding windows, when opened, turned the whole
room into a balcony, or loggia. 39
Le Corbusier himself dedicated one of his (Five
Points towards a New Architecture' (1926) to the pro-
vision of roof-gardens, since (In this way the roof gar-
den will become the most favoured place in the
building. In general, roof gardens mean to a city the
recovery of all the built-up area.'4 However, there
0

were other implications to this principle, for what he

was proposing was the replacement of the public
street, square, park or garden with a private version
in the sky.
Le Corbusier was not alone in seeing that a
potential new world could be created on the rooftops.
The FIAT Works in Turin, which Le Corbusier high-
lighted in Vers une architecture (1923), created a testing
track on the reinforced concrete roof of the factory,
inspiring architects elsewhere to think about roof car-
parking, rooftop roads, as well as rooftop gardens. In
one of the most extraordinary architectural visions of
the modern city, the otherwise conservative landscape
architect Geoffrey Jellicoe published in 1961 a detailed
set of proposals, with drawings by the distinguished
designer Gordon Cullen, for a New Town in the
Thames Valley called Motopia, in which all the con-
necting roads ran along the top of the residential and
commercial buildings (illus. 45).41 While the idea
failed to catch on, rooftop gardens gained in popular-
ity in some densely populated cities, and helicopter
pads are now located on many private and public

85

So far the planning of estates, towns and even cities -
and the architectural development of new kinds of
public health and social facilities such as sanatoria,
health centres, clinics and open-air schools - have
been the principal concerns. All of these develop-
ments were endeavouring to develop a new perme-
ability between indoor and outdoor spaces, and
opportunities for a fuller, healthier life, and thus, in a
more formal sense, were attempts to bridge the gap
between architecture and landscape. Yet as has
become clear, the practice of architecture and the
practice of landscape design often stand historically
in an asymmetrical relationship with one other, at
least aesthetically.
FIGURE AND GROUND: BUILDINGS AND THEIR
LANDSCAPED SETTINGS
In Elizabethan times, a large private house was likely
to be complemented by a rather intricate knot gar-
den, so that house and garden were joined in a shared
intricacy and formality. Similarly, in the seventeenth
century an ornate manor house might be enclosed
within a formal, geometric French or Italianate gar-
den. It was two literary figures, Joseph Addison and
Alexander Pope, who early in the eighteenth century
argued for a new, even dissonant, relationship
between architecture and landscape. They deplored
the geometric formalism of the French and Italian
86
5 Parks, Pleasure Gardens
and the Democracy of the
Open Air
garden style, which they associated with autocracy
and absolutism, and espoused a more natural and
open landscape as the most appropriate surrounding
for a large house or mansion. They also believed the
natural style to be more in keeping with the English
l
temperament and love of freedom. A tension, often
quite productive and creative, crept into the relation-
ship between the style of the building and the style of
its landscape setting.
This new gardening style came replete with liter-
ary and intellectual allusions to a lost Arcadian idyll,
as well as more humanistic references to a classical
Elysium. Over time this tradition, developed by land-
scape architects - such as William Kent (1685-1748),
Lancelot 'Capability' Brown (1716-1783), Humphry
Repton (1752-1818) and J. C. Loudon (1783-1843) -
fixed into the English psyche the immutability of the
landscaped park with its slow rhythms and open
horizons, still powerful and influential today. Writing
at the end of the eighteenth century about the influ-
ence ofWilliam Kent, Horace Walpole claimed that it
was Kent who had 'leaped the fence, and saw that all
nature was a garden'.2 It was Walpole also who first
drew the analogy between the Garden of Eden in
Milton's Paradise Lost and the gardens of Stourhead
and Hagley Park, and for ever linked the English
landscaping revolution to Milton. Thus the pastoral
tradition became linked with the indivisibility of
English liberty. Formalism (and functionalism) In
landscape have often been distrusted ever since.
Central to this landscaping tradition was an
assertion of the necessary contrast between the
building and its setting, between the neo-classical
great house and the artfully designed (natural'
grounds, woods and pastures which surround it.
Such contrasts are found at Stowe, Castle Howard
and Blenheim Palace for example. Power and author-
ity were mediated by a gentler setting, like a fist in a
velvet glove.
For a brief period, the English Arts and Crafts
architects turned this relationship between the for-
mal house and the (natural' garden inside out once
again. As Peter Davey has noted, (Of the many Arts
and Crafts paradoxes, none is so puzzling at first
sight as the contrast between the Movement's passion
for irregular buildings and its mania for surrounding
them with clipped and pleached Euclidian patterns.'3
Modernist theories reversed this relationship yet
again when it was discovered that these new sharp-
angled and highly engineered buildings were dis-
played to their best when located in wild, even
forested, settings, as we have already seen. The ten-
sion between landscape and architecture, between
formalism and naturalism, in twentieth-century
design remains a contentious issue, further compli-
cated by the growing interest in ecology and the pos-
sibility that the city itself might become green again.
These aesthetic conflicts come into play as we
turn to the cult of the open-air in (progressive' social
thought in the early twentieth century, where a whole
set of new problems emerge. For within conventional
British professional traditions, certainly in this cen-
tury' architects design buildings, landscape architects
design parks, gardens and outdoor public spaces, and
planners take on the job of master-planning whole
towns and cities. Not surprisingly this has caused,
and continues to cause, serious border disputes at the
point where the various professional disciplines and
aesthetics meet, and often fail to connect.
Elsewhere in Europe some of these damaging
divisions of labour and expertise are not so pro-
nounced. In France, for example, there is no plan-
ning profession as such, and the training of architects
involves the study of master-planning and urban spa-
tial modelling. In the UK, however, the history of
planning has largely been the history of rural protec-
tion, urban development control and an enthusiasm
for new towns. 4 Rather less thought has been given to
the problems of planning so that people might live
well in cities. Indeed, in planning terms, issues of
open-space provision, for example, are usually con-
ceived in a negative sense as simply land which has
not been built on. Thus open space has little inherent
value, other than in terms of general (amenity', an
interesting word which (is one of the key concepts in
British town planning, yet nowhere in legislation is it
defined.' Widely used in planning circles, the concept
of (amenity' veers between being simply an absence
of visual intrusion or nuisance, to, on the other hand,
a more positive sense of visual delight. 5 But as a con-
cept it has no heuristic power. Such a weakly defined
aesthetics of public space alone was not able to stop,
consequently, many inappropriate new develop-
ments, many of which have cut right through the
hearts of cities.
Today the professions of architecture and land-
scape design still co-exist uneasily, yet in the 1930S
they seemed to come together in more considered
and productive ways, notably in the design of new
kinds of parks and other outdoor recreational set-
tings' brought to fruition in a Functionalist and
modern style. Again many of the most innovative
ideas came from Northern Europe, particularly
Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen and Stockholm. It
seems something of a paradox that the colder,
northerly European countries should seem so adept
at designing successful outdoor urban spaces, but
they clearly were. Partly this was the result of a cer-
tain kind of Functionalism: why let the opportunity
for healthy exercise go without proper organization
and planning? Partly it was because of the Northern
cult of fitness. But it was also, perhaps more subtly,
because of long-standing traditions that associated
childhood play with the character formation
required by patriotic citizenship, the English version
of which was mythologized in the battles metaphori-
cally won and lost on the playing-fields of Eton.
Simon Schama's study of seventeenth-century
Dutch culture, The Embarrassment of Riches (1987),
eloquently explores the relationship between play
and citizenship in that period, noting that the popu-
1ar genre of paintings known as kinderspielen (chil-
dren's games) often showed the children playing in a
market square or in front of public buildings, as if to
demonstrate the connection between youthful plea-
sures and the development of a mature civic con-
sciousness. In the early twentieth century the
influential child psychologist Jean Piaget, exploring
the same theme, drew attention to the connections
between children's play and the development of con-
cepts of fairness and justice. An interest in the devel-
opmental benefits of play became a hallmark of
progressive social thought in the first part of this cen-
tury, and influenced the funding and planning of
parks, playgrounds and other outdoor spaces in
preparation for the new life ahead. Children's emo-
tional and physical needs in this period were privi-
1eged in unprecedented ways.
88
PARK POLITICS
In 1931 the Danish landscape architect, Carl Theodor
S0rensen (1893-1979) published Parkpolitik i Sogn og
KrJbstad (Park Politics in Town and Country), a book
that was to become as influential in its way, for out-
door European urban planning as Le Corbusier's Vers
une architecture had been for the design of buildings
(illus. 46).6 S0rensen is now largely forgotten outside
Denmark, which is a pity, because his influence was
far-reaching from the 1920S through to the 1960s. He
rigorously drew attention to all the existing open-
space types, and potential new ones, in his well-
illustrated guidebook, and his influence was based on
extensive work as a landscape architect, as an enthu-
siast for children's play, an international lecturer and
an advocate of open-space planning. S0rensen was
also the inventor of the (Junk Playground', or
'Adventure Playground' as it was often called in more
respectable circles. At the age of 75 he contributed a
Foreword to Lady AlIen of Hurtwood's Planning for
Play (London, 1968), although in that Foreword his
own pioneering work is mistranslated as (Open
Spaces for Town and Country'.
Parkpolitik expresses enthusiastic support for a
greater functionalism and commitment to public
recreation in open-space design - at least for new
developments. It opens with a photograph of a mass
of grass tennis-courts (300 of them side by side) in
Prospect Park, Brooklyn, followed by a photograph of
a group of young children, naked, splashing about a
park hydrant in Hamburg. There is a photo of the
boating lake in London's Kensington Gardens, and a
view of the swimming lake in Frankfurt's East Park.
All the photos depict people enjoying themselves, in
contrast to the dominant landscape and architectural
photographic traditions, which prefer to omit people
from photos in order to concentrate on the structural
components of the scene. S0rensen was especially
catholic not only in his choice of photos from all over
Europe used to illustrate his thesis, but also of the
range of open-space types he considered valid for
public policy: cemeteries, sports-fields, beaches,
islands, sandpits, lidos, playgrounds, allotment
colonies, streetscapes, formal gardens, linear parks.
The book is both a gazetteer of open-spaces types,
and a celebration of them and the role they play in the
social life and culture of villages, towns and cities.
S0rensen was also an energetic practitioner of
landscape architecture in Denmark, being one of the
Fre.Ude•• Park
er U1 at ....... lie 11
46 Parkpolitik: This book by the Danish landscape architect
C. T S"rensen, published in 1931, was enormously influential
in Northern Europe and beyond.
principal designers for the Danish Open Air Museum
as well as for the landscaping of the now famous
Aarhus University. He also designed and landscaped
many housing estates in Copenhagen (Ryparken,
Blidahpark, Klokkergiirden), the greatly admired cir-
cular allotment gardens in Na:rum, the coastal park
at Klampenborg (1930-35) in association with the
famous Danish architect Arne Jacobsen (illus. 47), as
well as the original Junk Playground at Emdrup of
1940-41 (illus. 48),7
The fact that Parkpolitik contains so many pho-
tos of developments elsewhere in Europe and
America - which S0rensen clearly admired and
approved of - suggests that the modern park move-
ment was already well established by the 1930S. Much
was being learned from North America at this time,
for as Galen Cranz has noted:
Unlike their European predecessors, American
public parks have been intimately linked with
urban problems ... and the reform park
(1900-30) accepted industrial life and attempted
to rationalize it by siting the park near working-
class tenements and by stressing physical
exercise, supervision and organization, while
minimizing the significance of fine art and
nature appreciation. 8
One of the defining characteristics of the mod-
ern park was its role in moulding a healthier, more
robust people (particularly children) through pur-
poseful endeavour. In Germany this decisive shift in
the function of the park is represented in the move
from the Biirgerpark to the Volkspark, or from the
landscaped, highly aestheticized civic park for reflec-
tion and cultivation of the finer senses to the people's
park for active recreation.
47 Bellevue Bathing Station and beach towers at Klampenborg.
 Klampenborg Coastal Park
One reaches Klampenborg in just over 20 minutes
on a train from Copenhagen's Central Station
(opposite the Tivoli Gardens), or on anyone of the
ultra-modern trains heading for Helsingor, from
where Helsingborg in Sweden is reached by ferry
across the narrow Sound. In the summer the
trains are full of city people heading for the beach
with rucsacs, swimming costumes and picnic bas-
kets. The train travels out along the coast, past the
northern city shipyards and then into some beau-
tifully wooded, and attractive suburbs.
Klampenborg is a modernist's delight. As you
leave the station to walk down to the beach, only a
couple of hundred metres away you pass by one of
Arne Jacobsen's most celebrated architectural
achievements, the Bellevue Houses at 407-33
Strandvejen (see illus. 43, 44). There are two main
blocks at right-angles to the seashore, but each
In North America the reform park movement
emphasized other priorities in its designs for urban
parks. While the 'reform park' was also targeted at the
working class, it was principally aimed at working-
class children, who it was felt needed to be rescued
from street games and street culture, and placed in
more convivial- and supervised - playgrounds, which
were often the main feature ofthe new parks created in
the first decades of the twentieth century in American
towns and cities. There were often bathing-pools,
shallow enough to bathe in but not deep enough to
swim in, which were intended to encourage greater
cleanliness and hygiene, and some of the parks con-
1O
tained school farms, connected to local schools.
apartment has a balcony that is staggered in order
to give each one a view of the Sound. The develop-
ment is regarded as a major work in Danish archi-
tectural history.9 Reaching the main beach road
you look across at an undulating 'natural' sward of
parkland designed by Carl Theodor S0rensen,
where people flock to sunbathe or to shelter in the
shade of the trees. Further to the left you will see
the elegant Bellevue sea-bathing complex designed
by Jacobsen, with the distinctive Constructivist
blue and white striped beach-towers also designed
by him at the point where the artificial beach
meets the (non-tidal) Baltic sea. Everything works
together - the dazzling white sea-front apartments
with their sun-ray canopies and theatre-box bal-
conies, the gentle parkland and the blue and white
architecture of the Bellevue bathing station, to pro-
duce a dream-like seaside setting.
Creating new parks was eaSIer than adapting
existing parks to meet new social purposes, the latter
often generating considerable social tensions. When
George Lansbury, first Commissioner of Works in
the 1929-31 Labour government proposed to put a
children's boating-lake in London's elegant Regent's
Park, The Times newspaper described him as 'The
Caliban of Parks'. He also withdrew all the 'Keep Off
the Grass' signs, arguing that 'Grass was made for
man, not man for grass: ll
The traffic in ideas and influences concerning
the role and aesthetics of park design between
Denmark and the UK during this period was both
ways. In 1934 the Danish architect Steen Eiler
91
48 Adventure or Junk playground at Emdrup, Copenhagen, the first in the world.
Architect: C. T. S0rensen. Constructed 1940-41.
Rasmussen published a book in Denmark, London:
The Unique City, subsequently translated and first
published in English in 1937, and now regarded as
one of the best - if not the best - books ever written
about the capital. One of the finest chapters is on
'London Parks'. Here Rasmussen compares the
English park tradition with the Continental one, and
finds the former more sociable and active.
The London Park is the ideal place for an
outdoor life. Formerly, the park had been a
purpose in itself: its only aim was to look
beautiful. But in these last 100 years the English
have taught the world that town parks must be
utilised more intensively. They have to be not
92
only a thing of beauty for the connoisseur, but a
joy for ever for the sporting youth and the
children.... In many continental countries the
main purpose of the park is still that of
providing an open space, a place with fresher air
than in the stuffy streets of the dwelling
quarters. But to the English this is not enough.
The public gardens must give the inhabitants an
opportunity of taking exercise in the open air. 12
Rasmussen, while following a distinguished aca-
demic career at the Royal Academy for Fine Arts in
Copenhagen, and as a Visiting Professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953, and
Lethaby Professor of Architecture at London's Royal
College of Art in 1958, carried on as a practisIng
architect, designing the adventure playground and
recreational areas at Tingbjerg (from 1956) in collab-
oration with S0rensen. He also wrote another fine
book, Experiencing Architecture (1959), which was
more preoccupied with the sensual experience of the
textures, light, shade, volume and human flows pro-
duced by architecture than it was of the formal build-
ing elements of construction. A plain-speaking and
sociable man by nature, one of his favourite remarks
to would-be architects, urging them against fussy
over-detailing, was (We don't play with our food.'1 3
In Germany there was also a strong, reforming
park tradition. One of the largest and best known
was the Hamburg Stadtpark, the design of which was
adopted in 1909, but not completed for another two
decades. It was designed jointly by Fritz Schumacher,
Hamburg's Director of Building, and Friedrich
Sperber, Director of Engineering. The park con-
tained formal gardens, a stadium, a swimming-pool,
a running-track, a (people's meadow' and a large
lake, the Grosser See, edged with a large cafe-terrace
where people sat and watched the rowing, which
then was one of the most popular open-air sports. In
Berlin, the Schillerpark, designed by Friedrich Bauer
between 1903 and 1913 in the working-class district of
Wedding, is often regarded as the first great success of
the Volkspark movement. 14 The Volkspark Rehberge,
also in Berlin's Wedding district and built to designs
by Erwin Barth in 1926-9, was part of a massive job
creation programme: the park took 300,000 (man
days' to complete, and included a sports arena,
toboggan run, tennis-courts, lawns, woods, foun-
tains and serpentine paths, as well as a substantial
allotment colony on the north-west corner.
The most ambitious of the great European mod-
ern parks, however, was Amsterdamse Bos, which
Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe regarded as the most
inspiring modern park for active rather than passive
recreation, conceived in 1928 and largely completed
by 1936 - and 13 feet below sea level. 15 Amsterdam
Bospark covers some 2,200 acres, 400 of which are
water, including the vast and impressive rowing-lake,
the Bosbaan, perhaps the main feature of the park,
2,200 metres long and 90 metres wide (illus. 49).
There are many footpaths and cycle-tracks, large
playing meadows for formal and informal games,
sports fields, swimming facilities, fishing-lakes, arti-
ficial hills for tobogganing in winter, a riding school,
a deer park, a maze, an arboretum, an open-air the-
atre, restaurants and refreshment pavilions, camping
grounds and nudist areas for sunbathing. The park is
only five kilometres from the centre of Amsterdam,
and has had on occasion more than 100,000 visitors
in a single day.16
In the UK a Functionalism of a more austere kind
reigned. For as was observed earlier, the English park
tradition was inherently pastoral and Arcadian, and
when it tried to be explicitly functional it often failed.
The National Playing Fields Association was set up in
1925, recognizing (the vital importance of playing
fields to the physical, moral and mental welfare of the
youth of the country', and between 1925 and 1933
some 1,200 playing fields were created in England
alone. When such institutions moralized about youth
they were almost certainly thinking of young men,
particularly unemployed young men. At the time it
was publicly stated that there was (a rapid increase in
public appreciation of the part which games can play
. not only in promoting health and physical well-being
but also in moulding character', since the committee
of the NPFA was (made up of dukes, marquesses, earls
and lords, we can see the playing field initiative as
social engineering'. I? Many of the playing fields or
93
49 Rowing lake at Amsterdam Bospark. Largely completed 1936.
'recreation grounds' created were bleak, featureless,
grass deserts, principally designed for organized team
games such as football and cricket, sometimes with
small playgrounds attached.
The NPFA was committed to the creation of 6 acres
per 1,000 population, a figure derived 'scientifically'
from an analysis of what proportion of the population
under 40 would need access to a senior football pitch,
a junior football pitch, a cricket pitch, three bowling-
greens, two tennis-courts, one children's playground
and one pavilion. This was a rather mechanistic and
utilitarian approach to provision, which it has largely
adhered to to this day. The NPFA approach was also
94
adopted by the King George v Memorial Fund, set up
on the death of the monarch in 1936 as a national
memorial. By the time the Fund was dissolved in 1965
it had given grants for the costs of 500 playing fields,
mostly of a similar, utilitarian kind. The geographer
Doreen Massey recalls as a ten-year-old on the bus
into Manchester passing acres of such dank, muddy
fields of football and rugby pitches: 'And I remember,
too, it striking me very clearly ... that all this huge
stretch of the Mersey flood plain had been entirely
given over to boys."8
In other ways the UK remained immune from the
emerging modernist landscape tradition being devel-
oped elsewhere in Europe. In what came to be a land-
mark essay in the post-war history of landscape
architecture, Sir Peter Shepheard in Modern Gardens
(1953) wrote that
Today modern architecture may fairly be said to
have won its first battles all over the world, but in
very few of them has it had any assistance from
landscape architecture. Even now one sees many
great modern buildings whose setting is an
incongruous medley of dwarf walls, crazy-
paving, and all the tricks of the Edwardian
landscape gardener, and everywhere one can find
housing, architecturally sound, but spoilt by a
complete absence of any understanding ofwhat
can and what cannot be done with the space
between buildings. This is the more unfortunate
because modern architecture needs the landscape
architect. One of the best qualities of the modern
movement is its increasing awareness of the
connection between the space within buildings
and the space around them, and of the
interdependence of building and site.19
The revolution in urban recreation and play that
spread across Europe came from Scandinavia, during
and after the Second World War, partly through
S0rensen's development of a (junk playground' at
Emdrup, but principally through the energetic and
determined efforts of two architects in Stockholm,
Holger Blom, the city's Director of Parks from 1938 to
his retirement in 1971, and Erik Glemme, Chief
Designer in Blom's department from 1936 until
1956.20 Together their work formed what became
known as the (Stockholm School' of park design, and
was influential throughout Europe and beyond for
decades after. In their case a single picture told the
story. A photograph of a children's pond at a new
housing estate in Fredhall, Stockholm, designed in
1937 by Blom's predecessor, Oswald Almqvist, and
photographed in 1946 by a well-known Swedish pho-
tographer, K. W. Gullers, captured the world's imagi-
nation overnight, and became an icon of the
(Swedish model' of an enlightened, modernist social
contract (illus. 50).
What Blom and Glemme together achieved was
the successful integration of social democratic ideals
in social policy, together with a Functionalist
approach to landscape objectives, but, perhaps most
importantly, with a strong respect for the natural
topography of Stockholm city, with its extended
waterfront and island system, rocky terrain, aromatic
pine forests, flowering meadows and deciduous
groves, natural ponds, rivers and streams. Blom and
Glemme are also credited by the Jellicoes with the
inventive elegance of much of what we now take for
granted as urban street and park furniture: moveable
flower containers, children's climbing sculptures, wild
flower planting in linear parks and self-contained gar-
den rooms, bowers or booths, all with seating, where
individuals and small groups could find sanctuary.21
Blom had spent time working with Le Corbusier
in Paris before he got the Stockholm job, and was an
equally energetic and driven individual. He was also
an astute strategist and a tough negotiator, cultivat-
ing the politicians on the City Council who made the
big budgetary decisions. In an essay on (Green Spaces
in Stockholm' published in 1946, he argued that
The park breaks up the unrelenting flow of
urban construction. Taken as a group, parks can
form a network in the urban fabric that
provides citizens with necessary air and light.
They can create borders between different parts
95
 of the city and provide each district with
individual character and identity.
The park offers to citizens of all ages space
for recreation, for promenades and rest, for
sport and play. The park is a place in which to
gather: for concerts, demonstrations, parties,
dance, and even religious services. The park
preserves both nature and culture: existing
nature and newly created; old traces of culture
as well as modern editions. 22
The Stockholm School involved the provision of
supervised play facilities on a neighbourhood basis,
public art programmes, theatre events and other activ-
ities. Glemme updated the design of Kungstradgarden,
Stockholm's most important and popular public

50 Children's pond on a new housing estate at Fredhall, Stockholm, designed in 1937 by Oswald
Almqvist. This photograph by K. W. Guliers captured the world's imagination.
51 Open·air chess at
Kungstradgarden,
Stockholm's principal
publ ic square and
meeting place.

52 Card games and

conversation at
Kungstradgarden.
space, a mixture of floral displays, strolling areas, areas
set aside for circuses and events, and a series of hedged
booths, each with its own table and chairs (as you
might find in an American bar), where people can sit
and talk, play cards and chess (illus. 51, 52). He also
designed one of the most influential linear parks, the
Norr Malarstrand, a long waterfront park that stretch-
es from the wooded countryside surrounding
Stockholm right through to the neo-classical garden
terrace of the City Hall. The park includes a curving
footpath, seating areas, sun-bathing areas, boat land-
ings, sculpture gardens, bridges, ponds, playgrounds,
a cafe, and smaller 'garden rooms' for quiet medita-
tion. In Glemme's view the Malar lake itself, which the
park fronted, was part of the park, with its boating,
swimming and winter skating activities. As Thorbjorn
Anderson so tellingly concludes,
The Stockholm School emerged in a golden
moment in the history oflandscape architecture
in Sweden. It was a powerful moment because
professions as diverse as landscape architects,
city planners, botanists, cultural geographers,
and nature conservationists for once shared the
same basic belief, in spite of their varied
backgrounds. 2 )
Anderson's conclusions only serve to highlight
the fact that the current professional divisions
between planners, architects, landscape designers
and environmentalists are largely unprecedented in
the history of modern urban planning, certainly in
this century. Most if not all the great achievements in
urban design and planned settlement in twentieth-
century European towns and cities have been the
result of coordinated action, invariably inspired by
wider social aspirations and goals, and the result of
fairly large-scale public investment.
53 Ferry to Djurgtlrden,
where Stockholm's open·
air museum at Skansen,
along with indoor
museums, pleasure
gardens and a big dipper,
is to be found.
THE OPEN-AIR MUSEUM
Stockholm was a pioneer in other kinds of outdoor
spaces too. One of the new civic spaces that emerged
at the turn of the century as part of the rise of a new
kind of urban civic culture was the open-air museum,
the first of which was established in Stockholm in
1891. Visit Stockholm today and you can either take a
bus or ferry to Djurgarden, a large area of parkland
close to the city centre, and once the royal hunting
grounds (illus. 53). Although now used for other pur-
poses, it still retains its earlier landscape structure
and topography. Some of the oak trees are over 700
years old, as old as the city itself. At the end of the
nineteenth century it became the home of a mixture
of museums, fairgrounds and the pioneering open-
air museum at Skansen established in 1891 by Arthur
Hazelius. At Skansen there are more than 150 recon-
structed buildings, including a whole town, laid out
on a regional basis, and constituting a magnificent
history of architectural development in Sweden over
the previous millennium. Visitors can also watch and
participate in traditional methods of glassmaking,
candle-making, weaving and other activities.
It is significant that Sweden pioneered the idea of
the open-air museum, and reflects not just the pow-
erful rural sympathies of a country that came quite
late to urbanism, but also the population's continuing
identification with life outdoors. On another island,
Lidingo, close to Djurgarden, is Millesgarden, the
home and studio of Carl Milles (d. 1955), Sweden's
most famous sculptor, who created there an open-air
art gallery, with dozens of statues laid out on terraces
carved from the island's steep cliffs, many of which
have been copied and are to be found in other Swedish
towns and parks.
The outdoor museum, like the outdoor gallery,
was seen to be a way of democratizing knowledge and
the arts by putting these things in settings that
eschewed the inhibiting aura of traditional museum
and gallery buildings. It was also a way of naturalizing
or grounding art on more earthly foundations. Siting
such activities outdoors, and in the case of Skansen
locating traditional museums together with the open-
air museum and the city's major fairground and
dance-hall, all in one shared parkland setting, was also
a way of challenging the distinction between high and
low culture that elsewhere in Europe was highly segre-
gated, both spatially, and architecturally. By 1901 an
Open Air Museum (Frilandsmuseet) had been opened
in Copenhagen, which was made a department of the
National Museum of Denmark in 1920. Open-air
museums in other countries followed quite quickly.
The outdoor museum or gallery also linked the
figurative sculptural tradition with the culture of the
body tradition in new ways, given that such settings
were also places where people came to picnic and
sunbathe, to court and make love. Nowhere in
Europe was this new idea of the outdoor gallery
developed more spectacularly, and some would say
more confusingly, than in Vigeland Park (1916-30) in
Oslo, Norway, still one of the city's principal parks
and visitor attractions (illus. 54-7).
Vigeland Park is significant because the sculptures
in it represent perhaps more clearly than any other
artefacts in Northern Europe of the time the confusion
as to what the naked body was now meant to represent:
sometimes freedom, sometimes mutability, sometimes
decay. In the same way, the aesthetic of the overall park
design - a mixture ofthe formal, the Baroque, together
with Art Nouveau and Expressionist elements - ended
up confused and unsure as to whether it was looking
forward or looking back.
Such a park would have been impossible any-
where else in Europe at the time, given the sexual
99
54 Sculptures by Gustav
Vigeland in Vigeland
Park, Frogner Park, Oslo:
an enormously popular
mixture of humanist,
kitsch and classical
figurative traditions.

55 People picnic next to

the dancing forms in
Vigeland Park.
Vigeland Park, Oslo
Gustav Vigeland (1869-1943), the founder of the
Park, came from a peasant family living on the
southern coast of Norway. His father, a woodcarv-
er, was a religious fanatic gripped by an aware-
ness of man's sinful nature and the torments to
come. 'Too much darkness and too little light',
wrote the younger Vigeland in later years. Self-
taught through copying drawings and sculptures
in books borrowed from the public library,
Vigeland eventually found a position as an assis-
tant in the studio of Mathias Skeibrok, who also
taught at the Royal School of Drawing in Oslo.
Vigeland subsequently travelled to Copen-
hagen and then to Paris before returning to Oslo
and becoming successful and nationally famous.
The park that bears his name is a large sculpture
park in the western part of Oslo. Vigeland not only
modelled all the sculptures - there are 194 sculp-
tures containing more than 600 figures, most life-
size - but was responsible for the entire park
design and lay-out. 24
The park is an uneasy mixture of styles and
influences. The geometric layout of the paths, ter-
races and main axes, is very formal and in the
style of the French Baroque park or garden, and
some of the sculpture, as well as the ironwork, is
clearly influenced by Art Nouveau. However, the
dominant aesthetic is one of a universalist figura-
tive humanism: the naked body as the irreducible
essence of human life and culture. The 58 lifesize
bronze figures and groups laid out along both
sides of the bridge are very fine indeed: powerful
expressions of male and female bodily poise and
sensuality, whether in couples, in groups or with
children within the adult embraces.
The focal point of the sculpture park, however,
The Monolith, suffers from bombast and megalo-
mania. It consists of a great raised podium with
steps on all sides, down which 36 groups of gran-
ite sculptures are arranged in 12 radial rows. At
the centre of the podium is a giant columnar
sculpture, 17 metres high, and consisting of 121
human figures of all ages, piled on top of one
other in prone and Iifeless positions. The effect is
unnerving, even horrifying, given that it so clearly
anticipates those images of piled bodies pho-
tographed when the concentration camps were
liberated at the end of the Second World War. In
making this connection one cannot also fail to be
reminded of how the ideology of the perfectible
body led to the beliefs in racial purity espoused by
Nazism.
The nude sculpture goes directly back to
Classicism, and is a re-affirmation of that sensibil-
ity. But it also has important architectural implica-
tions as well, since bodily proportion was
regarded as the key to architectural proportion,
and remarks by Vitruvius led Renaissance thinkers
and scholars to insist upon the natural geometry
of Vitruvian Man, invariably portrayed as standing
full-stretched within a square or circle. In
Vigeland's park he has designed a series of sculp-
tures showing individual men, or a man and a
woman, trapped inside circles, unable to free
themselves from the constraints of order and end-
less recu rrence.
101
56 Sculptures of decline and old age by Gustav
Vigeland in Vigeland Park.

57 Group forms by Gustav Vigeland in Vigeland

Park.
explicitness of numerous statues, as well as the graphic
casting of infirmity, old age, immiseration and despair
in many of the tableaux and reliefs. Vigeland Park,
although one single individual's challenge to the old
gods, not only created a staging-post for a new way of
thinking about the human body in public settings,
but also represented an early attempt to move the
gallery outdoors, as it had originally been in ancient
Greece. Today the park is still enormously popular,
although disdained by intellectuals who find the aes-
thetic and the relentlessness of the proliferation of
heroic and non-heroic poses rather kitsch, if not
atavistic: another evolutionary cul-de-sac.
ELEGANT FUN: THE LOST HISTORY OF THE
PLEASURE GARDENS
In post-war UK there were attempts to revive other
traditions of urban parks and gardens. Fun, said
Johan Huizinga in his magisterial book on play,
Homo Ludens, must be an English invention. No
other European language has a word for it. Homo
Ludens was first published in English two years
before the 1951 Festival of Britain, an attempt to
renew the pleasure-garden tradition in the UK,
though from the outset emphasizing serious learning
at the expense of hedonism in its planning. Even as
work on the Festival site on London's South Bank
progressed, the main organizer, Gerald Barry, was
(finding the South Bank rather clinical for his tastes',
a colleague later recalled. 'Architects and the scien-
tists seemed to be running away with it. He wanted a
place where people could relax and have fun - ele-
gant fun. Remembering the old pleasure gardens at
Vauxhall he decided we'd have a Festival Gardens.
Battersea Park, then given over to allotments and a
cricket pitch, was to be the site.' Unable to combine
popular elevation with fun, they opened up a second
front, creating the Battersea Pleasure Gardens which
became almost as popular as the official Festival itself
(illus. 58-6o).
The siting of the 1951 Festival on the Thames in
central London was significant, as this part of the
capital always occupied a special place in the English
geography of pleasure. Whether one thinks of
Chaucer's Southwark, Shakespeare's Bankside Globe,
the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, or the populist ener-
gies of Lilian Baylis at the Old Vic, the South Bank
represented the popular and the carnivalesque com-
pared to north of the Thames, where all the national,
royal and elite cultural institutions are located. There
was certainly a bacchanalian, orgiastic (after hours'
life at the 1951 Festival, vividly captured in Michael de
Larrabeti's valedictory post-war Battersea autobiog-
raphy, A Rose Beyond the Thames, published in 1978.
The 1951 Festival was criticized at the time for its
lack of internationalist outlook, particularly at a time
of post-war European reconstruction; a decision was
even made to ban foreign foodstuffs from the South
Bank restaurants and cafeterias. Yet at the same time,
the Council of Industrial Design, deeply involved in
the planning of the Festival, was using it to showcase
the work of a new generation of young designers - a
direct attempt to emulate the international success of
the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition, which had catapulted
Swedish architecture and design on to the world stage.
The architectural ideas that inspired the 1951 Festival
were also linked to the planning and building of the
new towns, which came to share many of the same
design motifs, the planning of open public spaces, and
architectural scale. Paradoxically, perhaps, what peo-
ple later remembered as among the most distinctive
features ofthe South Bank Festival was not the array of
indoor exhibitions devoted to industry and science,
but rather the pleasures of the outdoor cafes, and even
103
 58 Schematic plan of
Battersea Pleasure
Gardens, 1951.

59 Artist's impression of Battersea Pleasure Gardens, 1951. 60 High·wire acrobatics at Battersea Fun·Fair during the
Festival of Britain.
outdoor dancing - just like they did 'abroad' (illus. 61).
A significant blow was struck, in London at least, for
the pleasures of an al fresco cafe society, though this
proved to be somewhat premature.
Gerald Barry's 1951 envious evocation of the
Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens was instructive. As John
Brewer has noted in his recent study, The Pleasures of
the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth
Century, it was the English who invented the social
promenade, the passeggiata, as well as the night-time
pleasure gardens (where in park surroundings one
could enjoy music performances, concerts, theatri-
cals and food and drink in an atmosphere of
heightened sexual anticipation). However, with the
rise of Methodism in the nineteenth century and
with the greater control over public space and public
life that nonconformist local government increasingly
exerted, these traditions were effectively quashed.
61 The Union Cafe at the Festival of Britain.
People remember that eating and dancing
outdoors were among the most enjoyable
features of the Festival.
The Italian il dolce far niente (the pleasures of doing
nothing) was displaced by a rather more puritanical
injunction that exhorted people 'to work, for the
night is ,coming'.
The Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen were also a
direct copy of the Vauxhall model, as were many
other European pleasure gardens, where drinking
and dancing - and therefore a degree of sexual
licence - were among the most popular activities,
particularly at night when parts of the park might be
festooned with lights (illus. 62). The early years of the
twentieth century saw the creation of a number of
Luna Parks in cities throughout the world (illus.
63).The American pleasure garden was rather differ-
ent, according to Galen Cranz, and although in the
1870S beer, wine and cider were sold in Central Park,
most American parks did not allow alcohol to be
sold, and walking, rowing and skating were the prin-
105

cipal recreational activities, all of which were largely
confined to daytime demand.
The pleasure garden also thrived, though under
more difficult political and cultural circumstances, in
some of the former Eastern Bloc countries. The
writer Ian Jeffrey has recently written a fine essay on
Prague's Vystaviste, a 'random assemblage of run-
down restaurants, theatres, playgrounds and a
5
Lunapark'.2 Like the Tivoli Gardens, this kind of park
was more of a campus of museums, theatres, open-
air entertainment, sports facilities and cafes - and
even a sculpture park - in a parkland setting. Today
Vystaviste is badly neglected and the tennis-courts
are overgrown, although the open-air dance floor is
still used at weekends, where saxophone and accor-
dion bands play for ageing dancers.
In the 1970S the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger
was taken to a forlorn Hungarian amusement park just
106
62 Schematic plan of
Copenhagen's Tivoli
Gardens, 1956.
outside Budapest, where his host thought one could
capture the 'melancholy of the fifties'. In Enzensberger's
evocative description we are also allowed to share this
melancholy, induced by a place where 'kiosks with the
slanted, silver-glitter fronts are empty, the pink plastic
signs don't light up anymore, and the fairy-tale tunnel
with the artificial mill, the little boats, and the celluloid
swans that used to glide through the dark has been
drained: 26 Yet more astonishing was the train, a
Marxist-Leninist ghost train, possibly the only
one in the whole world. It showed the course of
world history according to the laws of dialectical
materialism, paying particular attention to
Hungary of course. First the apes as they
emerged from the jungle, then the discovery of
fire, then slave society, groaning figures in heavy
chains, Spartacus, bloody executions, mocking
63 Luna Park, Melbourne. One of a number of 'Iuna (night·time) parks'
developed around the world in the 19205 and 19305.
 exploiters. The magnate, the great land-owner
in his golden tunic, personally swung the whip
over the naked backs of the serfs.... Right next to
that were the capitalist, fat bankers with top hats
and cigars, and the sufferings of the proletariat,
all very gory in the darkness, and then the little
car rattled out into the open air: the glorious
future of socialism shone in the spring sun.
Yet even when the park was in full flush, the
world of Disney was already in the ascendant else-
where, and in waiting.
Sun imagery has always been part of the iconog-
raphy of political utopianism, representing as it does
a new dawn, a fresh start, a walking in the light or a
coming through the fire unharmed. The metaphors
tumble over themselves to be noticed. In all 'progres-
sive' imagery of this era, in the films about Soviet col-
lectivization, or m British or Scandinavian
documentaries about new housing, or new towns,
the sun is always shining. The sun not only represents
the life force of heliotropism, the bringing to life of
nascent powers and energies, but it also represents
the constant movement of time, with the possibility
that every day could herald a new future. A dying ray
of this utopian trope broke through during the total
eclipse on 11 August 1999 across many parts of the
world, when Georgi Spasov, leader of Bulgaria's
beleaguered Communist Party, predicted with a
bravura born more of hope than experience that 'The
world will be covered with darkness and then the sun
will rise again - to bring back to life the idea of com-
munism, the most human system. Misery, poverty
and exploitation will be buried, the working class will
rise to strike back against cruel capitalism.'27 As Oscar
Wilde once said of the death of Little Nell, only the
hardest heart could read it without laughing.
108
Today Budapest's main City Park is rather less
melancholic than this, with a boating-lake that in
winter becomes a skating-rink, an amusement park,
a circus and the Budapest Zoo, as well as a botanical
garden. It too mixes up the categories of nature, cul-
ture, pleasure and learning in ways lost to the western
European pare de plaisanee with its sequestered sense
of moral and natural order, or the recreation park
with its emphasis on sporting prowess and active
recreation. Every landscape cannot but tell a story of
the zeitgeist that produced it (illus. 64).
One of the most interesting examples of the way
in which landscaping can help effect the change from
authoritarian architectural and landscaping codes to
more democratic ones can be seen today in Prague.
In the early 1920S Tomas Masaryk, President of the
newly created democratic republic of Czecho-
slovakia, commissioned the Slovenian architect Joze
Plecnic to redesign the grounds and passages of the
fortress-like Prague Castle so that it would be much
more amenable to public use and pleasure. This he
achieved, according to Caroline Constant, by 'sus-
64 The Budapest 'Corso' pleasure gardens and promenade.
pending those elements that once embodied a uni-
fied concept of power, [so that] he introduced pauses,
silences, intervals, suspensions'.28 The subtle ways in
which the articulation of spaces and connections
even within an open setting can embody codes of
authority or express a variety of versions of the free
life should never be under-estimated, whether wholly
conscious in the design or not. The shaping of emo-
tions and desires, and the choreography of individual
and collective movement, is what landscape design is
privileged to do. Today this is a responsibility which
is oft-en taken too lightly, or which has been ceded to
standardized commercial imperatives. In a pluralist
and multicultural society, the difficulties of express-
ing such a multiplicity of values is a challenge that
may not only require the subtle design of space, but
also the management of time.
In this regard, someone who saw the possibilities
for a different kind of civic and political culture that
could be represented by a new use of space and time
in the city - and which drew on the success of the
Battersea model - was the theatre director Joan
Littlewood. In her autobiography, loan's Book, she
describes the plans for the 'Fun Palace' that she was
promoting in the early 1960s, and which would build
on the success of the Battersea experiment:
In London we are going to create a university of
the streets - not a gracious park, but a foretaste
of the pleasures of the future.... In the music
area - by day, instruments available, free
instruction, recordings for everyone, classical,
folk, jazz, pop, disc libraries - by night jam
sessions and festivals, poetry and dance. In the
science playground -lecture demonstrations,
supported by teaching films, closed-circuit
television and working models, at night an
agora or Kaffeeklatsch where the Socrates,
Abelards, Mermaid poets, the wandering
scholars of the future - the mystics, sceptics and
sophists - can dispute till dawn.... But the
essence of the place will be informality -
nothing obligatory - anything goes. There will
be no permanent structures. Nothing to last
more than ten years, some things not even ten
days: no concrete stadia, stained and cracking,
no legacy of noble contemporary architecture,
quickly dating.
With informality goes flexibility. The 'areas'
that have been listed are not segregated
enclosures. The whole plan in open, but on
many levels. So the greatest pleasure of
traditional parks is preserved - the pleasure of
strolling casually, looking at one or other of
these areas or (if this is preferred) settling down
to several hours of work-play.29
This was not just a programme for a park; it was
also the prototype for a different kind of society.
Littlewood had also recruited some distinguished and
energetic supporters (Asa Briggs, Tom Driberg,
Michael Young, Richard Gregory, Robert Pinker and
Cedric Price among many others) to her cause. It was
one of those rare moments when a door of radical
opportunity opened. And it was quickly slammed shut
by the Labour Party's ingrained puritanism. Para-
doxically, over 30 years later, in the introduction to the
catalogue of the innovative travelling exhibition curat-
ed by Rem Koolhaas, Cities on the Move, installed at
the Hayward Gallery in London in early 1999,
Koolhaas explained that he first came to London in the
1960s, specifically attracted by the opportunity to meet
and learn from Cedric Price (and the architect Peter
0
Cook).3 Price's improvisatory and reflexive approach
109
65 Elevated plan of Tivoli
in 1999.
to urban architecture and culture, which the Labour
government could have supported and learned from
in the 1950S, is today realized to have been well ahead
of its time.
Other social democracies still learned how to
mix educated pleasure with fun. Even today you can
go to Skansen Park in Stockholm, or to Copenhagen's
Tivoli Gardens, where museums are located next to
swingboat parks, and where symphony orchestras
alternate with dance-bands in both open and indoor
concert halls (illus. 65). Other European cultures
seem able to accommodate to this inter-weaving of
the educational, the recreational and the carnival-
esque without any undue cultural stress, or out-
breaks of rioting during the slow movements.
In 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain,
B. Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers published
their moralistic survey: English Life and Leisure.
While deploring the large part that drink, gambling
110
and sexual promiscuity now played in the lives of
many of the people they interviewed, in the final
chapter Rowntree told of a visit he had made to
Scandinavia to study leisure pursuits there. As we
have seen, Scandinavia had established a reputation
as a pioneer in educational and social reform, and
certainly Rowntree was impressed by what he saw,
particularly the Liseberg amusement park in
Gothenburg (which was then enjoying over two mil-
lion visitors a year), with its 250-acre landscaped
park that combined extensive horticultural displays
with traditional fairground and concert-hall amuse-
ments. He thought it almost, but not quite, the equal
of Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens, which, in a famous
article in the News Chronicle of 1 July 1949, J. B.
Priestley had enthused about as capturing the new
spirit of the age. For Priestley, Tivoli was a place
where 'Old folks go ... in the morning to saunter
among the trees and flower beds. Children rush to
66 Crowds enjoying themselves at Tivoli. now the most famous pleasure garden in the world.

67 Chinese Pagoda and boating lake at Tivoli.

the playground or the lake to see the clown and the
harlequin at the Pantomime Theatre. In the evening,
highbrows go for Beethoven and Brahms, and low-
brows go to jitterbug.... At one place they are wolfing
sausages and at another they are nibbling caviar.
This, I trust, suggests not only a wide variety of
attractions but also a genuinely democratic institu-
tion.'3 1

The 'Tivoli Effect' still endures (illus. 66, 67). In

the summer of1997, staying in an apartment close to
the Gardens, my wife and I spent a lot of time
observing how people used it today. Here of a morn-
ing, amid the crowds, one could watch and enjoy, as
Priestley had, the many open-air cafes and bars filled
with elderly people drinking coffee, smoking cigars
(women as well as men - this is Denmark remem-
ber), reading Politiken or Berlingske Tidende, while
50 yards away people rowed on the boating-lake to
the sound of a youth orchestra rehearsing a Bizet pro-
gramme on the adjacent open-air stage. Elsewhere
people wandered through the ornamental gardens
while taking notes on new plant varieties; others
squealed with delight as they rode on the great ferris-
wheel nearby. No one seemed' to be suffering terribly
from culture shock or a dissociation of sensibility.
Even in an era of rapidly changing cultural forms and
lifestyles, in which 'everything that is solid melts into
air', it is instructive to note the resilient and abiding
appeal of the fairground, the pleasure park or the
public festival, where the social and civic virtues are
leavened by the pleasures of the carnivalesque.

112

A feature of many of the new European parks of the
1920S and 1930S was the lido - the open-air swim-
ming pool. The word 'lido' was borrowed from the
Italian word for coastline, but made famous through
the reputation of the Venice Lido, and so the lido
became the city's beach. There were historical prece-
dents for providing bathing facilities in parks. In
Victoria Park in east London, for example, opened in
1845, a large bathing-lake was constructed in the early
1850S for hygiene purposes principally, and only
available to men and boys between 4 and 8 am in the
summer. 'Tens of thousands descended on it every
l
morning', according to one historian of the Park.
Such was the popularity of the lake that a second was
added, with diving-boards and a floating raft. This
was even more popular, with as many as 25,000
bathers counted on a summer morning before
8 o'clock. Both lakes continued in use until 1934,
when new standards in hygiene and health regulation
forced their closure, to be replaced by a modern
swimming-pool opened in May 1936 by Herbert
Morrison, who declared that 'This is more than a
swimming pool. It is East London's own Lido.'
The 1930S saw a proliferation of open-air lidos in
the UK, many of them developed as part of public
works programmes to create work for the unem-
ployed. Out of the 48 open-air swimming pools con-
structed, 35 were built in London, of which only 11
6 Summer in the City:
The Cu It of the Lido
were still in use in 1998. Many conformed to a stan-
dard size recommended by the Amateur Swimming
Association, 165 feet long, and between 55 and 90 feet
wide. All had shallow and deep ends, the deepest of
which could be as much as 15 feet, where there were
diving boards. The basic design was a sunken pool
with changing-rooms and refreshment facilities,
enclosed within a brick compound high enough to
keep out intruders or free-riders, but also acting as a
sun-trap and wind-break. Yet even this most elemen-
tary of architectural forms was capable of providing
multiple pleasures, as Thomas A. P. van Leeuwan has
observed in his fine history of the swimming-pool:
No other building type compares, in the purity
of its mathematics and the modesty of its
phenomenal appearance, to this unpretentious
hole in the ground. Even garages and parking
lots offer more in terms of complexity and
sublimity, but they lack the pool's ceaseless
power to inspire interpretation, analysis, fantasy,
or just straightforward narration. 2
Many of the pools had ornamental fountains
whose distinctive shapes became a feature of the lido,
though in fact these fountains did the job of aerating
the water as it circulated from the pool through the
filtration and purification system, through the foun-
113
68 Gospel Oak Lido, north London, one of 35 open·air swimming pools constructed in London in
the 1930s, still open in 1999. Architects: H. A. Rowbotham and T. L. Smithson, London County
Council (LCC) Architects Department. Opened 1937.

tains and back to the pool again. The lining of most
pools was painted in Mediterranean blue, with the
edges painted white. Many of them took their archi-
tectural shape and detailing from the design of the
cruise liner, which Le Corbusier had enthused so pas-
sionately about in Vers une architecture.
One historian of the London lidos has written
that 'a lido is not merely an indoor swimming pool
without walls':
In opening itself to the skies, the lido paid
homage to 'unbounded Nature': it also offered
the feel of fresh air on unclothed skin. It was not
serious, like the indoor pool, which was a
building to be swum in, and in which one was
totally indifferent to the elements outside, and
which was essentially part of the urban
environment. The lido was ambiguous, a
halfway house between town and country,
between a London suburb and the Cote d'Azur,
even between earth and heaven...3
The areas surrounding the pool were often wide
enough for sunbathing, for sitting in deckchairs, pic-
nicking and taking refreshments. This created new
spaces of public informality in the city, and helped

114
69 New Brighton Lido, on the Wirral near Birkenhead, opened in June 1934 and said to be
the largest outdoor pool in Europe.
break down the barriers between men and women in
public, especially in minimal attire and part-nudity.
Dress codes had always been an issue for the puritan
regulation of much municipal leisure provision, and
prior to the Great War men and women were not
even allowed to stand on the same side of the baths at
many indoor pools, and could only mix in the water.
In some places separate bathing times for the differ-
ent sexes were enforced as a matter of principle. The
proclamation 'Mixed Bathing at ALL times', was a
badge of pride and free-spiritedness worn by many of
the new lidos. The space around the pool in the lido
resembled beach space in its promiscuous democracy
of age, class, bodily shape and temperament.
Most pools were designed by the local authority
Council Engineer and Surveyor, though all of the
London County Council (LCC) lidos in the 1930S were
designed by H. A. Rowbotham and T. 1. Smithson
(illus. 68). Several London lidos, in particular,
became famous in their own right, and well beyond
their local boundaries, notably the Serpentine Lido -
also known as 'Lansbury's Lido', after the popular
London radical politician - and the Ruislip Lido. The
Serpentine Lido was opened in 1937 and is still in use
today. Photos of people splashing about and up to
high jinks in the Serpentine Lido during July and
August heatwaves became a standard icon ofsummer
in the city. The RUislip Lido, opened in 1936, was
designed by the architectural practice established by
Thomas H. Mawson (author of Civic Art: Studies in
Town Planning, Parks, Boulevards and Open Spaces,
1911), a modern white rendered complex, with the
115
70 Saltdean Lido, near Brighton, Sussex, helped create an image of the south coast as chic and moderne. The
building also incorporated the local public library. Architect: R.W.H. Jones. Opened 1937.
main building featuring two large curved prows, set
in woodland surroundings. There were changing-
rooms to accommodate 350 men and 350 women, a
first-floor restaurant and clubhouse with a central
dance floor and an open-air tea terrace.
Another of London's most distinctive lidos was
built in Finchley in 1932, designed by the Borough
Engineer and Architect, Percival T. Harrison, with
changing accommodation for 1,000 people, and with
wide, shelving beaches for sunbathing and lawns for
deck-chairs. In the summer months it was open from
6.30 am until 10 pm and was floodlit at night. In 1948
it was used to stage the Olympic water-polo events.
Even larger was the lido that was opened at New
Brighton, on the Wirral near Birkenhead, in June
1934 (illus. 69), said to be the largest outdoor pool in
Europe, with space for 2,000 bathers and 10,000
spectators. This was another public works project
designed to help the unemployed. The pool was lined
with blue glass tiles and fed with pumped sea water.
116
Few of the inter-war open-air pools had any means of
heating their water.
On the south coast of the UK two of the most
beautiful seaside lidos are still in use today, in
Brighton and Penzance. The Saltdean Lido near
Brighton (illus. 70) was opened in 1937, designed by
the architect R.W.H. Jones, who also designed the
nearby Ocean Hotel in the same idiom: white, curvi-
linear forms with shipdeck railings, and with a semi-
circular glass bulkhead. The Lido also housed the
local public library. Jones's design at Saltdean bor-
rowed heavily from the De La Warr Pavilion designed
4
by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff and
built in 1935 at Bexhill on Sea (illus. 71), only a few
miles from Saltdean.
Sadly the Pavilion fell into neglect in the 1970S,
and some of its features were badly altered and
redesigned - as was also true of the Saltdean Lido. In
recent years architectural conservationists and local
people have rallied to bring both buildings back into
use, and with something of the same exterior elan
and decoration that once made them such brilliant
and dramatic force-fields along this largely suburban
coastline.
Swimming and dancing were seen as comple-
mentary activities, and a short-lived magazine of the
period, CHUTE:The Magazine for Swimming,
Sunbathing and Open-Air Recreation, the first issue of
which was published in May 1936, contains a column
entitled 'Where to Swim and Dance', a guide to lidos
with dancing facilities. There was, not surprisingly,
an overlap in the design, management and commer-
cial interest in lidos with the simultaneous growth of
the holiday camp business. Whereas the early camps
had generally been made up of serried rows of chalets
or dormitory blocks, the new camps, such as the
Prestatyn Holiday Camp in Wales designed by
William Hamlyn, otherwise a railway architect, and
5
opened in 1939, was an exercise in the modern style.
The Prestatyn camp had a large landscaped square
known as Sun Court at its centre, with large modern
buildings on either side painted white and in the style
of the distinctive marine architecture of the period,
with a large pool surrounded by an elevated terrace
and a 60-feet high control tower used by judges of
pool competitions, but which could be used by
campers to look out to the sea. It was stylish, Cl la
mode, and very popular.
Lido life was regarded as rather more sophisticat-
ed than traditional municipal swimming: ban chic,
ban genre. Many pools experimented with underwater
lighting, and many also had stunning tiered diving-
platforms, rising to vertiginous heights and ziggurat
complexities, as if designed by Lissitzky or another of
the Russian Constructivists. It was the springboard
6
that transformed the placid pool into 'athletic water'.
A seven-platform diving-board in concrete built at
the lido at Weston Super Mare was at one time listed
for its architectural splendour (illus. 72) but then it
was delisted and demolished rapidly afterwards for
reasons of safety. The art of diving, and the photo-
graphic iconography of the arched body of the diver
in mid-flight belongs to this Nordic world of the
open-air lido, a point made graphically in Charles
Sprawson's original and delightful book, Haunts ofthe
Black Masseur. It was the Swedes who introduced the
art of diving to the UK at the turn of the century, espe-
cially the swallow dive, and diving became a spectator
sport, or even a theatrical performance. 7 The Swedes
had established their supremacy in the air and water
at the 1900 Paris Olympics, where they had won most
of the aquatic prizes.
The Swiss also enjoyed a long history of popular
open-air bathing. In his essay on the lido phenome-
non in Switzerland in the 1930S, Bruno Maurer noted
that 'for the protagonists of Neues Bauen (New
Architecture) in Switzerland, the public swimming
pool was a prime building task that was particularly
suited for exemplifying their concerns ... in 'red
Zurich' the demand for sports facilities and open-air
pools was even taken up as an election campaign
issue.'8 The creation of the new park pools solved sev-
eral problems at once: it provided work for the
unemployed and created a place where other unem-
ployed people could at least enjoy some of their
enforced leisure. The design of the new pools sought
to merge the park pool into the surrounding land-
scape, rather than to create hard-edged, municipal
and highly functional facilities (illus. 73). The
Alenmoos pool in Zurich, designed by Haefeli,
Moser and Steiger, constructed in 1938-9 uses lawns,
flower-beds, terraces and parasols to create a holiday
setting rather than a sports setting, and there was
originally a lot of planting along the borders of the
117
 The De La Warr Pavilion
The De La Warr Pavilion was the most famous, if
not the first, public building in the UK in the new
international modernist style, a dramatic and confi-
dent exercise in maritime aesthetics, with a clean-
cut silhouette and beautiful interior fittings,
including a sweeping circular staircase inside the
main glass turret. It was designed by Erich
Mendelsohn (1887-1953), a German architect who
had already established an international reputation
for a number of large buildings, such as the
Schocken department store, before he fled from
Germany in 1933 and arrived in England. 9 Quite
soon after his arrival he went into partnership with
Serge Chermayeff (1900-96), born in Russia, but
who had been sent to school at Harrow at the age
of 10, a Bohemian and radical who befriended Eric
Gill, Henry Moore, Bertrand Russell and others.
During his friendship with Gill they had planned to
create a kind of 'Bauhaus-by-the-sea' at Cap Negre
in the south of France, but this came to nothing.
Chermayeff was a lifelong devotee of sunbathing
IQ
and of swimming in the sea.
Making use of new steel-frame techniques, the
Pavilion was started in January 1935 and officially
opened on 12 December in the same year. It includ-
ed a theatre, a library and reading-room, a sun par-
lour, restaurant and dance-floor. The flat roof was
used for d.eck games. The building itself was origi-
nally to have been part of a larger development,
with counter-balancing hotel and cinema buildings,
but these never happened, and its stand-alone pos-
session of the site has been criticized for being
slightly over-dramatic, but in the circumstances this
was unavoidable.
118
The prime mover for setting up the competition
to build a new pavilion was Earl De La Warr
(1900-76), the socialist mayor of Bexhill in
1932-5. De La Warr was an unusual man for his
time, having also been a conscientious objector,
and living in a town normally regarded as deeply
conservative. It was agreed to appoint an architec-
tural assessor, and this luckily turned out to be
Thomas Tait, an English architectural modernist
avant la lettre, who had designed the estate at Si Iver
End and had established a reputation as a mod-
ernist whose work had already won respect. The
construction attracted considerable interest in the
technical press, notably in The Builder and The
Welder, and engineers and construction specialists
were astonished at the building's technical ingenu-
ity and the way in which Mendelsohn was able to
adapt the original design - originally to have been
in reinforced concrete - to welded steel.
The building won almost universal approval on
completion, an experiment in design that delighted
everybody who came to see it. It was also regarded
as a harbinger of a new way of life, for as Earl De La
Warr remarked in his plaque-laying speech, 'The
laying of this plaque marks a great day in the histo-
ry of Bexhill - we are embarking upon a new era. An
era which is going to lead to the growth, the pros-
perity and the greater culture of our town. a venture
which is part of a great national movement, virtual-
ly to found a new industry - the industry of giving
that relaxation, that pleasure, that culture, which
hitherto the gloom and dreariness of British resorts
have driven our fellow countrymen to risk in foreign
lands.'
71 De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, a success from the start, completed within twelve months in 1935.
Architects: Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff.
grounds so that the fences would disappear in time
and merge with the landscape beyond.
The interest in outdoor pool architecture in
Switzerland had started with the lakeshore facilities
in Vevey-Corseaux by Otto Zollinger (1929), the
facilities by Steger and Egender in Kiibacht at the
Lake of Zurich (1930), and the facilities at Bellerive-
Plage in Lausanne-Ouchy by Marc Piccard (1935-7).
A number of pools were also designed in mountain
resorts, such as Wengen (1931), Adelboden (1931) and
Heiden (1932/3), designed by the engineer Beda Hefti.
Such pools were considered particularly appropriate
to the modernist project in that they created a dia-
logue between the new architectural forms and the
spectacular natural surroundings. One writer
described this as being 'impressive in the opposition
created by the reflecting, calm water surfaces to the
icy, rugged Alpine mountain landscape'.ll After the
War a number of other large-scale lidos were con-
structed, including the Tiefenbrunnen Lido in
Zurich (Architects: Josef Schiitz, with Otto Diirr and
Willy Roost, 1954) and the Open-Air Bath at Aarau
by Haefeli, Moser and Steiger (1955).
The architect Max Frisch, who later became
more famous as a playwright, designed the Freibad
Letzigraben in Zurich, built in 1947-9 with a
lO-metre high diving-tower of elegant design. On
one occasion he brought Bertolt Brecht, that 'expert
in asking questions', to see the pool. Frisch subse-
quently wrote in his diary that he explained to Brecht
'how, for instance, a diving tower has come out as it
has, how the architectonic form evolves from the
119
technical task, no, not merely evolves, but is incum-
bent upon the form, to not only solve the task, but
also to reveal it, such explanations become a true
2
pleasure, enjoyed by both:' Whether Brecht took a
dip during the visit, we are not told.
When the bathing facilities on the Bo-acre island
of Glinsehaufel just outside Vienna were destroyed by
aerial bombing, shordy after the end of the War the
Vienna city council commissioned architects Eugen
Wade and Max Fellerer to design, build and landscape
a whole new lido facility. In addition to the 14,000
bathers, for whom lockers and cubicles were necessary,
72 A crowded day at Weston Super Mare Lido (now modernized as the 'Tropicana') in 1973.
120
provision was made for tennis-courts, a cafe, rentable
cottages and picnic areas.'3 The lido itself became the
focus of a new type of holiday village.
The cult of diving reached its apotheosis
between the wars, exemplified in the film Leni
Riefenstahl made of the 1936 Olympic Games, where
the diving sequences astonished cinema audiences by
their breathtaking risks and beauty. In fact the
sequences were filmed by Hans Erd, Reifenstahl's
cameraman, in 'an empty stadium, after the Games
had ended, sometimes by searchlight till late at night,
from angles and positions that would not have been
allowed during the actual competition'.' 4 While
swimming had its muscular and heroic elements,
particularly in competitive sports, where the swim-
mer in his or her one-piece suit and stretched rubber
helmet became a model of human streamlining,
according to Thomas van Leeuwan, it was enjoyed
equally as much for its reflective and introspective
qualities. As Wittgenstein, himself a keen swimmer,
wrote: 'Just as one's body has a natural tendency
towards the surface and one has to make an exertion
to get to the bottom - so it is with thinking." 5
73 Lido at Interlaken, Switzerland. New architectural forms in spectacular natural surroundings.
The 1952 Olympic Games held in Helsinki
focused attention again on the architectural merits of
sports facilities, in a stunning stadium that raised
'white' Functionalism into a symbol of modern
Finland, designed byYrjo Lindegran and Toivo Jantti
(1940 and 1952), including a Swimming Stadium by
Jorma Jarvi (1939 and 1952). The stadium and pool,
which had originally been designed and partly built
for the putative 1940 Olympics cancelled by the War,
are both still in use (illus. 74, 75). Today the stadium
and pool are very much integrated into the life and
121
74 Olympic Stadium, Helsinki: intended for the 1940 Olympics but interrupted for twelve years
by the war. Architects: Yrjb Lindegran and Toive Jantti. Started 1940, completed 1952.
75 Olympic Pool, Helsinki: still popular and easily accessible by tram and bus from
the city centre. Architect: Jorma Jarvi. Started 1939, completed 1952.
76 Jubilee Pool, Penzance, opened in 1935, recently saved by local campaigning and now
listed. Architect: Captain F. Latham, Borough Engineer.
social fabric of Helsinki, located as they are in a pop-
ular park with good tram and bus links to the city
centre.
Some of the best Art Deco architecture was
devoted to lido architecture. The Jubilee Pool in
Penzance, on the south-west tip ofComwall, was one
of the finest seaside lidos built between the wars, and
remains the largest open-air swimming-pool of its
type still in use in the UK today (illus. 76). In 1993 it
received Grade II listing as a building of architectural
and historical interest by the Department of National
Heritage. The pool was designed by the town's
Borough Engineer, Captain F. Latham, and was
opened to the public on 31 May 1935. Its unique shape
124
was meant to suggest a seagull alighting on the water,
although when strolling round the long brilliant
white terraces with their metal balustrades, one
could easily be on the deck of a great liner, the bow
jutting out forcefully into the Atlantic waves. At the
time of opening, even the local newspaper, The
Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph, could see the
connection between the design and contemporary
artistic movements:
the interior of the pool is not only a fine piece of
engineering - it is also a work of art. The
monotony of straight walls and right angles -
the domain of the compass and ruler - has been
 entirely and utterly avoided. Instead, there are
graceful curves and pleasing lines - an
adaptation of cubism to the terraces and diving
platforms which enhances the effect and makes
the whole so pleasing to the eye. 16
The lido was also used for concerts and orches-
tral performances, as the stepped sunbathing terraces
helped to create a natural amphitheatre.
When one looks back at the brief but dazzling era
of lido life, one wonders what generated the interest
and commitment shown by politicians, planners and
architects throughout Europe to this new architectural
form. Such enthusiasm must have had deep political
and cultural foundations. This shared international
concern for a politics of the body could not have been
conjured out of nothing, and it is extraordinary that
architectural and cultural history so quickly neglected
or forgot the great public passions that were created
for such forms of urban hedonism and bodily delight.
One also regrets the failure to maintain an intellectual
interest in the relationship between the body, public
space, health and the city in such dynamic and
enlivening ways. Perhaps it was all too (architectural-
ly) simple, and the economics of public subsidy all too
transparent. It took another half-century to revive the
social and economic arguments for supporting a high-
quality public realm. But was it really necessary to wait
so long?
In the UK the passion for lidos lost momentum in
the 1960s, partly as a result of the 1960 Wolfenden
Report on Sport and the Community, and later on the
1968 Sports Council report on Planning for Sport,
both of which deemed lidos poor value for money,
and blaming the UK'S unreliable climate for their
erratic, and largely seasonal, operation and use.
Blaming the weather is often a convenient excuse in
the UK for what is more truthfully a failure of civic
nerve, and a loss of interest in forms of public culture.
Statistics do not support this case. A comparison of
Outdoor Recreational Pursuits between the UK,
Sweden and the USA drawing on evidence collected in
the 1960s found that participation rates in outdoor
swimming were as follows: the UK:25 per cent;
Sweden: 65 per cent; and USA: 45 per cent. 17 A survey of
Finnish participation in outdoor swimming, pub-
lished in 1977, revealed that 50 per cent of Finnish
adults claimed to swim outdoors regularly.18 The
extraordinary open-air swimming complex at Tapiola
(illus. 77) makes evident this pleasure in the outdoor
life. Few would claim that the climate was more hos-
pitable to outdoor leisure in Sweden and Finland than
in the UK. The arguments against lidos and other out-
door forms of provision in the UK seem today to
derive from the new leisure managerialism. In this
scheme of things, indoor leisure facilities are regarded
as intrinsically more modern because they are part of
the commercial leisure industry - and therefore more
amenable to professionalization, economic control,
and even privatization. It is always much harder to
put a price or value on the pleasures of life outdoors.
Today the very idea of a culture oflife in the open,
whether in the city or in the countryside, has been
dramatically challenged by research that suggests the
rays of the sun ought now to be considered a health
risk, not least because of the risks of skin cancer. In
the 1980s scientists discovered a huge hole appearing
in the ozone layer. Ozone 03 is a form of oxygen, and
exists in a definite layer some 15-50 kilometres above
the earth's surface, high up in the atmosphere, shield-
ing the biosphere from the harmful effects of ultra-
violet light that comes from the sun. Chlorine- and
bromine- containing compounds, mainly chloro-
fluorocarbons (CFCS), released into the atmosphere,
125
77 Tapiola Swimming Hall at Expo 1965. Architect: Aarne Ervi. Built around an artificial lake
with a real sense of flair and commitment to public space and enjoyment.

largely in the twentieth century, seem to have caused
a measurable thinning of the ozone layer. In coun-
tries such as Australia, New Zealand, Chile and oth-
ers, which are protected only by a very thin layer of
ozone for parts of the year, there are increasing num-
bers of skin cancer cases reported, and in Australian
schools today, for example, children are required by
law to wear hats and sun-block cream whenever they
go outside. 19
In turn, though, the concern about the harmful
effects ofexposure to the sun has itselfbeen criticized
for being counter-productive in terms of public
health. Some specialists are prepared to make the
case that 'There is evidence that the potential benefits

126
of exposure to sunlight may outweigh the highly
publicized adverse effects on the incidence of skin
cancer'.20 While it is agreed that the sun can cause
skin cancers of various kinds, it can also help reduce
heart disease, the risk of rickets or fractured bones, as
well as making people feel happier and healthier.
Nevertheless such fears are part of the growth of a
widespread sense of unease and risk as a result of the
environmental effects of inappropriate use of chemi-
cals and the unchecked spread of all kinds of envi-
ronmental pollution which are only now being taken
seriously. This is the 'risk society' that has arisen
from the ashes of triumphalist modernism.
Nevertheless, there are today new attempts to
create opportunities for swimming in the city. In the
UK a new initiative to revive the lido tradition has
been the stunning new proposal by the architectural
firm of Lifschutz Davidson for a floating swimming-
pool on the River Thames (illus. 78). In fact the float-
ing pool was an early forerunner of the land-based
public swimming-pool. In the nineteenth century
78 Computer simulation of proposed new lido on the Thames: The floor of the pool is designed to be raised to provide shallow
swimming for children or people with disabilities, or can be converted to a dance hall in minutes. Architect: Lifschutz Davidson.
there were a number of places in Europe where
swimming-pools were created by simply enclosing
river water within a floating pontoon. In Moscow,
after the 1917 revolution, such a pool became 'the
most popular structure in the history of Modern
Architecture' according to Rem Koolhaas and Madelon
Vriesendorp.21 Due to the chronic labour shortage,
the architects and builders who constructed it also
acted as lifeguards. It is unlikely that the elegant
floating structure proposed for London will be man-
aged with such voluntarist enthusiasm, but it will
provide year-round public facilities for swimming
and associated activities. Although the pool will be
enclosed by a glass roof and walls, its floating setting
sustains the impression of bathing in the Thames, an
illusion which was also maintained in the Moscow
pool. If it gets built it could represent a new begin-
ning for the British lido tradition. 22
The fact that swimming and the city can still co-
exist has also been demonstrated intriguingly by the
French artist Anne Fremy in her film Tokyo Marine
127
(1999), a documentary video made for the Cities on
the Move exhibition, and which shows various swim-
ming-pools in Tokyo with flumes crossing streets,
going above and below ground, as young and old
swimmers slide through these watery tunnels only
feet away from the cars and buses. 23 There are few
better visual metaphors for the parallel lives and pas-
sions to be found in the pluralist mix of the modern
city than that of the swimmer and the driver crossing
within yards of each other unawares and unafraid.

128

According to Charles Jencks, Modernism came to an
end at 3.32 pm on 15 July 1972 when the Pruitt-Igoe
housing project in St Louis, Missouri, built in the
1950S, was demolished. The architectural correspon-
dent for The New York Times wrote in that same year
of demolition that (What is being designed is instant
blight. We are building blight for the next hundred
years. The environment is being sealed into instant
sterility and its social problems are being compound-
ed by ... substandard design.'! The era of (comprehen-
sive re-development', as the process of large-scale
urban demolition and reconstruction was called, was
over, and the widespread disenchantment with the
very idea of redevelopment per se was regarded as a
climactic defeat for architectural and planning
hubris.
It wasn't just the monolithic tower blocks and
vast suburban housing projects or schemes that were
deemed to have failed. Already by 1955, in a celebrated
edition of The Architectural Review, Ian Nairn and
Gordon Cullen had excoriated British urban plan-
ning as leading to a disastrous melange of urban and
suburban badlands, in which no apparent design or
civic intention was to be detected. Notions of place-
lessness - attributed to a lack of topographical or
architectural identity and distinctiveness - became a
theme of architectural and planning literature in this
period, a concern which has not abated since. 2 If any-
7 Limits to Growth:
Nature and Society
Restored
thing, the crItIque of the homogenization of the
modern city and its public spaces has become
stronger and more widely felt.
The evident failure of collectivist provision in
the command economies of the (people's democra-
cies', and the lesser but still common inefficiencies of
public sector services in Western European social
democracies, led to a widespread questioning of the
whole ethos of state planning and provision from the
1970S onwards, in Europe and beyond. Too often, it
was argued, state provision seemed to ride
roughshod over individual choice in the name of
some wider public good that often in reality turned
out to be bureaucratic convenience. In housing,
transport, health, education, as well as in leisure, the
greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness in supplying
such goods and services to consumers (no longer cit-
izens) through (market choice' won widespread
political support throughout many countries in the
world.
In the UK the growth of owner-occupied hous-
ing, and car ownership, for example, went in parallel
with a widespread movement to a more privatized
domestic life and culture, recently characterized as
(suburban flight'. The great social democratic era of
public investment in housing, schools, health care,
transport systems, libraries, parks, swimming-pools
and sports centres seemed to have come to an end,
129
partly as a result of a fiscal crisis in public spending,
but also as a result of more people choosing to exer-
cise their right to buy more personalized (and often
what were perceived to be better) services in the
market-place, leaving public provision as 'provision
of the last resort'. This move from public to private
services strangely echoed a similar period of transi-
tion a century before, when more basic public ser-
vices such as the bath-house, the latrine and the
wash-house were domesticated and this 'process of
civic-miniaturization and privatization led to an
almost complete secrecy in terms of the distribution
and disposition of the hygienic facilities'.3 Today the
move is not from the public to the private spatially,
but economically and socially.
Take housing, for example. In 1963 the average
weekly income for those living in public housing in
the UK was roughly the same as for the general popu-
lation; by 1993 those living in public housing had
incomes equivalent to only half of the national aver-
age: in three decades public housing moved from
being a popular form of tenancy to being almost
exclusively for the poor. In education, the number of
4
children attending private day schools has risen,
from 344,122 in 1988 to 403,331 in 1998, rather than
declined. s The percentage of university places at
Oxford and Cambridge taken by privately educated
children has also risen: in 1969 privately educated
children made up 38 per cent of Oxford students, but
by 1996 it was 50 per cent. 6 In the UK car ownership
rose from 50 to 331 vehicles per 1000 persons between
1950 and 1988, and traffic volumes grew by 630 per
cent between 1950 and 1990. 7 Between 1951 and 1994
the percentage of households without a car dropped
from 86 per cent to 32 per cent. Using public trans-
port, at least in the UK, is now often a sign of poverty
or social failure, as can been seen from a remark
130
made by Margaret Thatcher when Prime Minister: 'If
a man finds himself a passenger on a bus, having
attained the age of 26, he can count himself a failure
in life'.8 In so many areas of life, public services have
been marginalized and downgraded, to the extent
that the difference between public and private provi-
sion is no longer a matter of balance or complemen-
tarity, but the social representation of two nations.
In such changed circumstances - so different
from the early years of the century when the political
challenge of a democratic public culture seemed sim-
ply a matter of finding the political will and the
money - today the very notion of a modernizing pol-
itics and culture seems much more complex. The rise
of the sovereign consumer as the principal agent. of
modern social relations, has created enormous polit-
ical difficulties, particularly in respect of environ-
mental issues where one person's freedom to, act
independently is often achieved at the expense of
others. Yet the sovereign individual is here to stay, a
product of the very modernizing processes that were
intended to take the social project in other directions.
As the German philosopher and scientist Ulrich Beck
has noted, 'If thought through to its conclusion, the
basic figure of fully developed modernity is the single
person.'9 Such understandings of the modernist pro-
ject seem so distant from the early collectivist dreams
of the fully-functioning model community, or radi-
ant city. Certainly in terms of public health, the
larger trends have moved against collectivist provi-
sion towards a preoccupation with private fitness and
personal therapy, leading to images of middle-class
urbanites driving to their private health clinics
through littered and vandalized streets occupied by
homeless people.
The plight of many historic American cities
architecturally, economically and socially has in
recent years acted as a spur to many European urban-
ists to think again about the public realm and the
need to renew a civic urban culture. J. K. Galbraith's
lO
celebrated axiom of (private affluence and public
squalor' returns to haunt the European urban politi-
cal imaginary. In North America, where state provi-
sion) regulation and intervention were often much
less developed within the political discourse, many
cities have been blighted by the mass exodus of the
wealthier - predominantly white - population. This
has left a CBD (Central Business District) surrounded
by a ring of decaying inner city districts with boarded-
up shops, offices and commercial buildings, frequent-
1y vandalized or burnt out, together with a mixture of
run-down private and public housing occupied by
poor - predominantly black or Hispanic - families
who cannot afford to leave.
The exodus from the historic American cities to
the new (Edge' or (Stealth' cities is now assumed to be
an inescapable fact of life that cannot be halted or
reversed. Given the increasing mobility of capital and
labour to move in search of optimal conditions for
business growth) the historic cities are losing out fast.
For example, when the computer-chip company
Sematech reviewed the credentials of 134 cities before
locating its new headquarters in the early 1990S) only
two big cities, Boston and Kansas City) made it onto
ll
the list of 25 finalists. In his description of one of
these (stealth cities', Tysons Corner, Virginia, the
urbanist Paul Knox notes that
Tysons Corner does not exist as a postal
address... [yet] in 1990 it was the ninth largest
concentration of commercial space in the
United States, including more than 20 million
square feet of office space, 3,000 hotel rooms,
and parking for more than 80)000 cars. Yet)
while it had become the largest retail
concentration on the East Coast with the
exception of Manhattan, it had little of the
apparatus of urban governance or civic affairs. It
had a branch of Tiffany's but no public open
space; an exclusive business club but no public
forum; acres of parking lots but no transit stop;
dozens of sportswear stores but no recreation
centres, swimming pools or bicycle tracks. 12
It is the absence of a civic philosophy of public
space and public culture in such new forms of urban-
ism that has alarmed many in Europe, where there is
still a substantial political commitment to the eco-
nomic, social and cultural renewal of historic cities. I3
The revitalization of cities such as Barcelona, partic-
ularly through an investment in new public spaces,
has inspired many other European cities to take the
same route. Increasingly the issue of the provision of
high-quality public amenities and public spaces)
together with a much greater attention to issues of
environmental quality) ranging from air quality to
the reduction of traffic and the greater (walkability'
of urban settings and amenities, is bringing back
together for the first time since the (heroic' period of
early modernism) issues of urban planning, social
equity and public health policy in the name of (eco-
logical modernisation'.I4 There is much to be won in
these new initiatives.
Any discussion today of the future of cities has)
however, to address issues of long-term environmen-
tal sustainability, at present a concept honoured more
in the word than in the deed. Public and professional
concern about these issues emerged initially in
response to the 1970 Club of Rome report) The Limits
to Growth, as well as to the subsequent oil crisis of the
mid-1970s, and then the World Commission on
Environment and Development report of 1987,
usually known as (The Bruntland Report'. It was this
latter report that elaborated the core principle that
(Humanity has the ability to make development sus-
tainable - to ensure that it meets the needs of the pre-
sent without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs.' The sustaina-
bility of cities - environmentally, economically and
socially - was also the main concern of the 1992 Rio
Summit and its adoption of Local Agenda 21, which
required new ways of thinking about the liveability of
cities in much more ecological ways.
The rationalist model of urban planning - which
regarded the development of the city as primarily a
struggle to subdue or deny nature - is now deemed to
have been in error, and badly so. As Ferenc Heher
and Agnes HelIer have acerbically noted, (The list of
promises that modernity has made and never kept is
remarkably long. Top of the list would be mastery of
nature.'15 Partly as a result of the failure to sustain the
initiatives of the 1920S and 1930S, cities once again
have come to be regarded as unhealthy and unsocia-
ble places - a negation of the Enlightenment view
that cities equal civilization. People have voted with
their feet. Between 1961 and 1994, for example,
Liverpool lost over 35 per cent of its population,
Manchester (city) just under 35 per cent, and inner
London just under 25 per cent. 16 These are substantial
losses which have caused systemic damage. The pop-
ulation exodus from British cities in the past two
decades was initially propelled by the loss, or reloca-
tion' of jobs in the traditional manufacturing indus-
tries. Yet in the wake of the many social and
environmental problems that have resulted from the
economic (re-structuring' of the modern city, and the
evident deterioration of the historic Victorian infra-
structure of hospitals, schools, roads and public-
132
transport systems, many have also became perceived
as hostile environments in entirety, particularly for
those with young families.
Environmentalists might have addressed some of
these urban problems earlier on, seeing in these great
restructuring processes, real opportunities to develop
new models and configurations of healthy urban liv-
ing. Yet environmentalist politics has regrettably so
far had very little time for the city, or for the lifestyles
of urban populations, including the poor. Indeed one
recent writer on this theme has noted with some con-
cern that
The green movement's tendency to root itself in
the values of an imagined idyllic countryside
based in a rather rigid gaze to the past, which
castigates the city as a virulent pathological
excrescence, has led to a poverty of green
perspectives on cities and a reticence to
seriously engage in urban issues. 17
More recently green politics in the UK and in
other European countries has further retrenched, and
is much more likely to busy itself with rural concerns,
such as preserving the landscape, organic food pro-
duction and animal rights. These issues are clearly
important, but many green campaigners have turned
their backs on the challenge of urban environmental-
ism. Forms of ecological modernization could help
solve both environmental and social problems simul-
taneously through the development of new
economies and more reciprocal, self-managing forms
of social relations. Yet unless people are convinced
that such developments also offer opportunities for
the good life - and not just austere self-denial - they
are doomed.
THE GRANITE GARDEN
Fortunately some ecologists are active in the urban
debate, and there is some attempt to understand
anew the relationship between landscape, human
habitat and the city. They now insist that all forms of
urban policy and planning need to rediscover the
topographical and geological underpinnings of the
city - the beaches beneath the pavements, so to
speak. Matters of air quality, rainwater circulation,
the recycling of all organic materials, a greater respect
for building orientation to take advantage of prevail-
ing micro-climates and the efficient use of local
energy sources, are today regarded as the new criteria
for successful urban settlements. 18
The American landscape architect Anne Whiston
Spirn was one of the first to alert urbanists to the fact
that (Disregard of natural processes in the city is,
always has been, and always will be both costly and
dangerous.'19 She has pointed out that many cities are
now suffering badly as a result of failing to take nat-
ural cycles and processes into account. Los Angeles
and New York suffer poor air quality three days out
of four; Mexico City has subsided 25 feet as a result of
failing to recognize the relationship between water
and ground stability; Los Angeles and Hong Kong are
plagued by massive landslides, many of them trig-
gered by inappropriate development. The tempera-
ture in central London has been recorded as being 12
degrees fahrenheit higher than on the metropolitan
outskirts, yet at the same time within the city, the
temperature in a wooded urban park can be 9
degrees cooler than in the residential streets around
it. In programmes of urban renewal it makes sense to
take these topographical and climatic issues serious-
ly, and take advantage of some of the ways in which
we can use nature to moderate, calm and make life
cleaner and healthier. If we don't we only have to read
the novels of the American writer Don DeLillo,
notably White Noise and Underworld, to find the
most graphic and unnerving portrayals of the unreg-
ulated city in a state of environmental entropy, if not
near collapse.
Attention to both the macro- and micro-climates
of cities is now seen as essential to a more efficient and
sustainable form of urban living. However, the man-
agement of air, water, transport and waste systems in
many cities is now disastrously adrift, and has become
a principal reason why so many people wish to leave
them (and unknowingly create the same problems on
fresh territory). Spirn's call for a renewed respect for
nature in the city is rather more hard-headed and
urbane than that of many environmentalists, who still
have little understanding of the dynamics of urban
life, as we have already seen:
Nature in the city is far more than trees and gar-
dens, and weeds in sidewalk cracks and vacant
lots. It is the air we breathe, the earth we stand on,
the water we drink and excrete, and the organisms
with which we share our habitat. Nature in the
city is the powerful force that can shake the earth
and cause it to slide, heave or crumples.... Nature
in the city is an evening breeze, a corkscrew eddy
swirling down the face of a building, the sun and
the sky. It is the consequence of a complex inter-
action between the multiple purposes and activi-
ties of human beings and other living creatures
and the natural processes that govern the transfer
of energy, the movement of the air, the erosion of
the earth, and the hydrologic cycle. The city is a
part of nature. 20
The sun-worship that characterized modernism
can no longer be an organizing principle of urban
133
architecture and design in the old way, though solar
power offers both architecture and design a new
opportunity to use its vital energies in other ways.
The abuse of the planet's ecology, compounded by
the evident failures of centralized planning, suggests
that today we have all been (burnt by the sun'.21
Climatic concerns are now regarded as being central
to the planning and development of urban life. This
argument has been quite clearly articulated by
Michael Hough, who lays much blame on the pre-
scriptive tenets of the major town-planning tradi-
tions:
Attitudes and perceptions of the environment
expressed in town planning since the
Renaissance, have, with some exceptions, been
more concerned with utopian ideals than with
natural process as determinants of urban form.
Examples of cities and institutions all over the
world attest to the aesthetic and cultural
baggage of a past era, transported to hostile
climatic environments and wholly inappropriate
to them. Cheap fossil fuel, together with a
misguided sense of civic pride, or expressions of
power and wealth, has enabled the inorganic
structures of planning theory to persist and
maintain the illusion that the creation of benign
outdoor climates has little relevance to urban
development. 22
As the economist Robin Murray has written, (the
new mines, quarries and forests of the secondary
materials era' are to be found in the cities, as popula-
tions learn to recycle increasing percentages of waste
materials. 23 For Murray, recycling involves a com-
pletely transformed understanding of social reia-
tions, as the processes of waste management and
134
re-use throw into question many aspects of contem-
porary lifestyles, as may be seen from an extended
visit to cities such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen
for example. Experiments in recycling are often
accompanied by changes in attitudes and behaviour
towards consumption, particularly as the household
unit becomes a principal node of (production' in the
secondary materials economy. Such developments
provide an echo of that older connection between
(natural' and (social' dynamics in the culture of the
city.
Once again the sun's rays are brought into use as
a source of energy and power, though for collective
rather than personal rewards. A number of European
countries have already embarked upon a programme
of installing PV (photo-voltaic) tiles into the rooftops
of new housing, where appropriate. Architects now
study how to use passive solar design to produce
energy efficient buildings by integrating heating,
cooling, ventilation and lighting with (passive design'
elements, such as the siting and orientation of the
building, creating an efficient skin with appropriate
fenestration and thermal mass.
The growing use of glass atria in retail malls and
offices helps spread natural daylight within the
building or complex, and in doing so interestingly
creates a degree of ambiguity about whether such
atria are thus public or private space. There is an
interesting study to be done around the relationship
between light access and notions of public access.
The historic tradition of (ancient lights' in the UK has
offered protection to people from others seeking to
block the passage of light to existing premises or gar-
dens. The loss of light is often regarded as synony-
mous with. the loss of freedom. Legally these new
spaces are in private ownership, but this is often con-
tested through the way they are used, particularly by
young people. This ambiguity about public and pri-
vate space in the city is longstanding and part of the
history of the built urban form, particularly since the
famous maps of Rome by Giovanni-Battista Nolli
(1748), which detailed not just buildings and open
spaces, but the courtyards and internal thorough-
fares connecting them.
A recent collection of essays has explored this
very issue of the continuum between exterior and
interior public space in modern Amsterdam. One
contributor noted that 'In a number of buildings the
city's public space is, in a certain sense, continued.
The many nuances between street and building,
between outside and inside, between public and pri-
vate, make staying in the city worth the trouble.'
Another contributor observed that 'In terms of use,
exterior and public interior form a continuum;
together they are images on which people's collective
memory of Amsterdam is based.'2 The buildings of
4
the 'Golden Age' in The Netherlands were often
courtyard-based, and the difference between interior
and exterior was a matter of membrane rather than
structure, something that is certainly made clear in
the paintings of Vermeer, and, perhaps more con-
sciously, in those of Pieter de Hooch, whose paint-
ings make much play of the connections between
rooms, windows, doors and courtyards, and the con-
tinuity of the life that flows between them.
PARK LIFE
In this concern for the ecological relations of city life,
and forms of pleasure not based primarily upon con-
sumption' it may come to be seen that life outdoors,
even in the city, can be more convivial than that of
the private home. This is why the provision and
funding of parks and public spaces in the city
remains so important, for they, almost alone, cannot
be accommodated or appropriated by a market-
based leisure society, since the world of the park still
symbolizes a public domain of natural rights and
civic freedoms, one of the last enclaves in the modern
geography of collective provision and amenity.
Many parks in British cities have their origins in
common land, which has all kinds of political reso-
nances for how we think anew about public space in
the city. The commons embodies its own traditions
of ownership and rights of access (nobody and every-
body), and interest in thIs unique form is now being
revived, as it is seen to be central to current debates
in philosophy, ethics, sociobiology, environmental-
ism and politics about the nature of altruism, the
kindness of strangers, the value and limitations of
public goods, the moral economy, and the politics of
trust in the modern world.
The long, hidden history of the commons - and
its relationship to customary behaviour and coopera-
tion - also puts it intriguingly well beyond the
current antinomies of 'public' and 'private' that
dominate economic and planning policy. The com-
mons were not based on ownership, but on rights,
while customary behaviour is a form of self-policing,
based on collective agreement and the moral econo-
my of specifically local traditions and understand-
ings, rather than on rules and regulations imposed
from without or from above. Some urbanists and
environmentalists find these latent kinds of moral
codes (which are really forms of mutual aid and col-
lective self-interest based around the use of space and
local resources), an increasingly attractive model for
understanding how individuals, communities and
even nations might learn to cooperate with each
other and help limit the consumption of scarce
resources through negotiation and agreement,
putting long-term survival before short-term greed.
135
 In the meantime, however, it is difficult not to
pity the plight of the municipal park, beleaguered in
the midst of a consumer society (illus. 79). Here there
are no entry charges, few opportunities for retailing,
combined with seasonal difficulties that make cater-
ing potentially unprofitable. They are also open to all
the vicissitudes of the weather and the seasons, and
are as much a home for the homeless as a retreat for
the sun-gilded tennis-club players - a veritable labo-
ratory of the universalist mess social democracy
seems to be enmeshed in. Pity too, the overgrown,
vandalized Victorian cemetery, which, once filled,
lost its economic rationale completely (illus. 80).
Who is going to pay to maintain and care for these
great landscapes of meaning, given that the dead
have no spending power left to speak of?
These issues arise from what Pierre Bourdieu has
described as a culture in which 'the social world is
5
written in economic language.'2 How we pay for
parks, and how we manage them, is the key to the
136
even larger question as to how we pay for and man-
age public space, and the quality of life outdoors. It
may seem strange to argue that outdoor life needs
any kind of management at all. Yet in the happy
absence of authoritarian or absolutist constraints on
public behaviour, forms of regulation and, more
importantly, self-regulation, are still needed. As tra-
ditional deference to authority gives way to the more
tentative and negotiated relations of a pluralist and
cosmopolitan culture, these matters become more in
need of public debate.
For such reasons the funding, care and mainte-
nance of parks and open spaces have become crucial
issues in the politics of the modern city. In my own
discussions with park administrators and landscape
architects in cities such as Amsterdam, Barcelona,
Copenhagen, Helsinki, Paris and Stockholm, the
political issues around how to maintain and improve
parks and open spaces are now deemed critical,
though the tide seems to be turning once again in
79 The decline of the
municipal park reflected
in increased vandalism:
burnt·out park pavilion,
south London.
80 The neglected
Victorian cemetery: In a
market society, such vital
spaces have lost their
economic rationale.
favour of the revitalization and revalorization of the
public realm.
What we are witnessing therefore is a growing
complexity in the ways we think about the limits of
individualism in the modern city, about trust
between strangers, and about public space and civic
culture in a more pluralist and cosmopolitan society.
It is not surprising that these issues manifest them-
selves more sharply outdoors, particularly with
regard to opportunities for children's play.26
Attention has been drawn time and again to the cen-
tral importance of childhood play in the develop-
ment of rule-governed behaviour, notably in the
work of the child psychologist Piaget earlier in this
century. Throughout many years of close observation
of children's play activities, Piaget noted how impor-
tant questions of trust, truth-telling, the formation of
group solidarities and notions of fairness and justice
gradually emerged through children's play, leading to
the assumption that children who have few play
opportunities will have less opportunities to develop
social skills. In the UK, however, children's indepen-
dent access to outdoor play opportunities, or the
freedom to travel alone or with their peers in the city,
has been reduced markedly over the past two
decades. The outdoors itself is now often portrayed
as a place of danger for children and young people.
How then will they learn to live in an open society?
The link between the opportunities for play, for
self-expression, for childhood independence and
freedom to explore, and civic behaviour, is one that
has been neglected in recent social policy, and
demands renewed attention (illus. 81).27 For these
kinds of trust relations are much more likely to grow
out of rule-governed situations and understandings
than from more casual and informal ways of doing
things. This has always been the argument of one the
most prescient writers on urban affairs, Richard
Sennett, to the effect that high levels of civil society
and urbanity are related to knowing the rules and
137
81 The death of the playground: municipal play area, south London.
codes of public life and social relations, and that trust
and reciprocity are based on observing the rules and
conventions of public life and culture, not on famil-
iarity or intimacy.28
In such a context the urban park becomes a sig-
nificant laboratory for understanding how different
individuals and groups learn to live alongside each
other, and it is the very success of many town or city
parks in accommodating so many different needs
and interests that makes the park form one of the
most resilient cultural forms ever invented: an osten-
sibly neutral space within which a multitude of indi-
viduals and different cultural groups can explore and
express different emotions, activities and relation-
ships (illus. 82, 83). The Dutch writer Lodewijk
13 8
Baljon compares the urban park to a modern cathed-
ral: 'as a monument in the city it is an impressive
symbol of its bustling centre, but it is also a place for
tranquillity and contemplation.'29 The first point
might also be made in regard to the shopping mall -
but certainly not the latter.
Today architects, planners, landscape architects,
urbanists and environmentalists - particularly in
northern Europe - are beginning to seek some new
kind of rapprochement to the issue of public life and
public space in modern cities. At present these devel-
opments are still tentative, for the sports lobbies, the
landscape conservationists, the environmentalists, tile
urban regeneration professionals and the park work-
ers still seem to be pulling in different directions. 30
82 rai·chi in an inner·
city park, London: The
urban park becomes a
rehearsal space or public
commons, to be used by
all kinds of people for all
kinds of activities.

83 A gathering space in
the city: the sloping
lawns by the ponds on
Hampstead Heath. A
popular place for picnics,
trysts and display.
There is still little agreement as to what the function
of parks - and to a lesser extent other urban public
space - is in the new cosmopolitan, consumer-based,
but socially divided urban settings of the modern
European city.
Some of the most disturbing proposals about the
future of urban parks have come from ecologists, a
number of whom would happily see them revert to
meadowland and rough vegetation, if not turned
into productive agricultural land. Lodewijk Baljon
has already noted that
In some countries the discussion about parks in
the 1970S and 1980s has become permeated with
ecological arguments; in Germany, in particular,
there is a strong predilection for Spontan-
vegetation and Feuchtbiotope. This development
is moving in the same direction as, and is an
expression of, anarchic, anti-technological and
anti-urban tendencies: the Aesthetik von Unten.
Indigenous varieties and rough growth must
31
express the absence of any design.
Equally worrying is an over-concern for design,
for beautification or for heavy-handed security and
management. Over-regulation, including the use of
CCTV cameras already in some parks in the UK, could
violate the very spirit of the unique park-world. For
at night particularly, the urban park is also a wild
place in the city, and can embody elements of the
profane and dangerous, a place where the rules and
conventions that obtain during daylight can be
turned upside down. In this respect the city park
contains residual mythological elements of the forest,
about which Robert Pogue Harrison has written so
elegiacally:
140
If forests appear in our religions as places of
profanity, they also appear as sacred. If they
have typically been considered places of
lawlessness, they have also provided havens for
those who took up the cause of justice and
fought the law's corruptions. If they evoke
associations of danger and abandon in our
minds, they also evoke scenes of enchantment.
In other words, in the religions, mythologies
and literatures of the West, the forest appears as
a place where the logic of distinction goes astray.
Or where our subjective categories are
confounded. Or where perceptions become
promiscuous with one another, disclosing latent
dimensions of time and consciousness. In the
forest the inanimate may suddenly become
animate, the god turns into a beast, the outlaw
stands for justice, Rosalind appears as a boy, the
virtuous knight degenerates into a wild man,
the straight line forms a circle, the ordinary
gives way to the fabulous. 32
The park at night is a very different setting from
the park during the day, as is the city itself of course,
and serves many illicit pleasures and urban gratifica-
tions. 33 Furthermore we need to ask, what is the role
of the park as a social condenser, if there is no unified
'public' any more to be moulded into universal citi-
zens, despite the fact that the history of the public
park was intimately connected to the development of
a new ideal of citizenship, particularly in cities, and
the consolidation of a public domain and culture?
These are challenging issues for an urban and cos-
mopolitan democracy.

There is today a new exploration of the role that
parks and public spaces can play in the civic and cul-
turallife of European cities - tentative though it is in
some countries - in which Dutch architects and
landscape architects have made a particularly impor-
tant contribution/ As Gerrit Smienk has already
pointed out:
Architects, urban designers and landscape archi-
tects do not seem to feel at ease when confront-
ed with each other. A dialogue between
representatives of the ecological, historical and
modern movements has yet to begin. The vari-
ous countries from northern and southern
Europe do have entirely different backgrounds
and no common language, even if English is
universally understood. The problem is a lack of
focus in discussion. There are no concepts,
notions or views that everybody subscribes to.
Differences are dealt with in remarks like: (he is
an architect or she is an ecologist, or they are
Latin.'2
Yet it is clear that different designers continue to
hold very strong, and differing, views about nature
and culture in the city. The French architect Bernard
Huet has confessed to loathing large areas of grass in
the city, (Because green spaces are exactly the result of
Coda: Beneath City Skies:
New Parks in Europe
the destruction of the city by modern, functionalist
urbanisation. Landscape architecture has been called
in, like a Swiss doctor, in order to hide the sickness of
this failure.'3
Huet has helped design two of the most interest-
ing public settings in Paris: Place Stalingrad and Parc
Bercy. Place Stalingrad lies at the junction of two
major streets, rue de Flandre and rue d'Allemagne,
and the canal basin, Bassin de la Villette, where there is
a Rotunda and the remains of a wall, both designed by
Ledoux (illus. 84). This was a place that thrilled and
enchanted Guy Debord and the Situationists, who
thought the incongruous juxtaposition of Neoclassical
buildings and a harbour setting in a working-class
quarter represented the deranging mysteries of the
authentic city.4 Huet's plan at Place Stalingrad was to
create (an empty square, with absolutely no trees, no
grass, no flowers, no playground for children, no dogs
or elderly people: nothing. The city wanted to have a
small garden for children and so on. But we refused
and said we wanted to make a public space, not a place
for flowers. Flowers are in gardens, they don't belong
in the middle of the street.' Intriguingly the space
works very successfully. It is aesthetically quite formal,
yet neutral, and does act as a meeting-place and cross-
ing-point for the two distinct communities that lie on
both sides of it, one largely immigrant, the other
mostly indigenous French.
141
84 Place Stalingrad, Paris: ' ... a public space, not a place for flowers'.
Architect: Bernard Huet. Completed 1989.
Parc Bercy (1993-7) is a 13-hectare park on the
site of the old wine market next to the Seine (illus. 85,
86). Again it is very formally laid out with a chess-
board of green squares for picnicking and games,
along with nine different flower-gardens. There is a
separate 'romantic garden' on the other side of the
rue de Dijon, connected by a handsome pedestrian
bridge. In the centre of the park one of the old build-
ings has been preserved, and is now used as a garden-
ing advice centre. It is a beautiful park, and very
popular, and has given the area a much needed lift,
along with Frank Gehry's American Centre in rues
Pommard and de Bercy. Both Place Stalingrad and
Parc Bercy have been designed to create 'places of
142
memory', with respect paid to the history of the site
and incorporating elements of what has been left
from the past.
In Catalonia, the architect Andreu Arriola has
insisted that in Barcelona's great programme of parks
and public spaces, stimulated by the Olympic Games,
'public spaces in the city have nothing to do with
nature. The actual sites (for development) that we
find in Barcelona look more like wasteland than
nature.'5 Given that most of the sites to be used had
been previously occupied, again the issue of respect-
ing memory has been crucial (illus. 87). Fossar de les
Moreres is a new tiny plaza on the site of what had
once been a graveyard for victims who fought for the
85 Parc Bercy, Paris,
created on the site of the
old Bercy wine market.
Frank Gehry's American
Centre (1994) is in the
background. Architects:
Bernard Huet, Maryleme
Ferrand, Jean·Pierre
Feugas, Bernard Le Ray,
lan Le Caisne and
Philippe Raguin.
Constructed 1993-7.

86 Parc Bercy: the main

lawn, compartmentalized
for picnics and games.
87 Parc de l'Espanya Industriel, Barcelona: Many of Barcelona's new generation of public
spaces, the plaza dura, make use of hard surfaces and tough materials. Architect: Petia
Ganchegui and Rius. Constructed in the 1980s,

independence of Catalonia in the war of 1714. The
only materials used were brick and polished red
granite, the latter as 'a memory to the blood of
heroes, but also as a private joke, because granite is
red and the same stone as the Lenin Tomb in
Moscow'. Another project recently undertaken by
Arriola is Sector 'Esperit Sant' on a peripheral site left
over after urban construction, and at the meeting-
point of three different municipalities. As with Huet's
Place Stalingrad, the principal aim of the new space is
to provide a meeting-place for three different com-
munities, or in Arriola's words, a 'multifunctional
social condenser'.
The scale of intervention to create these new
public spaces in Barcelona is unprecedented in any
European city in the twentieth century. Between
1981 and 1997 over 140 urban space projects had
been completed, principally in the form of plazas,
parks and streets. The intellectual and aesthetic
powerhouse for this programme was the School of
Architecture at the University of Barcelona, and in
particular the Urban Planning Laboratory estab-
lished there. Standardized planning formats were
dispensed with, and instead the programme was
carried out as a highly differentiated, highly local-
ized set of developments, many of them small-scale

144
and hard-surfaced in the form of the plaza dura.
These were designed to be outdoor living-rooms,
not gardens, involving a 'public architecture of inti-
macy' one that brings people together in an experi-
ence of confidence and trust'. 6 The design
intelligentsia in Barcelona were in agreement that
the city 'belonged to the tradition of no trees ... and
scepticism [was] expressed about the image of trees
in the presentation of [an] emphatically public
plaza'.7
Meanwhile landscape architects in the Nether-
lands continue to try to reconcile modern design aes-
thetics with environmental concerns. David Louwerse
believes that 'the vacuum left by the modernists has
been occupied by ecologists ... who are seducing the
public with images of a new Arcadia, and artists, the
pre-eminent creators of images. The park, however,
is a challenge for landscape architecture, and land-
scape architects ought to reclaim the design of a
meaning again.'8 Another Dutch landscape architect,
Clemens Steenbergen, claims that it is time to
reassert both the meaning and ecological value of
landscape in the city:
Modern architecture experimented with discon-
necting topography and form. The landscape
became a neutral tableau, reduced to its monu-
mental aspects. The plan was projected onto this
as an autonomous intervention. The city of
today is becoming a tapestry of fragments. The
landscape is being deformed, the relationship
between urban structure and the landscape has
been lost... We can try to expose once again the
landscape origins of the city.9
In some cities the denial of nature continues,
while in others ecological imperatives are now in
command. However, architects such as Andreu
Arriola still insist on the continuing difference
between Nordic and Latin approaches to these ques-
tions, typifyi?g the Nordic approach as being
Functionalist, increasingly ecological, but more inter-
ested in the urban fringes and suburbs, while Latin
cultures remain much more concerned with the civic
culture of the city centres, the piazzas and squares, the
pavement cafes and the evening passeggiata.
These polarities are being increasingly chal-
lenged throughout Europe, city by city. Each major
conurbation now appears to be seeking its own bal-
ance between the economic, social and environmen-
tal benefits which accrue from different regimes of
open space provision. One of the most interesting
European urban initiatives in recent decades, and
one which does in some way provide a natural con-
nection between the modernizing, public culture
ethos of the social democratic era with today's new
urban culture based around lifestyle, identity and
consumption, is the result of the work of Jan Gehl,
together with Lars Gemz0e, in Copenhagen. Both lO
are based at the School of Architecture in the Royal
Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where Gehl is Head of
the Urban Design Department. As with Barcelona,
Copenhagen has benefited greatly from having this
close academic involvement in public policy and
design. Gehl and GemZ0e have studied the changes
made to the life of Copenhagen's city centre since the
pedestrianization of Str0get, the city's principal
shopping thoroughfare in 1962. Since that date the
city authorities have made a conscious decision to
deter car use and to create a more open-air, pedestrian
and cafe culture (illus. 88). They claim that 'Whereas
city centres in many other places in the world have
deteriorated over the years - becoming noisy, heavily
trafficked places that are rather unpleasant and at
145
88 Nyhavn, Copenhagen: once the redundant harbour, now the centre of
Copenhagen's tourist and leisure economy. Pedestrianized 1980, renovated 1996.

times frightening to be in - Copenhagen has fol-
lowed a different path. The city centre has improved
year by year, becoming more used and appreciated.'
Nearly 40 years after the initial experiment, the
city centre has six times as many car-free areas as it
did when the project started, cycling increased by 65
per cent between 1970 and 1995 and the number of
people who spend time in the streets and squares of
the city centre - rather than just passing through
them - has increased by 350 per cent. Between 1986
and 1995 the number of outdoor cafes in the city
centre almost doubled, as did the number of outside
cafe seats on offer. In answer to the original criti-
cisms of the pedestrianization scheme, with newspa-
pers declaring that 'we are Danes, not Italians', the
experiment has been justly regarded as a great suc-
cess, and has become an inspiration for many other
cities.
Copenhagen enjoys a milder micro-climate than
most northern cities, having kept much of its
medieval street plan and tradition of low building
heights, which have helped reduce wind and shade,
and created more sun-traps in the city. This remark-
able experiment in urban design was simultaneously
paralleled by experiments in social and cultural
processes. Proposed attempts to locate new university
facilities outside the city were strongly resisted, since
it was felt that students add vitality to the urban
scene. Also licensing and planning laws were relaxed
with regard to eating and drinking on the street. As
Gehl and GemZ0e conclude: 'Urban patterns that
were once the exclusive domain of Southern Europe
have moved north, acquiring a special character in
Denmark due to the Danish fondness for sun and
summer.'ll
However, pedestrianization alone is a fairly blunt
instrument to use in the remaking of a public and
civic culture, and needs to be complemented by
sophisticated cultural and social programmes, as well
as high standards of urban design. A great success in
Copenhagen, for precisely these reasons, in some
other European cities pedestrianization has not pro-
duced the same benefits, being badly conceived,
insensitive to the social and cultural issues, and
cheaply executed. The replication of 'good practice'
from one city to another, and more so when it is also
from one country to another, is fraught with risk.
Every programme of civic and environmental renew-
al has to start from the specificities of local condi-
tions and opportunities, even as it seeks to learn from
success elsewhere.
Despite continuing funding problems in the
management and maintenance of mainstream open-
space provision, new parks and public spaces are still
being designed and constructed in many European
cities today. In Paris, apart from Parc Bercy and Place
Stalingrad, in recent years the parks department, La
Direction des Parcs, Jardins et Espaces Vertes, has
overseen the development of Parc de la Villette
(Bernard Tschumi, 1987-91) and Parc AnQre-Citroen
(Viguier, Jodry, Provost, Berger and Clement
1988-95), both of which have attracted international
attention (illus. 89, 90). In Paris the creation of large
new parks has been seen as central to the process or
urban renewal, though ecological concerns have often
taken second place to aesthetic or social concerns.
These parks are enormously popular and are all
significant new landmarks to the real and symbolic
landscape of Paris as an international city. Parc de la
Villette is the most controversial as it has little grass
or areas where one might find sanctuary or solitude
(other than the bamboo garden), and Tschumi was
insistent that it is 'a 21st century park, devoted to
activity rather than the rest and relaxation which
were the goals of18th and 19th century parks'. As such
it works, and makes an intriguing setting for the Cite
des Sciences et de l'Industrie, and a large theatre and
concert hall. The famous 30 red follies are precisely
that - follies, which give a Constructivist feel to the
park. There is something of the air of a permanent
fairground about the site, with spectacular play
structures for children, as well as traditional merry-
go-rounds (illus. 91).
In Germany some of the most well-known new
park developments have taken the form of large-scale
rehabilitation of ex-industrial sites with a greater
emphasis on ecological renewal, such as the Emscher
Park near Duisburg in north Germany, a 23o-hectare
former steelworks. Rather than level the site, and in
doing so erase all memory of the places and people
that had once lived and worked there (as has hap-
pened in London's Docklands and at a number of
other European industrial or dockside sites), the
designers of the park, Peter Latz & Partners, decided
to retain a large part of the former industrial build-
ings and infrastructure. The old concrete water
purification tanks have been converted into walled
gardens, and adults and children are allowed to climb
the ladders and gangways of the old buildings for the
views, as one might have elsewhere climbed hills and
monuments. This brave (post-modern?) decision to
weave a natural park into the carapaces and skeletons
147
89 Parc Andre·Citroen, Paris: one 01 seven theme gardens. Architects/landscape architects: Jean·Paul Viguier, Jean·
Franc;ois Jodry, Alain Provost, Patrick Berger and Gilles Clement. Constructed 1988-95.

90 Parc Andre-Citroen: greenhouses and peristyle lountains.

91 Dragon Slide in Parc de la Villette, Paris. Master·planner/ architect: Bernard Tschumi.
Constructed 1987-91.
92 Museumpark, Rotterdam: the orchard of apple trees with whitewashed trunks planted in a bed of sea·
shells. Architect: Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Completed 1994.

of the remains of heavy industry has proved popular
with both visitors and local residents, who seem to
have found ghosts in these old machines, perhaps
dryads and naiads too. The ideas and strategies
developed at Emscher Park are now being applied to
industrial sites in the former East Germany.
In Amsterdam a new park is planned to revive
the Westergasfabriek site, formerly the western gas-
works, again keeping many of the original buildings.
While the main landscaping has yet to happen, by
1996 sixteen of the buildings had been leased out to
various theatre, film and performance groups. Large-
scale events have been held in the main gas-holder,
including opera, circus, orchestral concerts, corpo-
rate events and techno parties. Karl Heinz
Stockhausen held the world premiere of his
Helicopter String Quartet there. In the long term the
park will fulfil both open space and 'cultural district'
functions: echoes of the original pleasure gardens.
Two new open spaces in Rotterdam have attracted
a lot of interest: the Museumpark by Rem Koolhaas
and colleagues at OMA (illus. 92), and Adriaan Geuze's
Schoubergplein. The Museumpark, completed in 1994,
has created three open-air spaces linking the city cen-
tre with Rotterdam's Central Park, starting outside
the Netherlands Institute for Architecture, with an
orchard of apple trees planted on a diagonal grid in a
field of white gravel and sea-shells. The trunks of the

150
93 Boat shelter at the waterfront park on Islands Brygge, Copenhagen. Architects: Annelise Bramsnaes and Poul
Jensen. Under construction 1998-2000.
apple trees are whitewashed. This space is separated
from the next by a mirror wall, which opens onto a
raised podium covered in tarmac and fitted out with
an electrical grid and other services to receive travel-
ling shows, circuses and live performances. Here local
children often play ball-games. This is followed by a
number of small patios which 'assert the park condi-
tion' with black bamboo and a curtain of monumental
and weeping sequoias. In the last section the trees of
the old park were retained, and a river of large white
pebbles and blue-glass rocks 'flows' into a real pond.
Within a 12-hectare site the design addresses, success-
fully as far as one can tell from just one visit, both
serenity and active delight, movement and stillness,
and acts as both a buffer zone and connector between
two different parts of the city.
In Copenhagen a new park is being designed by
Annelise Bramsnaes and Poul Jensen together with
Copenhagen's parks department on the site of a piece
of ex-industrial waterfront close to the city centre, and
takes the form of an open terrace south of the
Langebro Bridge in front of the massive row of fac;:ades
of the apartment blocks of Islands Brygge (illus. 93).
Like the Museumpark in Rotterdam it is a long, nar-
row corridor of space, separated into zones or rooms,
with sunbathing areas, barbecue areas, cafes and pub-
lic seating, as well as a continuous avenue of trees sep-
arating the park from the road, and other areas of
94 Mile End Park. east London: the Green Bridge connecting north and south over the main trunk road.
Architect: Piers Gough. Under construction 1999·2000.
flower, bush and tree planting. Further north m
Helsinki, a new park is being built at Toolonlahti Bay
called The Secret Garden, again another linked set of
different gardens - a garden of scents, a social garden,
a romantic garden, a garden of innocence, a garden of
poets and an urban topiary garden. Such assemblages
of different types oflandscape types represent to some
degree a return to the Victorian English civic park,
with its separate rooms for different activities. This is
also true of one of the UK's very few new park devel-
opments, the Mile End Park in London's East End.
This also is a linear park, containing children's parks,
an ecology park, an art park, a sports park and a ter-
race garden, though one of its major features is a green
15 2
bridge designed by the architect Piers Gough, which
traverses a main road to link the two ends of the park
together. The area was planted with mature trees as
soon as the bridge was finished (illus. 94).
Many of the older European parks remain enor-
mously popular, though few share the same origins
as the Assistens Kirkegard, Copenhagen's principal
cemetery, which is actively promoted now as a public
open space for quiet reflection and recreation. It is
not uncommon for individuals and groups to take
picnics there, or to sunbathe and read. The cemetery
covers about 20 hectares and has been the burial
place of more than a quarter of a million people in
the past 200 years, including S0ren Kierkegaard,
95 Assistens Cemetery, Copenhagen: Ben Webster's headstone. The cemetery is a popular place for picnics
and the burial place of many famous people.
Hans Christian Andersen, Niels Bohr, and the
American jazz musicians Kenny Drew and Ben
Webster (illus. 95). While a significant part of the
cemetery retains the form of traditional walled burial
grounds, a large section of it has been landscaped
and planted with shrubs and trees to provide more
open green space. One assumes that a certain
amount of reburial has gone on to achieve this (just
as the remains in many of London's historic cemeter-
ies and churchyards were removed and reburied fur-
ther out of the city in the nineteenth century). As a
result, in modern Copenhagen, the Assistens
Kirkegard is one of the city's most popular public
open spaces, even though it is still used for burials.
This intriguing overlay between life and death,
past and present, memory and recreation, adds
something quite special to the palette of open space
that Copenhagen offers to those who live there and
those who visit. But these qualities inhere to some
degree in nearly all open spaces, particularly where
there are trees, watercourses and other enduring
signs of that pre-historic world which came before
the rise of cities. I am still slightly unnerved when
visiting Helsinki and Stockholm, for example, to
come across large and forbidding outcrops of granite
bedrock and rough scrub in among the shopping
153
streets and elegant boulevards, as though the
primeval world was still there waiting to come into
its own again. This is the almost hallucinatory power
of nature in the city, and a reminder too that the
summer park, with its picnics, games, cartwheels,
dizzying scents and mid-afternoon lethargies, in turn
will become the setting for the melancholy and
decompository traces of the late-autumnal Sunday.
In the middle of the bustling city the park reminds us
of other rhythms and destinies. It is a vegetable world
that is both a peopled Arcadia and primal, sovereign
nature. We go into the park as children and come out
haunted by the wisdom of old age.
In one of his early essays, John Berger, writing
about a walk in the country, observed that (The field
that you are standing before appears to have the same
proportions as your own life'. In the same spirit we
often feel that when we walk through the city, with its
streets, squares, parks and open spaces, we are walking
through our life in ways that cannot happen when we
are indoors. When outdoors nothing stands between
us and the world, between our body and the elements,
between the pavement and the sky. When we meet
other people in this outdoor world, we are more likely
to meet them as free agents and autonomous individ-
uals than we might do in the graded and contractual
world of institutional or commercial life. The nine-
teenth-century city of Baudelaire, the early twentieth-
century city of Benjamin, and the post-war city of the
Situationists was always the city of the walker. The
park and the street give us our freedom, and the build-
ings' too frequently, take it away.

154

THE BODY AND THE CITY: AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
1 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A. M.
Sheridan (London, 1976), p. 34. In these rhapsodic
lines, Foucault is paraphrasing the ideas of the
Girondist doctor Lanthenas and his book De
['Influence de la liberte sur la sante (1792).
2 Martin Knuijt et al., eds, Modern Park Design: Recent
Trends (Bussum, 1995), p. 31.
3 Paul Driver, 'Parenthesis on Parks', in Manchester
Pieces (London, 1996), pp. 155-84. This essay is one of
the most moving celebrations of the value of the
urban park that I have read.
4 G. E. Kidder Smith, The New Architecture in Europe
(London, 1962), p. 8.
5 Andrew Saint, Towards a Social Architecture: The Role
of School-Building in Post- War England (New Haven
and London, 1987), p. viii.
6 Notably in the following studies and reports: Ken
Worpole, Towns for People (Milton Keynes, 1994); Liz
Greenhalgh and Ken Worpole, Park Life: Urban Parks
and Social Renewal (London, 1995); Liz Greenhalgh
and Ken Worpole, People, Parks and Cities (London,
1996); Ken Worpole and Liz Greenhalgh, The Richness
of Cities: Urban Policy in a New Landscape: Final
Report (London, 1999).
7 Alison Ravetz with Richard Turkington, The Place of
Home: English Domestic Environments 1914-2000
(London, 1995), p. 1.
8 See Liz Greenhalgh and Ken Worpole, The Freedom of
the City (London, 1996).
9 Ibid, p. 18.
References
10 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge,
1994), p. 3·
11 This estimate comes from a paper prepared by the
London Ecology Unit, London's Natural Areas,
published on 23 September 1995.
12 Christopher Alexander, cited in Town and Country
Parks (London, 1999), p. 101.
13 Fran<;ois Maspero, Roissy Express: A Journey through
the Paris Suburbs, with photographs by Anaik Frantz
(London, 1994), p. 16.
14 For further details of the Dunfermline Plan, see
Thomas H. Mawson, The Life and Work ofan English
Landscape Architect (London, 1927), in which there are
frequent references to his work with Geddes.
15 Kidder Smith, New Architecture in Europe, p. 195.
16 Dealt with sympathetically in Gillian Darley, Villages
of Vision (London, 1975), including references to
earlier religious experimental communities, such as
those established by the German Protestant Moravians
in the mid-eighteenth century.
17 Charles Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture
(London, 1985), p. 30.
18 Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and
Control in the Origin ofModern Building Types
(London, 1993), p. 26.
19 Karen A. Franck and Lynda H. Schneekloth, eds,
Ordering Space: Types in Architecture and Design (New
York, 1994), p. 11. This provocative and thoughtful
collection of essays, ranging from neo-Marxist to
retro-Jungian, repays close reading.
155
20 See Fran<;ois Penz and Maureen Thomas, eds, Cinema
and Architecture (London, 1997). This is an excellent
introduction to the subject, especially Helmut
Weihsmann's essay, 'The City in Twilight: Charting the
Genre of the "City Film", 1900-1930'.
21 Ibid, p. 12.
22 See Ken Worpole, 'Mother to Legend (or Going
Underground): The London Novel', in Ian A. Bell, ed.,
Peripheral Visions: Images ofNationhood in
Contemporary British Fiction (Cardiff, 1995), pp.
181-94
23 See Ken Worpole, 'Time and the City', Town and
Country Planning [London], xLvn/3 (April 1998), pp.
114-15.
24 This stirring endorsement of the physiological and
psychological vitalism of street life comes from Peter
Jukes's excellent A Shout in the Street: The Modern City
(London, 1990), p. 14.
25 See especially Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The
Perspective ofExperience (London, 1977), as well as
Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore, Body,
Memory, and Architecture (New Haven, 1977). More
recently, Richard Sennett has dealt with these issues in
stimulating and provocative ways in Flesh and Stone:
The Body and the City in Western Civilisation
(London, 1994). See also the first essay in Nigel Thrift,
Spatial Formations (London, 1996), which reviews
twentieth-century philosophical concerns to re-situate
the body at the centre of everyday practice, and
therefore of knowledge.
HERE COMES THE SUN: PORT SUNLIGHT, TOWN
PLANNING AND THE NEW LIFE
1 See Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in
Nineteenth-century England (London, 1979).
2 Fiona MacCarthy, The Simple Life: C. R. Ashbee in the
Cotswolds (London, 1988), p. 10.
3 Quoted in Edward Hubbard and A. Shippobottom, A
Guide to Port Sunlight (Liverpool, 1988), p. 49.
4 Ian Jack, Before the Oil Ran Out: Britain in the Brutal
Years (London, 1997), p. 4.
5 Muthesius, quoted in Anthony Sutcliffe, Towards the
Planned City: Germany, Britain, the United States,
France, 1780-1914 (Oxford, 1981), p. 47.
6 Ibid., p. 114.
7 Ian Boyd Whyte, Bruno Taut and the Architecture of
Activism (Cambridge, 1982), p. 48.
8 Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth
(Cambridge, MA, 1992), esp. chap. 5.
9 Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City, p. 169.
10 For an account of the relationship between Arts and
Crafts architecture and its influence throughout the
world, see Peter Davey, Arts & Crafts Architecture
(London, 1995), an invaluable source of information.
11 Ibid., p. 182.
12 Ibid., p. 186.
13 This point is made forcibly in MacCarthy's study of
Ashbee, The Simple Life. It is also made by Darley in
Villages of Vision; Darley also suggests that 'the
cloaking of working class housing in a middle class
disguise ... [made it] obvious how influential the
architecture of the small house was becoming' (p. 75).
14 Quoted in Frank Jackson, Sir Raymond Unwin:
Architect, Planner and Visionary (London, 1985), p. 143.
15 Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City (London,
1991), p. 9·
16 William Morris, 'News from Nowhere', in Three Works
by William Morris, ed. A. L. Morton (London, 1968),
P·377·
17 Wilson, Sphinx in the City, p. 7.
18 I am very grateful to Colin Ward for furnishing me
with this attributed sentiment, particularly as we
probably stand on opposite sides of the fence on this
issue.
19 Tafuri, Sphere and the Labyrinth, p. 153.
20 Kirmo Mikkola, Architecture in Finland in the 20th
Century (Humari, 1981), p. 20.
21 Lewis Mumford, Introductory essay in Ebenezer
Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow (London, 1946),
P·29·
22 MacCarthy, The Simple Life, p. 9.
23 Stephen Yeo, 'A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in
Britain, 1883-1896', History Workshop Journal, 4
(Autumn 1977), pp. 5-56.
24 MacCarthy, The Simple Life, p. 13.
25 Cited in Sheila Rowbotham, Socialism and the New Life:
The Personal and Sexual Politics ofEdward Carpenter
and Havelock Ellis (London, 1977), pp. 127-8.
26 Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and
City Planner (London, 1993), p. 22.
27 This suggestion comes from Maristella Casciato,
(Notes on the Historiography of Modernism', in Jan
Molema, The New Movement in the Netherlands,
192 4-1936 (Rotterdam, 1996), p. 7.
28 See the entry on the International Style in Guy Julier,
Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Design and Designers
(London, 1997), pp. 105-6.
29 See Allan Pred, Recognising European Modernities
(London, 1995), which devotes several chapters to the
wider impact of the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930.
30 Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City, p. 165.
31 Ibid., p. 169.
32 Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in
Victorian Britain (London, 1983), p. 72.
33 See Andrew Lee, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in
European and American Thought, 1820-1940
(Manchester, 1985).
34 Wohl, Endangered Lives, p. 331.
35 Ibid., p. 334·
36 Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western
Culture (London, 1998), esp. chap. 9, (Degeneration
and Dissidence'.
37 Meller, Patrick Geddes, p. 23; a view still alive and well,
and promoted by Tony Blair, Leader of the Labour
Party and Prime Minister, who in an interview with
Country Life (26 September 1996) stated that 'I
wouldn't live in a big city if I could help it, I would
live in the country ... Bringing up children in the
country is a million times better than in towns.' This
from the leader of a political party that gathers most
of its support from one of the most thoroughly - and
earliest - urbanized countries in the world.
38 Ibid, pp. 22-3.
39 I am grateful to Rodney Mace for a number of
references which led to me taking a rather more
critical view of Geddes, Morris and others around
issues of race and purity.
40 This is one of the principal arguments made by Anna
Bramwell in her Ecology in the Twentieth Century
(New Haven and London, 1989).
41 H. E. Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, 1870-1914
(London, 1976), p. 119.
42 Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, p. 18.
43 Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (Harmondsworth, 1982),
p.21.
44 Meller, Patrick Geddes, p. 197.
2 OUR NORTHERN HEARTS: ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN
AND THE ART OF RIGHT LIVING
1 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ed. J. G. Links
(London, 196o), p. 157.
2 Gillian Naylor, The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study
ofIts Sources, Ideals and Influence in Design Theory
(London, 1990), p. 7.
3 I am grateful to Richard Hill for pointing out that
Lethaby later became keen to distance himself from
the Gothic and Protestant tradition, studying
Byzantine architecture and writing a book entitled
Architecture, Mysticism and Myth.
4 W. R. Lethaby, Form in Civilisation: Collected Papers on
Art and Labour, with a foreword by Lewis Mumford
(Oxford, 1957), p. xii.
5 Mumford, in Lethaby, Form in Civilisation, p. xii. I
was reminded of Mumford's enthusiasm for Lethaby's
work and writings by David Matless in his recent
Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998). Matless
makes the original and important point that in the
1920S and (30S in Britain, rural interests, landscape
interests, support for centralized planning and
modernity often went hand in hand.
6 Frank Whitford, Bauhaus (London, 1988), pp. 19-22.
7 This is the view expressed by William J. R. Curtis in
157
 Modern Architecture since 1900 (London, 1996), p. 245.
8 Peter Davey, Arts and Crafts Architecture (London,
1995), p. 219.
9 See the entry on Art Nouveau in Guy Julier, Dictionary
of Twentieth-Century Design and Designers (London,
1997), p. 24·
10 Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker, The Beach: The
History ofParadise on Earth (London, 1998), p. 207.
11 Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of
the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (London, 1987), esp.
chap. 4, 'The "English Way of Life"?', pp. 41-80.
12 See the Arts Council of Great Britain's Landscape in
Britain, 1850-1950, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery
(London, 1983).
13 Alison Ravetz and Richard Turkington, The Place of
Home (London, 1995), p. 19.
14 Wiener, English Culture, esp. chap. 4, 'The "English
Way of Life"?', pp. 41-80.
15 Colin Ward and Dennis Hardy, Goodnight Campers!
The History of the British Holiday Camp (London,
1986), p. 14.
16 Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a
Global Culture (London, 1984), pp. 106-13. This is in
every way an excellent synthesis of social, architectural
and economic history.
17 Ibid., p. 113.
18 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical
History (London, 198o), p. 118.
19 Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century
(New Haven and London, 1989), p. 80.
20 Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature
and Conservatism between the Wars (London, 1991),
pp. 13-19. Light also discusses the longstanding
conservative tradition within feminism, as well as
modernism.
21 Eve Blau, The Architecture ofRed Vienna 1919-1934
(Cambridge, MA, 1999). Chapter 3, 'Learning to Live',
is particularly good on Loos and the 'wild settlements',
but the entire book is an exemplary study of the inter-
relationship between social movements, national
politics and architectural practices.
22 Oliver Coburn, Youth Hostel Story (London, 1950),
P·9·
23 See Lucy Jaffe's introduction to Our Story: 50 Years
under Canvas with Forest School Camps (Leighton
Buzzard, 1998).
24 Rupert Hedger, Obituary of Ronald Brand, The
Independent (10 December 1998). Brand was a follower
of Westlake, and the founder of the Forest School
Camps.
25 Alfred Loos, 'Ornament and Crime' [1908], in Ulrich
Conrads, ed., Programs and Manifestos on 20th-century
Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1994), p. 19.
26 Both of these recollections are from Jaffe, Our Story,
p. 11 and p. 17.
27 Matless, Landscape and Englishness, p. 62.
28 Ibid., p. 250.
29 Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century, p. 39.
30 Hans Suren, Man and Sunlight, with a Foreword by C.
W. Saleeby (Slough, 1927).
31 Ibid., p. v.
32 Ibid., p. 70.
33 Linda Bryer, Below the Magic Mountain: A Social
History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-Century Britain
(Oxford, 1988), p. 148.
34 A feature article on Spielplatz by Sarah Wise ('Carry
on Camping') appeared in The Observer Magazine (26
September 1999), pp. 21-4·
35 John Willett, The New Sobriety 1917-1933: Art and
Politics in the Weimar Period (London, 1982), p. 121.
36 Stephen Spender, World Within World (London, 1977),
P· 107·
37 Matless, Landscape and Englishness, p. 87.
38 Ward and Hardy, Goodnight Campers!, p. 49.
39 Colin Ward, 'Skinny Dipping', New Statesman &
Society (28 August 1990), p. 23.
40 The social history of British nudism was strikingly
captured in the 'Witness' programme Acting Natural,
broadcast on ITV on 23 November 1998. A feature
article by Jonathan Margolis, 'Dark Side of Fresh Air
Utopians' (The Guardian, 12 June 1999), also looked at
contemporary nudist movements in the UK and their
 troubled institutional and ideological past.
41 Lencek and Bosker, The Beach, p. 210.
42 Ibid., p. 210.
43 Ian Traynor, 'Cold War over Sunshine Strip', The
Guardian (21 July 1999), p. 4.
44 Richard Weston, Alvar Aalto (London, 1995), p. 50.
45 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (London, 1983).
3 LIVE OUT OF DOORS AS MUCH AS YOU CAN: THE
ARCHITECTURE OF PUBLIC HEALTH
1 Linda Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain: A Social
History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-Century Britain
(Oxford, 1988), p. 11.
2 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (London,
1997), p. 422.
3 Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain, p. 32.
4 Lawrence Weaver, 'Cottages: Their Planning, Design
and Materials' (1926), cited in Gillian Darley) Peter
Hall and David Lock) Tomorrow's New Communities
(York, 1991), p. 14.
5 Porter, The Greatest Benefit) p. 607.
6 E. Stevinson, The Open-Air Nursery School (London)
1923), p. 17·
7 See Witold Rybczynski, The Most Beautiful House in
the World (London, 1990), chap. 2, 'The Building
Game', for a fuller account of the relationship between
construction toys and architecture.
8 William Craft Brumfield, The Origins ofModernism in
Russian Architecture (Berkeley) CA) 1991) p. 97.
9 Andrew Saint) Towards a Social Architecture (London)
1987) p. 39·
10 Cited in ibid., p. 40.
11 G. E. Kidder Smith) The New Architecture ofEurope
(London) 1962) p. 35.
12 For a detailed study of the 'pavilion plan' layout of
hospital architecture from the eighteenth century
onwards) see Adrian Forty) 'The Modern Hospital in
England and France: The Social and Medical Uses of
Architecture') in Anthony D. King) ed., Buildings and
Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built
Environment (London, 1980), pp. 61-93.
13 Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain) p. 46.
14 Elizabeth Robinson) Twentieth-Century Buildings in
Hackney (London) 1999) p. 56.
15 Jan Molema, The New Movement in The Netherlands,
1924-1936 (Rotterdam, 1996) p. 20.
16 Ibid., p. 1I.
17 Malcolm Quantrill) Alvar Aalto: A Critical Study
(London) 1983), p. 5I.
18 Ibid.) p. 240.
19 Cited in Jan Woudstra) 'Detailing and Materials of
Outdoor Space: The Scandinavian Example', in Jan
Birksted, ed.) Relating Architecture to Landscape
(London, 1999), p. 63.
20 Robinson, Twentieth-Century Buildings in Hackney)
pp. 51-3·
21 Malcolm Reading and Peter Coe) Lubetkin and Tecton:
An Architectural Study (London, 1992) p. 15.
22 Colin Ward) 'Peckham Recollected', Anarchy) 60
(February 1966), pp. 52-64.
23 Bruno Taut) 'Daybreak' [1921]) in Ulrich Conrads) ed.)
Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture
(Cambridge, MA) 1994) p. 63.
24 For an excellent technical description of the building)
see David Cottam's essay on it in David Cottam) ed.)
Sir Owen Williams, 1890-1969, Works III (London,
1986) pp. 95-100.
25 Innes H. Pearse and Lucy H. Crocker, The Peckham
Experiment: A Study in the Living Structure of Society
(London) 1943) p. 68.
26 Kenneth Frampton has an excellent chapter) 'The
Glass Chain: European Architectural Expressionism')
in his Modern Architecture: A Critical History
(London, 1980). The poem is quoted in full in Ian
Boyd Whyte) Bruno Taut and the Architecture of
Activism (Cambridge) 1982), p. 36. This is presumably
Boyd Whyte's translation, which is not of course
literal.
27 Le Corbusier, 'Five Points towards a New Architecture'
(1926) in Conrads) ed., Programs and Manifestoes)
p.100.
159
28 For a fine contemporary book on this subject, see
Raymond McGrath and A. C. Frost, Glass in
Architecture and Design (London, 1935), which
contains many evocative black-and-white photographs
of European glass architecture in this period.
29 Michael Spens, Viipuri Library, 1927-1935: Alvar Aalto
(London, 1994), p. 70.
30 See Herve Martin, Guide to Modern Architecture in
Paris (Paris, 1996), p. 53.
31 From a lecture by Sarah Wigglesworth, 'Maison De
Verre: Sections Through an In-Vitro Conception',
given at the Architectural Association, London, 22
October 1997.
32 Allan, Berthold Lubetkin, p. 333.
33 Ibid., p. 334.
4 BRING THE LANDSCAPE INTO THE HOUSE:
HOUSING FOR THE NEW SOCIETY
1 Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in
Victorian Britain (London, 1983), p. 295.
2 Leonardo Benevelo, The European City (Oxford, 1993),
p.186.
3 Roy Porter, London: A Social History (London, 1994),
P·3 0 9·
4 Nancy Stieber, Housing Design and Society in
Amsterdam: Reconfiguring Urban Order and Identity,
1900-1920 (Chicago, 1998), p. 1.
5 Ibid., p. 9·
6 Paul Groenendijk and Piet Vollaard, Guide to Modern
Architecture in Amsterdam (Rotterdam, 1996), p. 31.
7 This visit by Wright to Ashbee is described in Gillian
Naylor, The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study ofIts
Sources, Ideals and Influence in Design Theory
(London, 1990), p. 175.
8 The influence of Frank Lloyd Wright's drawings in
Holland is the subject of a separate chapter, 'Holland:
Berlage and Attitudes to Wright', in Reyner Banham,
Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London,
1975), pp. 138-47·
9 Cited in William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture
160
since 1900 (London, 1996), p. 246.
10 Kate Connolly, 'Making Light of Women's Work', The
Guardian (2 March 1998), p. 4.
11 Ibid.
12 Frank Whitford, Bauhaus (London, 1988), p. 144.
13 John Willett, The New Sobriety, 1917-1933: Art and
Politics in the Weimar Period (London, 1982), p. 125.
14 Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in
Germany 1918-1945 (Cambridge, MA, 1968), p. 65.
15 This example is given in J. R. Gold, The Experience of
Modernism: Modern Architects and the Future City,
1928-1953 (London, 1997), p. 51.
16 Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg, eds,
The Weimer Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, CA, 1994), p. 455.
17 Marie-Elisabeth Liiders, 'A Construction, Not a
Dwelling', in Kaes, Jay and Dimendberg, eds, The
Weimar Republic, pp. 468-9.
18 Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth
(Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 208.
19 Willett, The New Sobriety, p. 132.
20 Malcolm Reading and Peter Coe, Lubetkin and Tecton:
An Architectural Study (London, 1992), p. 135.
21 Louise Nystrom, Living in Sweden - Between Tradition
and Vision (Karlskrona, 1996), p. 23.
22 Magnus Andersson, Stockholm's Annual Rings
(Stockholm, 1997), p. 143.
23 David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London,
1998), p. 241.
24 Alison Ravetz and Richard Turkington, The Place of
Home (London, 1995), p. 13.
25 Elizabeth Denby, Europe Re-housed (London, 1938),
p. 257. I am very grateful to Gillian Darley for first
alerting me to the importance of Denby as both
architect and writer in this period.
26 Helen Meller, Towns, Plans and Society in Modern
Britain (Cambridge, 1997), p. 29.
27 Andrew Saint, The Image of the Architect (New Haven,
CT and London, 1982), p. 71.
28 Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity
(London, 1992), p. 11.
29 I am indebted to Susan King for the social history of
Silver End in her pamphlet Voices from the Guv'nor's
Village (Witham, Essex, 1996), published by the Silver
End Workers' Educational Association.
30 Cited in King, Voices, p. 11.
31 Naomi Stungo, (Writer's Block', The Observer Review
(17 January 1999), p. 4.
32 Ibid.
33 See Peter Blundell Jones, Hans Scharoun (London, 1995).
34 Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture
(Cambridge, MA, 1995), p. 96.
35 Whitford, Bauhaus, p. 159.
36 See Ernst Danz, Architecture and the Sun: An
International Survey of Sun Protection Methods
(London, 1967).
37 Herman Hertzberger, (The Space Mechanism of the
Twentieth Century', in Kaisa Broner, ed., Modernity
and Popular Culture (Alvar Aalto Museum, Helsinki,
1988), pp. 37-46.
38 For a history of this building type, see Anthony D.
King, The Bungalow: The Production ofa Global
Culture (London, 1984).
39 See John Allan, Berthold Lubetkin: Architecture and the
Tradition ofProgress (London, 1992), p. 277.
40 Le Corbusier, (Five Points towards a New Architecture'
(1926), in Ulrich Conrads, ed., Programs and
Manifestoes on 20th-century Architecture (Cambridge,
MA, 1994), p. 99·
41 See G. A. Jellicoe, Motopia: A Study in the Evolution of
Urban Landscape (London, 1961).
5 PARKS, PLEASURE GARDENS AND THE DEMOCRACY
OF THE OPEN AIR
1 William Howard Adams, Nature Perfected: Gardens
through History (New York, 1991).
2 Horace Walpole, The History of the Modern Taste in
Gardening, intro. John Dixon Hunt (New York, 1995),
p. 43 (an essay first published in 178o).
3 Peter Davey, Arts & Crafts Architecture (London, 1995),
p. 125·
4 Helen Meller, Towns, Plans and Society in Modern
Britain (Cambridge, 1997); see esp. chaps 4 and 5.
5 Graeme Evans, (Planning for Parks and Open Spaces'
(1999), an unpublished discussion paper.
6 C. T. S0rensen, Parkpolitik I Sogn Og K~bstad
(Copenhagen, 1931).
7 For information see Annemarie Lund, Guide to
Danish Landscape Architecture, 1000-1996
(Copenhagen, 1997).
8 Galen Cranz, (Women in Urban Parks', Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society, v/3 (1980),
Supplement pp. 79-95.
9 J0rgon Sestoft and J0rgon Hegner Christiansen, Guide
to Danish Architecture, VOI.1: 1000-1960 (Copenhagen,
1995), p. 221.
10 Galen Cranz, The Politics ofPark Design: A History of
Urban Parks in America (Cambridge, MA, 1982); the
issue of hygiene recurs throughout this book.
11 Patrick Wright, A Journey Through Ruins (London,
1991), p. 270.
12 Steen Eiler Rasmussen, London: The Unique City
(London, 1961), p. 225.
13 Cited in Kim Dirckinck-Holmfield, Danish
Architecture, 1960-1995 (Copenhagen, 1995).
14 M. Taylor, (Organic Modernism and Landscape
Design: An Appraisal of Twentieth-century Design in
Germany', MA thesis, Dept of Landscape, Sheffield
University, 1995.
15 Geoffrey Jellicoe and Susan Jellicoe, The Landscape of
Man (London, 1995), p. 301.
16 Facts and figures are contained in the Map of the
Amsterdam Woodland Park (Amsterdam City Council,
1989).
17 Tom Turner, (Open Space Planning in London', Town
Planning Review LXIIII4 (1992), pp. 365-86.
18 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge,
1994), p. 185·
19 This introductory essay is republished in full in Jan
Birksted, ed., Relating Architecture to Landscape
(London, 1999).
20 The stirring story of Blom and Glemme is very well
161
 told in an essay by Thorbjorn Anderson, 'Erik
Glemme and the Stockholm Park System', in Marc
Treib, ed., Modern Landscape Architecture (Cambridge,
MA, 1993), pp. 114-33.
21 Jellicoe and Jellicoe, The Landscape ofMan, p. 30l.
22 Anderson, 'Erik Glemme', p. 12l.
23 Ibid., p. 13l.
24 See Tone Wikborg, Gustav Vigeland: His Art and
Sculpture Park (Oslo, 1994).
25 lan Jeffrey, 'Prague: VystaviSte', London Magazine
(February/March 1996), pp. 156-62.
26 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Europe, Europe: Forays
into a Continent (New York, 1989), pp. 123-4.
27 'What's on around the world during solar blackout',
The Guardian (11 August 1999), p. 6.
28 Caroline Constant, 'A Landscape "Fit for Democracy":
Joze Plecnic at Prague Castle (1920-1935)', in Jan
Birksted, ed., Relating Architecture to Landscape
(London, 1999), p. 139.
29 Joan Littlewood, loan's Book (London, 1994), p. 704.
30 Fiona Bradley, ed., Cities on the Move: Urban Chaos
and Global Change, East Asian Art, Architecture and
Film Now, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery (London, 1999).
This catalogue contains a conversation between Rem
Koolhaas (Exhibition Architect) and Hans-Ulrich
Obrist (Exhibition Co-Curator).
31 B. Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, English Life
and Leisure (London, 1951), p. 422.
6 SUMMER IN THE CITY: THE CULT OF THE LIDO
1 Charles Poulsen, Victoria Park (London, 1976), p. 48.
2 Thomas A. P. van Leeuwan, The Springboard in the
Pond: An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool
(Cambridge, MA, 1999), p. 4.
3 See Andrew Fenner, 'Open-Air Swimming Pools in the
London Area from 1900 to the Present Day', MA
thesis, University College London, 1994; also Janet
Smith, Tooting Bec Lido (London, 1996).
4 See Elain Harwood, 'Lidos in London and the Major
Cities', in Alan Powers, ed., Farewell My Lido (London,
162
1991), p. 10.
5 Colin Ward and Dennis Hardy, Goodnight Campers!
The History of the British Holiday Camp (London,
1986), p. 116.
6 Van Leeuwan, The Springboard in the Pond, p. 2.
7 Charles Sprawson, The Haunts of the Black Masseur
(London, 1992), p. 195.
8 Bruno Maurer, 'From "Public Baths" to "Park Pools":
Neues Bauen Open-air Swimming Facilities in
Switzerland', Daidalos, 55 (March 1995), pp. 72-9.
9 See Modern British Architecture: Erich Mendelsohn,
1887-1953, ed. Jeremy Brook et aI., touring exh. cat.
(London, 1997), an excellent catalogue and an
important document in reviving interest in the De La
Warr Pavilion.
10 Fiona MacCarthy, 'Master of Modernism: Obituary of
Serge Chermayeff', The Guardian (11 May 1996), p. 28.
11 Ibid., p. 79.
12 Quoted in ibid., p. 76.
13 G. E. Kidder Smith, The New Architecture in Europe
(London, 1962), p. 15.
14 Sprawson, The Haunts of the Black Masseur, p. 197.
15 Ibid., p. 185.
16 Cited in Powers, Farewell My Lido, p. 26.
17 Ivor H. Seeley, Outdoor Recreation and the Urban
Environment (London, 1973), p. 20.
18 SAFA (The Association of Finnish Architects), Sports
and Leisure (Helsinki, 1977), p. 9.
19 Mike Boyle, Bill Indge and Kathryn Senior, Human
Biology (London, 1999), p. 377.
20 Sarah Boseley, 'Row over benefit of sunshine', The
Guardian (9 July 1999), p. l.
21 This delightful story is told in van Leeuwan,
Springboard in the Pond, p. 45.
22 See 'London Lido', Architectural Review (December
1998), pp. 63-7.
23 Anne Fremy, 'Tokyo Marine', in Fiona Bradley, ed.,
Cities on the Move: Urban Chaos and Global Change -
East Asian Art, Architecture and Film Now, exh. cat.,
Hayward Gallery (London, 1999).
7 LIMITS TO GROWTH: NATURE AND SOCIETY
RESTORED
1 Quoted in Edward Relph, The Modern Urban
Landscape (London, 1987), p. 211.
2 See Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to the
Anthropology of Supermodernity (London, 1995), a
short essay rich in ideas and insights.
3 Thomas A. P. van Leeuwan, The Springboard in the
Pond: An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool
(Cambridge, MA, 1999), p. 53.
4 Ben JupP, Living Together: Community Life on Mixed
Tenure Estates (London, 1999), p. 22.
5 Figures supplied in a press release of 20 April 1999 by
Knight Frank, one of the UK'S largest estate agents.
6 Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard, A Class Act: The
Myth ofBritain's Classless Society (London, 1997), p. 56.
7 Richard Evans, Regenerating Town Centres
(Manchester, 1997), p. 43.
8 Tony Grayling, 'Don't Let It Pass You By', The
Guardian (10 November 1999).
9 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity
(London, 1992), p. 122.
10 The civic plight of some North American cities has
been graphically described by Mike Davis in City of
Quartz (London, 1990); also Ecology ofFear: Los
Angeles and the Imagination ofDisaster (London,
1999).
11 M. Christine Boyer, 'The City of Illusion', in Paul
Knox, ed., The Restless Urban Landscape (London,
1993), p. 125.
12 Knox, The Restless Urban Landscape, p. 2.
13 See, for example, Towards an Urban Renaissance: Final
Report of the Urban Task Force (London, 1999); Ken
Worpole and Liz Greenhalgh, The Richness of Cities:
Urban Policy in a New Landscape (London, 1999).
14 A useful summary of this movement can be found in
Maarten A. Hejer, The Politics ofEnvironmental
Discourse: Ecological Modernisation and the Policy
Process (Oxford, 1997), esp. chap. 3.
15 Ferenc Heher and Agnes HelIer, Biopolitics (Vienna,
1994), p. 7·
16 Towards an Urban Renaissance, p. 34.
17 Dave Featherstone, 'Reimagining the human city',
Soundings, 7 (London, 1997), p. 53.
18 A useful starting-point for this new way of seeing can
be found in Ian Christie and Roger Levett, Towards the
Ecopolis: Sustainable Development and Urban
Governance (London, 1999), and also Robin Murray,
Creating Wealth from Waste (London 1999).
19 Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden: Urban
Nature and Human Design (New York, 1984), p. 10.
20 Ibid., p. 4.
21 To adopt the metaphor used by the Russian film-
director Nikita Mikhalkov in his extraordinary 1994
film of that title.
22 Michael Hough, Cities and Natural Process (London,
1995), p. 9·
23 Robin Murray, London Pride Waste Action Programme,
July 1996, private paper.
24 Maarten Kloos, Public Interiors: Architecture and
Public Life inside Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1993), p. 9
and p. 33 (the extracts cited are from essays by
Matthijs de Boer and Maurits De Hoog respectively).
25 Pierre Bourdieu, 'A reasoned Utopia and Economic
Fatalism', New Left Review, 227 (1998), p. 126.
26 Ken Worpole, Nothing to Fear? Trust and Respect in
Urban Communities (London, 1997).
27 The enduring relevance of Colin Ward's book, The
Child in the City, first published in 1978, but reprinted
several times since, attests that this issue has not gone
away completely. More recently the work of Mayer
Hillman at the Policy Studies Institute on British
children's loss of mobility in modern society - being
chauffeured to school, not allowed to ride alone on
buses even at quite mature ages, not being allowed to
cycle in the street, particularly in comparison with
their German and Dutch counterparts - has drawn
attention to a critical loss of childhood independence.
See M. Hillman, ed., Children, Mobility and the
Quality ofLife (London, 1993). No amount of formal
play provision - not that this is occurring in these
times of public expenditure cuts - can compensate for
 the more important loss of informal opportunities for 7 Ibid., p. 54·
play. 8 David Louwerse in Knuijt, Modern Park Design, p. 86.
28 Richard Sennett, The Fall ofPublic Man (London, 9 Clemens Steenbergen in ibid., p. 123.
1986). 10 For their work, see Jan Gehl and Lars Gemz0e, Public
29 Lodewijk Baljon, Designing Parks (Woodbridge, Spaces, Public Life (Copenhagen, 1996).
Suffolk, 1995), p. 237. 11 Ibid., p. 82.
30 Liz Greenhalgh and Ken Worpole, Park Life: Urban
Parks and Social Renewal (London, 1995), pp. 31-7.
31 Baljon, Designing Parks, p. 185.
32 Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of
Civilisation (Chicago, 1992).
33 The difference between day and night in the city is the
subject of Joachim Schlor's fascinating Nights in the
Big City (London, 1998).

CODA: BENEATH CITY SKIES: NEW PARKS IN EUROPE

1 I refer specifically to the symposium on 'The Park'

held in Rotterdam in 1992 mentioned in the
Introduction. This gathering marked a significant step
forward in the coming together of architectural, social
and environmental thought in Europe concerning the
role that open space can play in the public life of the
modern city. Seven contemporary park designers
contributed lectures: Bernard Huet (France), Adriaan
Geuze (The Netherlands), Andre Arriola (Spain),
Norfried Pohl (Germany), Peter Latz (Germany),
Steen H0yer (Denmark) and Clemens Steenbergen
(The Netherlands).
2 Gerrit Smienk in Martin Knuijt et aI., eds, Modern
Park Design: Recent Trends (Bussum, 1995), p. 31.
3 Bernard Huet in Knuijt, Modern Park Design, p. 19.
4 Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (London, 1998).
This fresh and stimulating book brings forward much
new evidence as to the continuing influence of
Situationist presentiments on contemporary thinking
in many fields.
5 Andreu Arriola in Knuijt, Modern Park Design, p. 57.
6 For a lengthy and thoughtful review of the Barcelona
Urban Public Space programme, see Peter G. Rowe's
Civic Realism (Cambridge, MA, 1997), pp. 46-68.
 Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations.

allotments 5, 20, 77 exhibitions and festivals

Arts and Crafts Movement 35-7,87 Festival of Britain (1951) 61, 103
'International Style', New York (1932) 31
balconies 16, 20, 22, 23, 41, 42, 43, 44, 53, 81-5
Paris Exhibition (1867) 31
roof gardens 57, 85
Stockholm Exhibition (1930) 7, 31, 103
Terrassenbau 53
Weissenhof Siedlung (1927) 75
Bauhaus35,36,42,73,82
body 14, 23,43-8, 68 garden cities 25-9
Freikorperkultur 43, 48 see also utopias and model communities
Lebensreform 34, 45, glass
nudity and naturism 43-8, 80 architectural use of 19, 32, 59-68, 75
population control 68, 76 glass bricks 27, 28,30, 61-5
and racial purity 14, 32
holiday camps 38, 47, 117
see also public health
housing 40, 69-85, 73
cemeteries housing for the working classes 33, 34, 36, 39, 69
Assistens Kirkegard, Copenhagen 95, 152-3 social housing
Stockholm Woodland Cemetery I, 15, 17 in Germany 74-5
Victorian cemeteries, decline of 8o, 136 in the Netherlands 33, 34, 69-74
children 12, 13, 33, 49-52 in Sweden 38, 76
child-centred education 50 in the UK 39, 40
kindergarten 50 in Vienna 37, 73
school buildings, 12-15, 17-19
landscape
Woodcraft Folk 33, 41
civic design 15, 131
see also open-air schools
colloquium on modern park design, Rotterdam (1992)
cinema and the city 21-3
13, 135, 145
ecology landscape architecture 141
environmental sustainability 131-4, 140 the picturesque 86-7
nature in the city 133, 140 the 'Stockholm School' 50, 51, 52, 95-8

165
lidos 77, 113-28 playing fields 93-4
in Switzerland 73, 117, 119 poor modern playgrounds 81
in the UK 11, 68, 69, 70, 72, 76, 78, 113, 127 pleasure gardens 64, 103-12
Olympic Pool, Helsinki 74, 75, 121 Battersea Pleasure Gardens 58, 59, 60, 103

see also swimming Djurgarden, Stockholm 53, 99

Fun Palace, proposed for London 109
open-air culture 8, 9, 24, 38
Luna Parks 63, 105
Live Out ofDoors As Much As You Can 31
pleasure gardens in former Eastern Bloc 106-9
open-air museums 53, 89, 99
Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen 62, 65, 66, 67, 105, 110-12
open-air schools 12, 13, 17, 18, 49, 54
public health 9, 33
outdoor meetings of Fabians 8, 9, 42
decline of collectivist provision 130
and philosophy of the 'New Life' 30
disease and degeneration 31, 48
picnics 83
Finsbury Health Centre 28, 29,30,3 1, 57, 64-7
plein-air painting 38
fitness 11, 47
Wandervogel movement 40
hospital buildings 22-3
youth hostels 40, 43
hygiene 32, 75
organic architecture 14, 15, 36, 50
Peckham Health Centre 24, 25, 26, 59, 61
parks TB (tuberculosis) 45, 49
Amsterdam Bospark 49, 93 see also the body
Clissold Park, London 4 public space 11-13, 97
commons 12, 135 pedestrianization in Copenhagen 88, 145-7
Islands Brygge Park, Copenhagen 93, 151-2 Place Stalingrad, Paris 84, 141
Klampenborg Coastal Park, Denmark 47, 91 poetics of place 21
Mile End Park, London 94, 152 social construction of 11
Museumpark, Rotterdam 92, 150-1
National Parks Bill (1949) 43 sanatoria 20, 49, 52-9
Parc Andre-Citroen, Paris 89, 90, 147 social democracy 9-10, 68
Parc Bercy, Paris 85, 86, 141-2 aesthetics of 10, 35
Parc de la Villette, Paris 91, 147 decline of state provision 79, 129-32, 136
Parkpolitik 46, 88-9 sport
parks in Barcelona 87, 142-5 Finnish Sports Institute 21
reform parks 89, 91 lidos, decline of 125; see also lidos
Vigeland Park, Oslo 54, 55, 56, 57, 99-103 T'ai -chi in parks 82
pavilions see also play
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea 71, 116, 118 sunlight
'pavilion plan' layout in hospitals 52 ClAM Charter 34, 48
play harmful effects 125-7
adventure playgrounds 48, 89 Man and Sunlight 10, 43-4
educational toys 41, 50 solar design 29, 134
Homo Ludens 103 swimming
play and the development of trust 88, 137-8 diving 117, 120

166
 (Fabians take the plunge' 9
international participation rates in outdoor swimming
125

swimming pool at Peckham Health Centre 25, 26

see also lidos

town planning 2, 3, 25, 31- 2 , 78, 87

utopian and model communities

artists' colonies 38
bungalow colonies 38-9
Motopia 45, 85
Port Sunlight, Cheshire 6, 16, 25-6

Silver End, Essex 39, 78-80

Vienna's (wild settlements' 40
 Photographic
Acknowledgements

All photographs are courtesy of Larraine Worpole with the

following exceptions: Architects Journal Picture Library:
13; Architectural Journal Picture Library: 31; Alan Barber:
87; BBC Hulton Picture Library: 64; Bill Brandt, copyright
Hulton Deutsch: 12; Gillian Darley: 1; by kind permission
of Hulton Getty: 9, 61; Kurt Hutton, © Hulton Getty: 8;
copyright Islington Libraries Local History Collection: 29,
30; reproduced by kind permission of Lifschutz Davidson:
78; by kind permission of London Metropolitan Archives:
60; by kind permission of the Museum of Finnish
Architecture, Helsinki: 20; with kind permission from the
Nordiska Museet, Stockholm: 50; courtesy of Robert Opie:
58, 59; by kind permission of Popperfoto: 73; by kind per-
mission of Southwark Local Studies Library: 24, 25;
Stockholm Stadsmuseum: 38; Svenska Dagbladet, by kind
permission of the Stockholm Stadsmuseum: 7; by kind per-
mission of the Tivoli Museum: 62, 65; by kind permission
of Unilever Historical Archives: 6; courtesy of VIEW: 41; by
kind permission of the Weston and Somerset Mercury: 72;
by kind permission of Williamson Art Gallery & Museum,
Birkenhead: 11, 69.

168