History of Education Vol. 39, No.

6, November 2010, 695712

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

Roy Kozlovsky*
Northeastern University School of Architecture, Boston, USA (Received 5 December 2009; final version received 29 July 2010)
THED_A_514295.sgm Taylor and Francis r.kozlovsky@neu.edu Dr 0 6000002010 39 RoyKozlovsky Taylor 2010 OriginalofFrancis 0046-760X (print)/1464-5130 (online) History&Article 10.1080/0046760X.2010.514295 Education

This essay explores the interplay between educational and architectural methodologies for analysing the school environment. It historicises the affinity between architectural and educational practices and modes of knowledge pertaining to the childs body during the period of postwar reconstruction in England to argue that educational spaces were designed to accommodate the childs free movement and bring it under observation, in order to constitute an active and emotionally adjusted citizen. Drake and Lasduns Hallfield Primary School is studied to illustrate the architectural implications of the shift in the modes of knowledge defining the child as an active and emotive subject, in part by aestheticising the sensation of movement. Thus the essay expands upon Andrew Saints seminal account by reinterpreting the architecture of the postwar school as a social technology, and identifying a pragmatist current of modernist architecture that was influenced by the concepts of time and growth developed independently by Alfred North Whitehead and Herbert Read. Keywords: architecture; school; childhood, educational reconstruction; space

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

The study of the environments where education takes place intersects two distinct fields of knowledge, architecture and education. This seemingly simplistic statement has a double register: in terms of historical subject matter, the study of the school, and especially that of the modern school building, requires knowledge in both fields to account for the collaborative nature of the process of design of these environments. As the opening quote by the architect Alfred Roth suggests, historically, modern architects have identified with the cause of progressive education and sought to represent and enable its ideals and methods through their design. To describe and critique this encounter one must be familiar with the history of both movements. On a more theoretical level, the opening statement suggests that the two disciplines can be enriched by a productive exchange of their methods and interests towards establishing an inter*Email: R.Kozlovsky@neu.edu 1 Alfred Roth, The New School (Zurich: Girsberger, 1950), 30.
ISSN 0046-760X print/ISSN 1464-5130 online 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/0046760X.2010.514295 http://www.informaworld.com

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disciplinary, but not necessarily a specialised space of inquiry. One theme that at the present brings the two fields together is the shared investment in analysing schools through the theoretical framework of space, power and knowledge, as part of the visual and spatial turns in the social sciences and the humanities. Catherine Burke stated its impact on the study of the school in a recent issue of Paedagogica Historica devoted to architectures and pedagogies:
An examination of the visual culture of the school involves bringing into focus, perhaps for the first time, the significance of detailed characteristics of schooling such as the intricate, regulated and ritualized choreography of the body; the design and siting of the built environment; the purposeful arrangement of objects in the classroom; the shape of interior and exterior spaces.2

The concept of space was developed in nineteenth-century architectural criticism as referring to the containing, volumetric properties of the building most evident in Adolf Looss concept of the raumplan3 for the purpose of shifting the focus from the visual primacy of the faade or the efficiency of the plan to the phenomenological experience of a subject moving through the buildings interior. With the spatial turn, this concept is also understood as a social practice, as a site for the study of power relations and the production of the self. In the issue of Paedagogica Historica mentioned above, Nick Peim used Michel Foucaults definition of social technology for analysing the role of space in education: Government is also a function of technology: the government of individuals, the government of souls, the government of the self by the self, the government of families, the government of children, and so on. This quote continues with a sentence that is especially relevant to this essay: I believe that if one placed the history of architecture back in this general history of techne, in this wide sense of the word, one would have a more interesting guiding concept.4 Following Foucault and other theoreticians of space such as Pierre Bourdieu and Henri Lefebvre, architectural discourse has been employing this category in a manner that corresponds with its usefulness to historians of education. Schools, together with other child-centred environments, lend themselves to this type of analysis because children, due to their status as immature and in need of education and care, are legitimate targets of certain modes of spatial and aesthetic strategies which would have deemed problematic in environments and material practices applied to mature subjects. The engagement of an architectural historian with the field of education history holds some obvious risks, but might also have its rewards in suggesting new ways of seeing the material at hand. Peim observed that the impact of the loosening of the boundaries between the disciplines introduces an uncertain, experimental methodology to the historiography of education:

2Catherine Burke, Containing the School Child: Architectures and Pedagogies, Paedagogica Historica 4, nos 45 (August 2005): 492. 3Loos was recorded saying that I do not design floor plans, facades, sections. I design spaces For me, there are only contiguous, continual spaces, rooms, anterooms, terraces etc. The composer Arnold Schoenberg commented that in Looss work everything is thought out, imagined, composed and moulded in space. Yehuda Safran and Wilfried Wang, eds, The Architecture of Adolf Loos (London: Arts Council, 1985), 74. 4Michel Foucault, Space, Knowledge and Power, in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 19541984, Vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 2000), 364.

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This openness to the range of phenomena within and around the school requires a thinking without strict boundaries, but also produces specific forms of history that necessarily feed into conceptions of what history can be, engendering a sense of further possibilities arising from specific forms of engagement.5

This openness is explored in this paper as it links a variety of discourses power, aesthetics, building science, the historiography of the modern movement, child development and education to account for the exceptional architectural quality of the postwar school and its importance to both architectural and educational history. School buildings as discursive objects The critical perspective of examining the school as a site for an array of disciplinary practices that act upon the substance of the person entails a revision of how the postwar English school has been interpreted by each discipline. Broadly speaking, designcentred studies have conceived these spaces of knowledge as monuments of modernism, and situated them within the discourse of the architect, as part of a broader debate over modern architecture; educational centred studies in turn have examined the schools of the postwar period as documents of educational policy. School buildings figure prominently in historical accounts of postwar architecture, often in the form of an opposition between two paradigmatic projects, the Hertfordshire schools and the Hunstanton Secondary Modern School (Figure 1). In the early 1950s, architects routinely contrasted these buildings as part of a formative modernist polemic between formalist and functionalist positions and, more broadly, the ideological debate over the status of architecture as an autonomous aesthetic discipline and a socially engaged practice committed to progress, a pattern that subsequent histories replicate: Andrew Saint, in his authoritative study of Englands postwar school building, Towards a Social Architecture (1987), positioned the technical and planning achievements of the Hertfordshire approach as the biggest and most radical adventure ever undertaken in the history of British architecture, in part to redeem the tainted reputation of the Modern Movement by rekindling its mission of making buildings of real benefit to society.6 The architectural historian Reyner Banham in turn criticised the Hertfordshire approach as the self-righteous imposition of the decree form follows curriculum a reference to its alignment with progressive child-centred methods of education which resulted in bureaucratic buildings that lacked architectural character. While Saint criticised the Smithsons Hunstanton Secondary School in Norfolk unapologetic image-mongering, Banham designated this school as a seminal New Brutalist building in his historical account of that movement.7 Hunstantons value resided in its dialogue with the architecture of the modernist master Mies van Der Rohe and in its naked treatment of materials such as brick and steel concerns which are autonomous to architectural culture. In retrospect, it is significant that
5Nick Peim, Towards a Social Ecology of the Modern School: Reflections on Histories of the Governmental Environment of Schooling, Paedagogica Historica 4, nos 45 (August 2005): 637. 6Andrew Saint, Towards a Social Architecture; The Role of School Building in Post-War England (New Haven, CT: Yale Architectural Press, 1987), viii, x. 7Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the English School, History of Education Quarterly 21, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 191; Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethics or Aesthetics? (New York: Reinhold, 1966), 1920.

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

debates fundamental to modernism were argued through school buildings an unprecedented phenomenon in architectural history. From the perspective of education history, these same buildings were selected to answer a different set of questions. In studies of the English school such as Seaborne and Lowes The English School, its Architecture and Organization (1971), Stuart Maclures Educational Development & School Building: Aspects of Public Policy 1945 73 (1984), or Peter Cunninghams Curriculum Change in the Primary School Since 1945 (1988), the architectural object figures as a document of educational history and governmental policy. Often what is taken for granted by architectural historians as a positive attribute the fidelity of the Hertfordshire programme to the values of progressive education is problematised. In Cunninghams account, the Hertfordshire school model was used by the central government to superimpose its agenda of child-centred education upon the geographically fragmented, pedagogically diverse local education authorities (LEAs); in Maclures account, the progressive aspects of school building are shown to be incorporated in so far as they correspond with the governmental pressure to reduce costs of school construction nationwide through standardisation and economisation. As for Hunstanton, it is interesting to note that while architectural historians who specialise in school buildings follow Saint and criticise it as a negative example of architectural style trumping educational needs,8 Seaborne and Lowe condone its formalist approach since it conferred civic dignity to the institution of the school which the Hertfordshire inspired schools lacked due to their anti-monumental ideology.9 This brief and incomplete survey of how each scholarly discipline has traditionally appropriated the discussion of educational environments raises the question of medium specificity might the analysis of schools suggest itself to methods and questions that are unique to this building type and the population it serves? One direction that can produce valuable insight into the intersection between architecture and education is to inquire into the conditions of possibility in the structures of knowledge and power that allowed the convergence of the New Education and the New
Figure 1 Interior of typical classroom at Hunstanton Secondary Modern School (left) and Aboyne Lodge Infants School, St. Albans, Hertfordshire (right). Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

8A typical example is Mark Dudeks critique of Hunstanton as inhuman in its projection of raw technology. Mark Dudek, Architecture of Schools: The New Learning Environment (Boston: Architectural Press, 2000), 32. 9Malcolm Seaborne and Roy Lowe, The English School, its Architecture and Organization, Vol. II 18701970 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), xvi.

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Architecture to bring about new types of knowledge environments, as the opening quote by Alfred Roth suggests. It is their claim to be based on a more psychological understanding of the child that will draw special scrutiny in this essay, as pertaining to a broader shift in modes of knowledge and power that define the subject in psychological terms, and act upon its interiority. Power and subjectivity This mode of power was explored by Nikolas Rose in his Foucauldian analysis of the welfare state in Governing the Soul (1990). Rose argues that postwar govermentality operates through modes of knowledge and networks of power that assess and modify the subjective existence of people and their relationships one with another. It required the subjects consent and commitment to assuming the responsibilities of citizenship.10 Rose situates the emergence of the mode of power that regulates the subjective capacities of the population in the Second World War, when war effort on the Home Front required the participation and consent of civilians and their will to endure the hardships and deprivations which followed the wartime mobilisation of the economy. A relevant example is the evacuation of more than a million children at the beginning of the war. The evacuation was planned years in advance, beginning in 1931, to prevent mass panic in case of air attack. The plan dealt with the logistics of transporting people to safe areas. The following anecdote epitomises the conception of children as objects that can be moved by bureaucratic fiat: Churchill briefed R.A. Butler (the author of the 1944 Education Act) upon his nomination as the president of the Board of Education in 1941: You will move poor children from here to here.11 The failure of the evacuation policy to anticipate the problems arising from separating children from their families led to a reconsideration of how government operates. The 1941 Cambridge Evacuation Survey is an example of a study of the effects of bureaucratic directives on actual subjects emotions. Undertaken by child psychologists and pedagogues, among them Susan Isaacs, Melanie Klein and John Bowlby, the survey concluded with the statement that:
a true understanding of the feelings and aims of ordinary human beings is an essential condition of success, whether we are concerned with the replanning and rebuilding of our great cities the humanizing of our town schools, the training and teaching of youth. 12

After the war, the subjective features of human life were increasingly integrated into the calculations of planners. While Rose barely discussed the role of architecture and space,13 nor did he examine the institution of the school, his historical insight is indispensable to the central argument of this essay: that in the postwar spaces of
10Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1990), 210. 11Michael Hill, The Welfare State in Britain: A Political History since 1945 (Aldershot: E. Elgar, 1993), 1. 12Susan Isaacs, The Cambridge Evacuation Survey: A Wartime Study in Social Welfare and Education (London: Methuen, 1941), 11. 13Roses sole analysis of the spatial dimension of the technologies of the self was Gesells Yale Psycho-Clinic. It brings up themes that were later explored by Ning de Coninck-Smith in her Foucauldian study of the architecture of the Child Study Center at Berkeley. Rose, Governing the Soul, 1429; Ning de Coninck-Smith, The Panopticon of Childhood: Harold E. Jones Child Study Center, Berkeley, Paedagogica Historica 4, nos 45 (August 2005): 495506.

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childhood, power did not operate by dominating or disciplining subjects who were by their nature free; rather, it operated by activating subjects and making them aspire to be free. In classrooms, as well as playgrounds, children were incited to appropriate their environments and express their interiority through playful, self-initiated activity. The role of the adult was to observe the childs individual and group activity, evaluate it and indirectly modify it. In this arrangement, spaces of knowledge are also spaces for producing knowledge on subjects, and even their formal and material properties become encoded with the power to impact childrens behaviour and perception they become educative in themselves. The starting point of this essay is the analysis of the role of rhythm and motion in postwar education. These are partly examined as social technologies, following Peims suggestion that the techniques that organize space are complemented by technologies that organize time and movement.14 The aim of physical education policy was to train English children in a new set of techniques of the body that both produced knowledge about children through observation, and in themselves were inscribed with aesthetic forms of knowledge. This essay also argues that the pragmatic, processoriented philosophy of education also influenced or, at the very least, was matched with a parallel shift in architectural thought from an idealism of form, aligned with Froebels mimetic attribution of transformative powers to symbolic forms (several influential modernist architects were associated with Froebelian pedagogy among them Walter Gropius), to an empirical, time-sensitive and sensual approach, aligned with Deweys and Whiteheads stress on process and rhythmic change. The introduction of the question of aesthetics suggests that that object of analysis be regarded both as a document of social history, one which exemplifies the spatial practices and social relations embedded in the institution of the school, and as a monument of a creative aesthetic practice, one which has implications for the ways in which architecture conceptualises its methods for generating forms, spaces and meanings. The architectural manifestation of this aesthetic turn will be examined through the case of a unique school building, the Hallfield Primary School in Paddington, London, from 1952. Rhythmic self-regulation The notion of education as a rhythmic, fluctuating process in time originates in the educational philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. His epistemological research into physics and geometry, and especially his concept of the event as a substitute to the traditional interest in mass, has been introduced to architectural theory through the writings of Sanford Kwinter; this essay seeks to direct architectural interest to his writing on education. In The Aims of Education from 1916, Whitehead defined education as the stimulation and guidance of the self-development of the individual towards the most complete achievement of varied activity expressing the potentialities of that living creature in the face of its actual environment.15 This is a pragmatic and vital definition of education, equal to John Deweys statement that education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.16 Whitehead stressed the importance
14Peim, Towards a Social Ecology, 629. 15Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education

and Other Essays (New York: Free Press, 1967), 39. 16John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed, School Journal 54 (January 1897): 78.

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of activity and receptiveness over rote learning of information, an attitude which was incorporated in England into the Hadow report from 1931: the curriculum is to be thought of in terms of activity and experience rather than of knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored.17 Arguing against the prevailing model of education as a linear process of growth through gradual and hierarchical stages of development, Whitehead reasoned that the learning process has a rhythm, that it is cyclic in nature:
Life is essentially periodic. That is why I have chosen the term rhythmic, as meaning essentially the conveyance of difference within a framework of repetition. 18

Whitehead defined these cycles as the stages of romance, precision and generalisation. At the stage of romance, the subject is stirred to desire to learn, as there can be no mental development without interest. The stage of precision introduces exactness and technique; the stage of generalisation is aimed at the enjoyment of culture and intellectual activity, or what Whitehead called the art of life.19 To infuse art into everyday life, he suggested that every educational activity, including the study of scientific subjects, was to be performed with style. Whitehead defined style as a technique for self-disciplining the senses and emotions, as the fashioning of power, the restraint of power. If, for Whiteheads generation, aesthetic education was part of a humanist endeavour of enrichment, the postwar generation redefined its politics as a technique for building a more peaceful society. In Education through Art (1943) Herbert Read, a polymath thinker who wrote on education, the visual arts, architecture, literature and political theory, pinpointed the causes for the two world wars in authoritarian, inhibiting educational practices: the secret of our collective ills is to be traced to the suppression of spontaneous creative ability in the individual.20 Seen as a psychological mechanism for sublimating aggressive emotions, art was valued for its transformative impact on a subject engaged in art activity, as opposed to a spectator that is transformed by it through passive contemplation; second, Read advanced the notion that art could be used to construct a more balanced and stable personality by habituating children in harmonic forms during the sleep of reason. Read sought to revive the Greek conception of aesthetic education, as formulated by Plato:
All grace and harmony in life which form the moral basis of the human soul itself are determined by aesthetic feelings, by the perception of rhythm and harmony in music and games.21

This statement was frequently quoted in postwar school building manuals, and might have informed, together with Rudolf Wittkowers influential study of Renaissance harmonic theory in Architecture Principles in the Age of Humanism, the revival of Classical design principles in buildings such as Hunstanton.22 Read considered bodily
17The Hadow Report: The Primary School (London: HMSO, 1931), 93. 18Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New

York: Free Press, 1967), 17. 19Ibid., 39. 20Herbert Read, Education through Art (New York: Pantheon Books, 1945), 202. 21Quoted in Roth, The New School, 213. 22Rudolf Wittkowers study, which included a chapter on Palladios incorporation of harmonic musical ratios in his buildings, appeared in 1949. Both the architects and Banham acknowledged the books influence on Hunstantons design. Banham, The New Brutalism, 14.

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motion as a potent medium for communication and self-expression, and suggested that the most important aspect of school design was to provide environments that ensure freedom of movement, freedom to roam. The senses are only educated by endless action and action requires space.23 These diverse ideas on rhythm and movement became incorporated into English educational policy and school design during the period of postwar reconstruction, in a manner that corresponds with Roses thesis. Story of a School, an educational pamphlet published in 1949, provides a remarkable demonstration of motion as a social technology. It narrates the experimental introduction of Rudolph Labans dance method at Steward Street, a socially disadvantaged school in Birmingham.24 During the war, Laban gave dance movement seminars to schoolteachers, who found his expressive yet abstract dance technique to correspond with their pragmatist educational philosophy. Pragmatism rejected predetermined forms of expression such as folk dance since those limit the agency and creativity of the child. Labans vocabulary of motion, which allegedly arose from the bodys own biological rhythm, allowed amateur dancers to discover and express to others their authentic self. Failure to move in a manner that expressed the subjects innate creativity was attributed to psychological inhibition. Arthur Stone, head teacher at Steward Street, reflected that: It took some time before we could free the child from his inhibitions, but, when that did occur, the children made their own patterns in the space about them as dictated by the individual ideas they wished to express.25 Timid, violent or destructive behaviours were attributed to a fear of freedom, a concept developed by Erich Fromm and popularised by Read. The task of the teacher was to liberate subjects from such fear in order to enliven the contact between the self and the world. This process of making subjects receptive to experience was sequenced according to Whiteheads cyclic model of education: Initially the childs body was engaged in repetitive, rhythmic movements. Next, the child was encouraged to express the self through motion, then to use it to communicate with others. Finally, the enactment of conflict while staging a dramatic play allowed children to release internal aggression and become socialised. An education based on cycles of immersion and dramatic openings, rather than upon a linear, uniform progress, entails the development of observational techniques for identifying the moment the student is ready to pass from one stage to the next, or when repetition is no longer productive. The text provides an example of how observation is used in a feedback process to adapt instruction to the subjective state of the student:
One child, maybe, would reach this saturation point very quickly in colour, but could go on very much longer before reaching that point using clay if we kept the childs interest, concentration and imagination at work, there would develop this self-discipline which would carry him through a greater period of time before he reached saturation point. 26 Education through Art, 292. thorough analysis of Story of a School and its impact on English education, see Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, Stories of a School or the Steward Street School Experiment Education through Art, 19401950 (unpublished manuscript), and Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, The Progressive Image in the History of Education: Stories of Two Schools, Visual Studies 22, no. 2 (September 2007). 25A.L. Stone, Story of a School, Ministry of Education Pamphlet no. 14 (London: HMSO, 1949), 14. 26Ibid., 9.
23Read, 24For a

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The illustrations accompanying the text depict children immersed in activity without adult supervision. The physical environment of the school corridors, floors, walls and furniture is appropriated in ways that transcend their intended purpose (Figure 2]. Architects would incorporate such flexibility into the interior organisation of the postwar school by placing movable partitions between classrooms and the corridor, allowing it to become a teaching space. A two-volume study published by the Ministry of Education, Moving and Growing (1952) and Planning the Programme (1953), integrated the experimental use of movement at Birmingham into a suggested physical education curriculum for all primary schools.27 Authored by Diana Jordan, who was personally acquainted with Stones educational work, the pamphlet substituted the romantic, confessional account of Story of a School with an impersonal, empirical method for evaluating the childs bodily movement. It presented the substitution of the mass movement of the drill with individualised forms of physical exercise as more suitable for the postwar notion of active democratic citizenship, since it is found that this independence gives a better opportunity for the development of self-discipline than mass movement, which demands little more than passive obedience.28 Apart from its symbolism, free movement was considered more productive as an instrument of knowledge, as it allowed the teacher:
Figure 2 Scene from Story of a School titled When they were completely absorbed, the results were always satisfying. Courtesy of the Institute of Education Archive.

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

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

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

This culture of empirical observation redefined the relation between bodies and citizenship: it stressed the imperfections and variations between children, rather than ideal types. As a consequence, gender could be presented as superficial and insignificant since, from an empirical standpoint, differences between boys and girls are no greater than the differences found among a group of either.30 Following Whiteheads conception of aesthetic education, the manual disseminated Labans grammatical movement to render the childs movement while walking, interacting with others, and performing everyday chores such as cooking and home-making, harmonious and graceful. The new style of movement appeared to arise from the childs natural exuberance of expression, and teachers were asked to value the childs natural vitality, rather than subdue it as an undesirable and uncivilized mode of behaviour.31 In what can appear to be a contradiction to the ideals of observational clarity and harmonic grace, Moving and Growing also sought to intensify the expressivity of movement. Often staged in dramatically illuminated interiors (Figure 3), the photographs illustrating the pamphlet evoked the archaic origins of drama and dance, bodily arts that the text claims arise from the need felt by people to come to terms with their exciting experiences and to put them into shape or pattern of their own creation.32 This Dionysian conception of collective movement provided the future citizen of the welfare state with an expressive language with which to fashion an energetic ideal of the self, and to forge communal attachments based on shared, embodied sentiments during the sleep of reason. To conclude the exposition of the educational significance of movement, there is a remarkable, undated transcript of Christian Schillers lecture to physical education teachers entitled Time and Space on a Summers Day. Schiller, who in his role as HM Inspector of Schools supported the Hertfordshire child-centred approach to school building, established in his lecture a conceptual distinction between personal space (subjective space in which the child moves and explores) and common space (the space the child share with others, the abstract, geometric space), and between personal time (the childs own perception of duration) and common time (the objective time of the clock and school routine). The process of growth is described as the mastery of time and space:
Figure 3 Photograph from Moving and Growing illustrating a section titled Movement as an art.

Movement happens in time, but it takes place in space I believe that young children from the earliest times are busy exploring space. Lying on their back they kick lustily, pushing space away; they stretch out with their arms lovingly, embracing space; they crouch into the smallest space possible, withdrawing from space. With these and other similar movements they explore and experience space, and express towards space the emotions they feel.33
29Ibid., 39. 30Ibid., 28. 31Ibid., 37. 32Ibid., 67. 33Christian

Schiller, Time and Space on a Summers Day. Spoken at Lady Mabel College of Physical Education, Wentworth Woodhouse, Rotherham, Yorks. Institute of Education, London, Schiller Archive, DC/CS/0/1/(1). The undated manuscript is most likely dated to the early 1950s.

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Figure 3 an art.

Photograph from Moving and Growing illustrating a section titled Movement as

Following Whitehead, Schiller conceptualised movement as having a rhythmic pattern: almost from birth the mindbody behaves easily in a rhythm. The task of the educationist is to synchronise the childs subjective perception of timespace with how these categories operate in the external world. Schiller, who was profoundly influenced by the experiment at Steward Street, argued for providing opportunity for free expressive movement through which the child could become socialised. Using

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terms similar to Herbert Reads, he located physical education within the psychological discourse of social reconstruction: Awareness and command of time and space is a major problem for on its solution depends the growth of balanced men and women who can contribute creatively to civilization.34 Schillers poetic discourse of movement indicates that space and time become meaningful categories for educational practice, paralleling a similar development in architectural discourse: theoreticians such as Siegfried Giedion defined time, space and motion as fundamental categories of modern architecture.35 But the use of similar words does not indicate conceptual affinity, as Giedion developed these terms in relation to his conception of architecture as an expressive and representational medium of high culture. In contrast, English educationists and architects understood these categories as pertaining to the experience of the user. The architecture of educare The authors of Moving and Growing suggested that the school should be regarded not as a place of instruction, but as an instructive environment.36 The environmental understanding of architecture was simultaneously embraced by educationists and architects, leading to a period of intense collaboration between the two disciplines during the reconstruction period. There are several implications to this way of conceptualising the space in which education takes place; in what follows, I will examine those pertaining to movement, and how they permit a revision of the history of modern architecture in England, by rethinking the polemical opposition between the Hertfordshire and Hunstanton schools examined at the beginning of this essay as pertaining to two different modes of functionalism that are associated with contrasting models of the subject. During 1947 and 1948, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the Ministry of Education jointly organised a series of conferences, publications and exhibitions to prepare the architectural profession for the massive school building programme required after the war. On the one hand, school experts such as Denis Clarke Hall promoted the functional approach typical of the interwar period, in which the organisation of the school is derived from the objective analysis of quantifiable standards for providing adequate amount of daylight, or the optimisation of the layout to reduce inefficiencies in structure, building materials and space. Hunstanton follows the guidelines laid out by Clarke Hall, who incidentally was the sole assessor of the Hunstanton school competition (see Figure 1).37
Figure 4 Hallfield Primary School, Bishops Bridge Road, Paddington, London. Lasdun Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

Space, Time and Architecture (1941) argued for an affinity between the theory of relativity and modernist compositional techniques such as transparency and interpenetration. In Mechanization Takes Command (1948) he claimed that our thinking and feeling in all their ramifications are fraught with the concept of movement. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 14. A discussion of motion in modernism is found in Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 18801918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 36Ministry of Education, Physical Education in the Primary School Part 1, 43. 37Hall provided diagrams analysing the most efficient classroom layout for providing the standard quantitative requirement for light and ventilation, while reducing the amount of structural steel needed; these were applied to the letter in Hunstantons design. Denis Clarke Hall, Secondary Schools, RIBA Journal 55, no. 1 (November 1947): 712.

34Ibid. 35Giedions

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In contrast to this impersonal discourse, architects employed at Hertfordshire and other counties based their design of schools upon a subjective and qualitative evaluation of the experience of the occupant, the child. This had two different manifestations: the reconsideration of the schools environmental systems according to a new scientific understanding of the subjective, time-sensitive attributes of sensory perception, and the shaping of the spaces of education to affect the childs emotive interiority, in accordance with the rhythmic conception of education. The RIBA conference on schools hosted experts from the Building Research Station (BRS) who introduced the architectural public to a newly developed psychophysical science of sensory perception to adjust environmental aspects such as lighting, heating or acoustics to what children subjectively perceive as comfortable. As described in Towards a Social Architecture, illumination experts developed at the BRS methods for measuring the quality of light, and especially the subjective phenomena of glare, which was first implemented in the design of lighting fixtures and windows in schools. Returning to the theme of rhythm, architects came to regard the eye as a living muscle that requires its own cycle of concentration and relaxation in opposition to the mechanical conception of the eye as a camera-like apparatus. This organic understanding was incorporated into the design of schools by adding variety to invigorate the visual perception that otherwise might become desensitised. Hence the practice of shaping the layout of the outdoor school grounds to reduce glare and provide the eye with varying distances and light intensities and patterns to focus on (see Figure 1). David Medd, a Hertfordshire architect who later headed the Development Group at the Ministry of Educations Architects and Building Branch, associated such vibrant light quality with the experience of being alive:
This play and movement of light and shade brings life to our interiors. As the sun and clouds move, so does everything in a room move a little. It is important in education that we do not make people indifferent and insensitive to this manifestation of life. 38

Complementing the treatment of light was the use of colour. In tandem with pragmatist theory, colour perception was understood to be time sensitive and cyclic. Like odour, it can initially invigorate, but this effect tends to fade in time or, conversely, become disturbing. Hues in spaces where children spent long durations were subdued, while circulation spaces were painted with contrasting and sparkling colours. Another parameter informing colour design was its reflective value, to control glare and light ambience. The combined effect of light and colour was designed to establish a vibrant, animated environment, in contrast with the earlier practice of applying colour defensively to protect walls from vandalism and dirt, or symbolically, to represent the identity of the school. Postwar architectural environments reflect the attempt to scientifically assess the effect of the environment on the childs senses, and organise its effects in space and time in a rhythmic manner, since it appeared to correspond with the underlying physiological and biological laws that govern life. In addition to the promotion of a psychophysical understanding of the environment, the conference included a presentation of the educational theme of growth. The educationist Molly Harrison defined to architects the purpose of progressive education
38David Medd, People in Schools: an Attitude to Design, RIBA Journal 75 (June 1968): 268.

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as providing the best opportunities for growth and to remove hampering influences.39 Harrison, who used the term educare for the welfare states conception of education as nurturing rather than scholastic,40 advanced the metaphor of the school as a place of life, suggesting that the school would be a place full of life, activity and happiness, but also that the building itself would be a living organism that could grow with the changing needs of children. In addition, she argued for a deterministic cause and effect relationship between the aesthetic properties of building and the childs behaviour:
No one who has much contact with children would deny that they are very strongly influenced by their immediate environment. In a pleasant, harmonious and appropriate building they tend to behave in a much more civilized manner and actually become better balanced and more sensitive than they do if they grow up in an ugly, ill planned or merely neutral environment.41

Architects were attracted to the architectural potential of expressing the conception of the child as a growing organism, as it corresponded with their conception of organic architecture, and were receptive to the idea that children are more sensitive than adults to the aesthetic qualities of the school.42 John Harrison, the Chief architect of Surrey County Council argued that:
If the primary aim of education is to provide the most favourable conditions for growth of body as well as mind then the buildings must display the twin qualities of lightness and grace, and the childrens awakening sense of beauty should not be stunted by a formidable and oppressive environment.43

Postmodern architectural and educational criticism was invested in deconstructing the rhetorical association between certain formal modernist traits (such as lightness) and the psychological well-being of the child. But the point is not to evaluate the truthfulness of such a claim on behalf of children, or to criticise it as following a deterministic mode of reasoning, but rather to uncover the practices of power and knowledge that it puts into place. To adjust the layout of the school to the definition of the child as a growing organism, architects employed the same observational techniques used by educationists to observe how children inhabit space. Harrison said that The architect must examine the daily programme and routine of the schools [and] know when the floor ceases to be the toddlers play space, and when the teacher becomes the focal point of audible teaching.44 As seen in Story of a School, the meaning of space is related
39Molly Harrison, The Educational Background, Architects Journal 107, no. 2780 (May 1948): 457. Harrison was a pioneer of museum educational programmes at the Geffrye Museum. 40This term reflects a debate over the meaning of education: its ambiguous etymology could be traced either to the Latin root educare, which refers to maternal nurture at home, or to educere, which refers to instruction of knowledge by men. 41Harrison, The Educational Background, 457. 42An organic current in modern architecture was identified after the Second World War by the architectural historian Bruno Zevi in Towards an Organic Architecture (1945, English version 1950). Zevi brought together the work of distinct architects such as E. Mendelssohn, F.L. Wright, and A. Aalto to advance a more humane alternative to the machine aesthetics typical of interwar modernism. 43John Harrison, Nursery, Infant and Junior Schools, RIBA Journal 55, no. 1 (November 1947): 16. 44Ibid., 15.

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Figure 4 Hallfield Primary School, Bishops Bridge Road, Paddington, London. Lasdun Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

to its active appropriation by children. Second, and even more pertinent to the argument of this essay, architects began to think of space itself in terms of cycles of immersion as experienced by the subject. In the words of David Medd:
To a child the floor can be home sweet home, or the Atlantic Ocean. I want a tiny space in which I can be quiet and undisturbed with only a handful of people I want a chair on which I can balance and experiment; I want a chair in which I can curl up with a good book.45

This subjective conception of space corresponds with the notion of an educational rhythm made of cycles of concentration and relaxation, openness (the ocean) and inwardness (home). A building that displays how such ideas and practices have been crystallised in form is the Hallfield Primary School, Paddington, designed by Drake and Lasdun in 1952. Unlike Hertfordshires vibrant, lucid architecture of modular rectangular prisms, it was informed by the dramatic and expressive aspects of motion in Moving and Growing. Its animated layout represents education as a time-sensitive, dramatic process of rhythmic growth through interaction with the environment, and the oscillation between the subjective states of openness and inwardness: the building is made to appear as if it is affected by external forces as much as directed by its inner nature (Figure 4). It adapts
45Medd,

People in Schools, 266.

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to its surrounding by folding and changing its form to preserve the existing mature trees, while the earth is moved in response to its curves, representing in formal terms Whiteheads definition of education as the achievement of varied activity in the face of its actual environment. Ironically, it seems to recoil from the housing estate designed by the same architects some years before. The schools design engages with motion and emotion, bringing in equilibrium the opposing claims of rhythmic repetition and dramatic epiphany. The maze-like circulation of the building is a metaphor of education as a process of transformation and discovery of the self, following Whiteheads non-linear conception of growth. For the kinetic subject, it renders motion self-conscious. The plan allows for two alternative paths for accessing the classrooms in the infant wing of the school, one can either follow the curvilinear corridor or take a shortcut through a set of intimate outdoor spaces. In part, this is a practical solution that avoids long corridors for an urban school twice as large as the typical suburban Hertfordshire school. Such corridors were condemned by educationists (and child-centred architects) as being institutional, hence oppressing growth; but this layout is also designed to invigorate the senses by exposing the childs body to the outdoors. In the Junior section of the school, the corridor is curvilinear and cannot be seen at once, and has to be discovered in motion. To intensify the experience of motion, its fin-like louvres provide two different prospects, depending on the direction of movement (Figure 5). Returning to the Infant school, the entrance to the leaf-like classroom and exit to the garden are placed on the opposite side of an axis, a dynamic arrangement which is further animated by the spacing of two oblique corners between the three orthogonal
Figure 5 Hallfield Primary School, Bishops Bridge Road, Paddington, London: passage on the first floor between the juniors entrance hall and the crush hall. Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

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

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Figure 6

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

corners (Figure 6). The classrooms are fitted with trapezoid tables which can be grouped in different combinations. Lasdun offered two comparative arrangements frontal and group layout, signifying a shift from frontal seating arrangement which focuses the attention of static children exclusively on the instructor, to group seating in a dynamic, multifocal classroom space, in which the teacher observes the selfinitiated activity of the child; the plan describes seven different activities taking place simultaneously. It resembles in its underlying logic another innovative institution dealing with children from the same time period, the formless, open-ended activity space of the adventure playground, where self-initiated and participatory activity is prescribed to endow subjects with agency while rendering their interiority into an object of knowledge and expertise. The most discreet demonstration of the indirect mode of power theorised by Rose is inscribed into the lavatories. In the same issue of the Architects Journal where Harrison presented to architects the ideal of educare, Lasdun contributed an essay on the design of nursery schools. It suggested that a fixed observation window in the wall separating the playroom from the lavatories is recommended. This will allow supervision without movement from the playroom.46 The elevated window provides the child with a sense of privacy needed for self-mastering the techniques of hygiene while allowing the teacher to observe from the corridor. Hallfield employed symbolism, narrative and the phenomenological properties of materiality and space to embody educare, following Herbert Reads statement that The school in its structure and appearance should be an agent, however unconscious in its application, of aesthetic education.47 The aim of its orchestration of movement was not to harmonise and enlighten through clarity, as in the Hertfordshire school, but to dramatise, contrast and differentiate, by mimicking the vital forces of life and growth.
Figure 6 Typical plan of an infants school classroom, Hallfield Primary School, Paddington.

46Denys Lasdun, Nursery Schools, Architects 47Read, Education through Art, 291.

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Conclusion The interest in the architecture of the postwar school reflects its relevance, not so much as a model for emulation but as critical lens for examining the contemporary condition of both education and architecture. As childhood is privatised as the obligation of parents to prepare their children to succeed in a competitive globalised economy, and as education is increasingly shaped by the requirements of testing, the postwar school stands out as a monument for a time when the prospects of imagining a more humane future were channelled into children and their education. Equally so in architecture, when such sensuous, socially active environments may be evoked, as monuments, to critique the contemporary tendency to produce and consume architecture as visual media. But one should keep in mind that it was precisely for the ambivalent status of children as not yet citizens, as objects of social rights but not subjects of political rights, that they could become subjects of such technologies of aesthetic self-modulation. It is not by chance then that the ideal subjects of postwar architectural functionalism were children, who, due to their immaturity, were more readily naturalised with biological metaphors of enrichment and growth. Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thanks the editors for their generous assistance in developing the essay for publication.

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

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