Architecture for Leisure in Post-war Europe, 1945-1989
Between Experimentation, Liberation and Patronization
Janina Gosseye & Hilde Heynen
The impetus for this special theme issue came from an international symposium, entitled ‘Architecture for Leisure in Post-war Europe, 1945-1989’, which was hosted at the University of Leuven (Belgium) in February 2012. In the decades following the Second World War a stark increase occurred in the construction of state-sponsored leisure infrastructure, including cultural centres, sport centres, holiday homes and youth clubs. This symposium set out to explore the correlation between the socio-political motivations that inspired this new building programme and the architectural inflexions of its resulting infrastructures.
Identifying the massive investment in the construction of publicly accessible leisure infrastructure as a logical component in the expansion of the post-war welfare state – which not only targeted education, social security and health care, but also democratised the right to leisure – the geographical frame of this symposium initially focused primarily on Western and Northern Europe. A glimpse behind the Iron Curtain (in the form of a multitude of abstracts submitted for the conference) however revealed that in the post-war era communist regimes also strongly encouraged – and financially supported – the construction of leisure facilities. The geographical frame thus expanded to include Eastern Europe, which in turn resulted in the broadening of the socio-political context.
Situated at the nexus of architecture discourse and socio-political history, the six essays in this special issue paint a fascinating picture of the development of leisure infrastructure in post-war Europe, ranging from the establishment of youth clubs in France, to the reconceptualization of the school as an open house in Switzerland, to the construction of a large sports stadium in Romania and, finally, to the accommodation of tourism in culturally diverse regions in Europe, including the Algarve in Portugal, former East-Berlin and Greece. In spite of the diverse nature of the essays, a few common threads that connect these contributions can be identified. The collection of essays exemplifies how the development of leisure infrastructure in post-war Europe on the one hand sought to create a common ground for the contemporary egalitarian society, enabling architects to experiment with new concepts and forms, while on the other hand empowered governments to influence the way in which citizens spent their free time, thus creating the possibility for subtle, and sometimes less than subtle (even rather blatant) coercion of citizens into participating in the ideological beliefs underlying the formation of the state. Meanwhile the search for ‘something else’ – a form of liberation from the routines and conventions of everyday life – was also at play.
Architectural inflexions: room(s) for experimentation
One of the key questions that the conference sought to address was how architects responded to the challenge of accommodating for leisure. Governments, who were faced with the emergence of a civilization du loisir, or leisure-based society, did not immediately have ideal solutions in mind and in many cases turned to architects to seek guidance on how to shape mass leisure. The discipline of architecture however did not have ready-made answers either, since it was in this period undergoing something of an existential crisis. Tarnished by growing criticism regarding its founding principles, early twentieth century modernism gradually mutated into something else, challenging the profession to find a new architectural idiom. According to architectural theorists Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, post-war architecture entered a period of ‘anxious modernisms’, during which architects assumed different positions in an attempt to ‘[…] renew rather than abandon the legacy of twentieth century modernism […] by recasting some of its tenets and abandoning others’.[1] Responding to one of the main points of critique – that modernism was too technocratic and had bypassed phenomenological aspects of the discipline – post-war architecture sought to address not only people’s physical needs but also respond to their immaterial desires. A new set of concepts was introduced, which revolved around notions such as, ‘authenticity’, ‘community’, and ‘sense of place’.[2] These elusive concepts were open to interpretation and, when confronted with the question of mass leisure, invited architects to experiment.
One of the best-known examples of experimental architecture designed for the new leisure society is Fun Palace, a project that Cedric Price worked on for more than a decade starting from the early 1960s. Price envisaged Fun Palace as a building that was capable of change in response to the wishes of its users – a free-spirited, Monty Pythonesque machine for fun. Hovering over Camdenthe Lea Valley, a borough of London, on a structural grid of steel lattice columns and beams, this paradigm of time-based and anticipatory architecture was not only radical in its approach to design and technology, but also vanguard for the manner in which it addressed contemporary socio-political issues. It was in a way anti-architecture, since it refused to congeal into a stable form, continuously adapting its spaces, subdivisions and devices to accommodate ever-changing users and desires. A similar logic is inherent to New Babylon, a project developed in the 1960s by the Dutch avant-garde artist Constant Nieuwenhuys, who imagined a utopian world in which ‘imagination is in power and homo ludens[3] is sovereign’[4]. The project presented ‘an image of a social form in which the desires of the individual and the needs of the community are inseparably entwined.’ Perched above ground, Constant's megastructure would literally leave the bourgeois metropolis below and would be populated by man at play, in search for new, authentic sensations. Its inhabitants would continuously aimlessly drift (the dérive) through the structure, all the timecontinuously encountering new people in ever changing settings. Nothing would remain the same, since users would be able to transform their surroundings in a continuous sequence of adaptations and appropriations. This massive experiment in nomadism would nevertheless lead to community, as people would be permanently forced to negotiate and deal with one another. ‘Leisure’ and ‘play’ were thus perceived by both Price and Constant as agents for societal change, and the conception of utopian (leisurely) environments was expected to somehow offer ‘common ground’ for the new, authentic homo ludens who would arise from these experiences.
Price’s and Constant’s projects were clearly utopian and never built as such. Many leisure projects that were built however shared some of their underlying beliefs, especially with respect to the importance of ‘authenticity’ and ‘community’. The development of leisure infrastructure in Europe hence rapidly became a synonym for experimentation in ‘community building’, as exemplified by the papers of Tom Avermaete and Marco Di Nallo. In his paper ‘A Thousand Youth Clubs’, Tom Avermaete describes how in the 1960s the French government outlined and implemented a building programme introducing a widespread system of youth clubs in French villages and towns to accommodate the emerging need for leisure for the youngsters. Defining the youth club as a ‘place for meeting and conversation’, the French government clearly emphasized community building as one of the key-goals of this building programme, but did not outline strict design guidelines beyond specifying that the units needed to be largely prefabricated, and easily assembled on site without safety risks or special instruments. This gave architects great leeway to experiment not only with materiality, technology and form, but also with notions of collectivity, homeliness and privacy in the public sphere. The results of this massive enterprise was a series of ready-made kits – of which over 2500 were assembled across France throughout the 1960s and 1970s – that to this day present a living testament to post-war experiment with leisure - and community building.
A comparable project was realized in Switzerland – more precisely in the city of Zurich – where youth were also given a central position in the expedition to accommodate and shape mass leisure. The conception of ‘Die Schule als Offenes Haus’, following which leisure infrastructure was integrated in schools, unambiguously promoted leisure as an opportunity for community-building. Giving rise to many design proposals – some conceived as extensions to existing buildings, others as entirely new complexes – this novel typology eloquently expressed the desire for a more egalitarian society, based upon universal access not only to education, but also leisure. According to Di Nallo, schools lent themselves particularly well to this type of experiment as they not only represented the epitome of ‘play’ – an essential ingredient for societal change, as we saw already – but also functioned as a common ground for people of any age, religious belief and political conviction. They thus became the community centres of many new neighbourhoods, embodying a sense of solidarity and emancipation that was deemed characteristic of the Swiss version of citizenship.
Socio-political expressions: Steering leisure between patronage and governmentality
Even though the development of leisure infrastructure in Western Europe relied heavily on experimentation with new modes of life and new patterns of social engagement, it also incorporated other political and social motivations. The example of the Swiss schools is in this sense representative of the somewhat paternalistic undertone that characterised many (if not most) governmental building programmes aimed at the accommodation of mass leisure. Worried that leisure time would become a vacuum, or worse, filled with activities of questionable moral value, authorities assigned an educational function to leisure. Western European countries – even though many had readily accepted Marshall Plan aid to reconstruct their war-torn economies – worried about the rise of an American induced consumer culture, which not only drastically changed people’s daily lives but also had a major impact on the way in which they spent their free time. Consumerism invoked fear of cultural degradation in governmental circles and among leftist intelligentsia. Many European intellectuals continued to refer to Europe’s (traditional) high standards of cultural production and consumption, contrasting its patronage of the arts, egalitarian education system, and heavily subsidized books, records and theatre tickets to the squalid pulp commercial culture allegedly propagated by America’s invasive imperialism.[5]
Cultural development and cultural participation, promoting authentic, ‘healthy’ experiences in newly developed leisure facilities were thus given primacy as a response to the dulling tendencies of consumer culture, offering commercially driven, ‘superficial’ leisure activities in cinemas, fairs and the likes.[6] The ‘official’ government-endorsed activities in publicly financed leisure infrastructure was thus to contribute to the formation of a certain type of citizen; a healthy, culturally informed and socially responsible individual able to uphold and represent the values of the state. This type of state-sponsored interventions can be related to what Michel Foucault termed ‘governmentality’. By connecting ‘governing’ and ‘mentality’, Foucault refers to the way in which the government[7] – which he described as ‘the conduct of conducts’ – attempted to produce the citizen best suited to fulfil governmental goals and the specific ways of reasoning, systems, regulations and measures it applied to achieve these goals.[8]
In the Cold War climate, leisure infrastructure indeed became a vehicle to promote socio-political beliefs and also to express ideological superiority over the rivalling bloc. The development of leisure and tourist infrastructure for the masses thus fulfilled several goals. It not only ensured domestic stability, by enabling all strata of the population to enjoy vacation and leisurely activities at an affordable price, which kept them ‘content’ and away from the picket line, but also allowed (predominantly socialist) countries to showcase the success of their governing system. The use of contemporary ideas in architecture and urban design for the construction of leisure infrastructure accordingly became a means to communicate a nation’s modernity to the outside world. In his paper on the 23 August Stadium, which was built in Bucharest in 1953, Puni Alexandru-Rareș demonstrates how communist Romania took ideological propaganda through the development of leisure infrastructure one step further by making the ‘success story’ concerning the stadium’s building process part of its international marketing strategy. Originally constructed to host the International Youth Congress and theWorld Festival of Youth and Students, this stadium was erected by an ‘army’ of (alleged) volunteers (who were in fact forced to volunteer, risking imprisonment if they refused), whose ‘enthusiasm’ enabled its completion in less than six months. Not only its modern building techniques and the formidable construction narrative, but also the ensuing victories of Romanian sportsmen in this stadium contributed to the creation of a ‘sellable’ mental construct of a glorious communist Romanian state.
While the paper on the 23 August Stadium unveils how Romanians were, through the construction of leisure infrastructure in their own nation, (once more) confronted with the harsh realities of the communist regime, Michelle Standley’s essay ‘Here Beats the Heart of the Young Socialist State’ conversely demonstrates how the promotion of East Berlin as a tourist destination in the 1970s seduced visitors from neighbouring socialist countries to (even if only for a short time) revel in the prospect of a bright socialist future. Standley iterates how in the 1960s the German Democratic Republic (GDR) adopted modern functionalist concepts and building techniques to redevelop its new downtown surrounding Alexanderplatz in an attempt to show international visitors its advanced state of development. One of the most impressive new structures built on Alexanderplatz in 1969 was the Fernsehturm. This 365 meter high concrete, steel and glass structure formed the symbolic and visual centre of the newly constructed downtown, which housed the tourist organization Berlin-Information at its base. Publishing pamphlets, organizing events and scheduling bus tours around museums and monuments, this organization educated visitors about Berlin (and the GDR), thereby presenting a successful model of socialist modernity to the rest of the world. The GDR’s turn to the built environment and tourism thus formed an integral part of the cultural Cold War, and presents a clear-cut attempt to gain international recognition as a legitimate modern state.
The Western bloc similarly employed leisure and tourist infrastructure to promote their beliefs and defend – and, if possible, expand – their sphere of influence. In the paper on the introduction of modern mass tourism in Greece, Emilia Athanassiou and Stavros Alifragkis describe how in the post-war years state-driven tourist development was promoted as the way to the country’s economic recovery. Supporting this rejuvenation strategy with Marshall Plan funds allowed the U.S. to introduce a Western lifestyle in Greece. Greek tourist development was thus in essence an educational project to create a new generation of Greek consumers, whose approach to modern life was in tune with the West. This not only settled the country’s cultural ambivalence about its position between the East and the West, but it also effectively established Greece as an ideological (as well as territorial) barrier against communist expansion.