Online Lecture – Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood

Co-sponsored by Glessner House and Forest Society North at The Rocks, this online lecture features Abigail A. Van Slyck, Dayton Professor Emeritus of Art History at Connecticut College, discussing her newly published book, Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood. The book examines children’s playhouses built on British and American estates between the 1850s and mid-1930s, including the Joseph Sears family log cabin playhouse, originally built in the 1880s on Prairie Avenue in Chicago and now located outside the Kenilworth Assembly Hall.

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 author Abigail Van Slyck shows, these buildings were more than extravagant spaces to cultivate children’s imaginations and fantasy lives.

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.

Abigail 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, 1890-1960 (Minnesota, 2010) and Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890-1920.

This program will be recorded and a link will be sent to all registrants. The link will remain live for seven days following the program.

SPECIAL OFFER

Receive a 30% discount on the book by visiting the University of Minnesota Press website and using the promo code PAP3025.

All ticket sales are final; no refunds or exchanges.