Playhouses and Privilege

The Architecture of Elite Childhood

Abigail A. Van Slyck

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English

University of Minnesota Press
14 January 2025

Art & design styles: Modernist design & Bauhaus; History of architecture; Age groups: children

Examining playhouses of the super-rich to understand how architecture contributed to the construction of elite identity and modern childhood

Playhouses and Privilege explores children's playhouses built on British and American estates between the 1850s and the mid-1930s. Different from the prefabricated buildings that later populated suburban backyards, these playhouses were often fully functional cottages designed by well-known architects for British royalty, American industrialists, and Hollywood stars. As Abigail A. Van Slyck shows, these buildings were more than extravagant spaces to cultivate children's imaginations and fantasy lives.

Reviewing a rich archive that includes extant buildings, site plans, family photographs, baby books, and intimate household correspondence, Van Slyck demonstrates that these structures were tools of social reproduction shaped by elite parents' attitudes toward child-rearing, education, and class privilege. Recognizing playhouses as stages for the purposeful performance of upper-class identity, she illuminates their importance in influencing children to internalize gendered codes of conduct as they enacted rituals of hospitality and learned how to supervise servants.

From Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's Swiss Cottage, built on their Osborne estate in 1853, to the children's cottage constructed on the grounds of Cornelius Vanderbilt's Newport mansion in 1886, and from the miniature bungalow commissioned in 1926 for the Dodge Brothers Motor Company heiress to the corporate-sponsored glass-block playhouse given to Shirley Temple in 1936, Van Slyck surveys a variety of playhouses and their milieus to trace the evolution of elite childhood and the broader social practices of wealth. Playhouses and Privilege makes clear that, far from being frivolous, playhouses were carefully planned architectural manifestations of adult concerns, integral to the reproduction of class privilege.

By: Abigail A. Van Slyck
Imprint: University of Minnesota Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 254mm, Width: 178mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 652g
ISBN: 9781517916961
ISBN 10: 1517916968
Pages: 408
Publication Date: 14 January 2025
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Abigail A. Van Slyck is the Dayton Professor Emeritus of Art History at Connecticut College and author of A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 18901960 (Minnesota, 2010) and Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 18901920.

Reviews for Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood

"""Abigail A. Van Slyck puts to rest the notion that buildings made for children are solely about kids, showing that as delightful as playhouses may appear to be, they reproduced class privilege and gendered relationships and were shaped by racism, consumer culture, and changing concepts of play. Beautifully written, impeccably researched, and profusely illustrated, Playhouses and Privilege is a must-read for anyone interested in the study of children, architecture, privilege, and play."" —Marta Gutman, dean, Spitzer School of Architecture, CUNY"