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Scholarly Research

Rhythmic Self Regulation: Motion and Emotion in Postwar Educational Spaces

Roy Kozlovsky
Published: Cooper Union School of Architecture

This paper examines postwar school architecture in light of educational practices that sought, following the philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead’s conception of education as a rhythmic and aesthetic process, to introduce free and expressive techniques of motion into the classroom. Building on the sociologist Nikolas Rose’s insight into the workings of the British welfare state in Governing the Soul, it argues that postwar educational spaces were designed to incite the child’s free and spontaneous activity and bring it under observation, in order to constitute a self-regulated and emotionally adjusted citizen who would overcome the ‘fear of freedom’. The educational role of movement was both to initiate the child into a harmonic, graceful yet ‘natural’ mode of communication, and to unlock, by the power of cathartic action, the child’s inner emotional resources—at the pre-lingual level of experience. The shift towards accounting for motion and emotion, and the requirement for empirical observation of the educational scene in terms of a fluctuating process, has informed the ways in which architects inscribed the user and the programme into the design process: This issue will be explored in two case studies, the modular Templewood Primary School (1950) by the Hertfordshire Country Council and the labyrinthine Hallfield Primary school by Denys Lasdun (1952). The paper identifies two models for aestheticizing the corporeal experience of movement and negotiating between the opposing claims of dramatic transformation and rhythmic repetition, and explores their critical implications to contemporary practices of animated architecture.

Research Topics:

• History and Criticism
• Modern Architecture & Urbanism