This article was downloaded by: [University of Hawaii at Manoa] On: 20 November 2013, At: 13:42 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
The Journal of Architecture Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjar20
Architecture for leisure in post-war Europe, 1945–1989: between experimentation, liberation and patronisation ab
Janina Gosseye
c
& Hilde Heynen
a
School of Architecture, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
b
Department of Architecture, TUDelft, The Netherlands
c
KULeuven-ASRO, Leuven, Belgium (e-mail address: ) Published online: 12 Nov 2013.
To cite this article: Janina Gosseye & Hilde Heynen (2013) Architecture for leisure in post-war Europe, 1945–1989: between experimentation, liberation and patronisation, The Journal of Architecture, 18:5, 623-631, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2013.835334 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2013.835334
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
623 The Journal of Architecture Volume 18 Number 5
Downloaded by [University of Hawaii at Manoa] at 13:43 20 November 2013
Architecture for leisure in post-war Europe, 1945–1989: between experimentation, liberation and patronisation Janina Gosseye, Hilde Heynen
School of Architecture, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia and the Department of Architecture, TUDelft, The Netherlands (e-mail address:
[email protected]); KULeuven-ASRO, Leuven, Belgium (e-mail address: Hilde.
[email protected])
Introduction
struction 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 architectural 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 re-conceptualisation 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, the 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 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, whilst 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
The impetus for this special, themed issue came from an International Symposium, entitled ‘Architecture for Leisure in Post-war Europe, 1945-1989’, which took place 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 motives 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 the 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 con# 2013 The Journal of Architecture
1360-2365 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2013.835334
624
Downloaded by [University of Hawaii at Manoa] at 13:43 20 November 2013
Architecture for leisure in post-war Europe, 1945–1989: between experimentation, liberation and patronisation Janina Gosseye, Hilde Heynen
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 gathering sought to address was how architects responded to the challenge of accommodating leisure. Governments, 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 twentiethcentury modernism gradually mutated into something else, challenging the profession to find a new architectural idiom. According to the 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 the 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 to 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 the 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 the Lea Valley 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 in the 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 ludens3 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 the ground, Nieuwenhuys’ 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 aimlessly drift (the dérive)
625
Downloaded by [University of Hawaii at Manoa] at 13:43 20 November 2013
The Journal of Architecture Volume 18 Number 5
through the structure, continuously 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 somehow to 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 their emerging need for leisure provision. Defining the youth club as a ‘place for meeting and conversation’, the French government clearly emphasised community building as one of the keygoals 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 2,500 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 realised in Switzerland, more precisely in the city of Zurich, where the young were also given a central position in the endeavour to accommodate and shape mass leisure. The conception of Die Schule als Offenes Haus (‘school as an open house’), through which leisure infrastructure was integrated in schools, unambiguously promoted leisure as an opportunity for communitybuilding. 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 to 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 have seen already—but also functioned as a common ground for people of any age, religious belief or 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.
626
Downloaded by [University of Hawaii at Manoa] at 13:43 20 November 2013
Architecture for leisure in post-war Europe, 1945–1989: between experimentation, liberation and patronisation Janina Gosseye, Hilde Heynen
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 motives. 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—although many had readily accepted Marshall Plan aid to reconstruct their war-torn economies —worried about the rise of an Americaninduced 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 the 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 commercial culture allegedly propagated by America’s invasive cultural 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 like.6 The ‘official’, government-endorsed, activities in publicly financed leisure infrastructure were 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 intervention can be related to what Michel Foucault termed ‘governmentality’. By connecting ‘governing’ and ‘mentality’, Foucault refers to the way in which the government7— 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 rival 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 systems. 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 ‘23rd August Stadium’,
627
Downloaded by [University of Hawaii at Manoa] at 13:43 20 November 2013
The Journal of Architecture Volume 18 Number 5
which was built in Bucharest in 1953, Puni Alexandru-Rares¸ 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 the World 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 ‘23rd 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 central area surrounding Alexanderplatz in an attempt to show international visitors its advanced state of development.
One of the most impressive new structures built in Alexanderplatz in 1969 was the Fernsehturm. This 365-metre-high concrete, steel and glass structure formed the symbolic and visual centre of the newly constructed centre, which housed the tourist organisation Berlin-Information at its base. Publishing pamphlets, organising events and scheduling bus tours around museums and monuments, this organisation 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 its beliefs and to defend—and, if possible, to 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 USA 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.
628
Downloaded by [University of Hawaii at Manoa] at 13:43 20 November 2013
Architecture for leisure in post-war Europe, 1945–1989: between experimentation, liberation and patronisation Janina Gosseye, Hilde Heynen
Looking for ‘liberation’: redressing countercultural tendencies The ambivalence between experimentation and state patronage can also be detected in the way authorities reacted to the rise of an international counterculture.9 The post-war counterculture originated in response to dissatisfaction with the dominant culture of the Cold War and caused governmental concern the world over.10 Ideological competition in the post-war period encouraged citizens to look beyond material assets and to seek a deeper meaning in their daily activities. Especially among the younger generations, dissatisfaction with consumer culture and rigid social structures became widespread. The question was also posed about how far material welfare translated into authentic well-being. Many women did not feel freer in the modern kitchens that the USA’s vice-president Richard Nixon extolled as a symbol of capitalist accomplishment; many men did not feel freer as they went to their daily jobs in large-scale industries; and many students did not feel freer as they attended mass institutions of higher education. Existential angst thus became pervasive in this context of heightened promises about a better life, while at the same time strong fears existed about the political implications of social deviance.11 Particularly worrying in the rise of an international counterculture from a governmental point of view was not only the geographical breadth, but also the demographical consistency of this movement. These ‘insurgent masses’ were not the dispossessed demanding more access to resources, nor the cultural fringe searching for freedom. Rather, they
were the empowered questioning their own power. This revolt was, in many cases, a revolt ‘from within’: a revolt of the privileged against the leaders who conferred privileges. These ‘revolutionaries’ were the future of each society: the housewife, the corporate employee and the college student—in short, the people whom leaders claimed to serve. Through rock music, beat poetry and abstract expressionist art, these countercultural ‘dissidents’ voiced their criticisms of how the pressures of social conformity destroyed individualism. These media (and many more) were used as vehicles to reassert individuality and to reconnect with ‘nature’: the antonym of the ‘unnatural’ industrial world in which the ‘non-conformists’ felt they were fated to live. Advocates of free living, free love and free drugs similarly claimed that they were returning human beings to the pursuit of pleasure, rather than state-manipulated wealth and power. Comparable criticisms can be detected in both Price’s Fun Palace project and Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon. Through the conceptualisation of a more dynamic architecture (or urbanism) in which freedom and play had a central role, Price and Nieuwenhuys expressed their aversion to the emerging post-war consumer society. Their projects relied on ‘fun’ as a form of insurrection; a destabilising, twisting gesture (or detournement as the Situationist International would call it). Both their projects are in line with the radical ideas of this leftist avantgarde group (of which Nieuwenhuys was a member up until 1960). They were convinced that the shift away from individual expression through
629
Downloaded by [University of Hawaii at Manoa] at 13:43 20 November 2013
The Journal of Architecture Volume 18 Number 5
directly lived experiences towards individual expression by proxy through the exchange or consumption of commodities inflicted grave damage to the quality of human life for both individuals and society. To counteract this tendency, they pleaded for the construction of ‘situations’; moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening the individual (and society) by encouraging the pursuit of more authentic desires. Such notions were clearly at the root of Price’s and Nieuwenhuys’ projects and were also the motor of the emerging post-war counterculture. In Western Europe, countercultural appeals for equality and human association met with the expanding social welfare state model and were accommodated by building programmes for leisure infrastructure. The governmental appeal to create leisure facilities that could instil a sense of community and offer opportunities to find personal fulfilment outside the workplace was thus a way to redress the existential malaise that increasingly perturbed the post-war world. Tom Avermaete’s paper on the Mille Clubs programme perhaps illustrates this point best. Introduced by the French government as means of defining and controlling the large number of unorganised young people in France, this programme gave rise to a set of club designs that, although spatially and aesthetically diverse, were all unambiguously geared towards fostering human association and instilling a community spirit. Another approach that post-war architects adopted to respond to people’s ‘immaterial desires’ and enhance the subjective experience of architecture was to focus on the relationship of a
building to its place and history. Influenced by the ideas of contemporary philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, who in his 1951 address Bauen Wohnen Denken pointed out that modernity was plagued by Seinsvergessenheit, in which ‘efficiency’ and ‘utility’ had replaced the relationship of man to das Geviert (heaven, earth, mortals and immortals),12 architects became increasingly aware of the importance of context in building. Goldhagen and Legault aver that this reorientation was an attempt to combat the numbing repetitiveness of the International Style, and was also heavily influenced by the memory of war, which increased the importance of continuity as opposed to rupture.13 The focus on what was later termed ‘regionalism’ was thus a clear attempt to break through early modernism’s obsession with functionality, sobriety and rationality— leading to standardisation and eventually alienation—and to instil a sense of belonging by helping people to identify with their immediate locale and its history. Regionalism also became an important concept in the construction of post-war tourist infrastructure, albeit for different reasons. The paper on the development of tourism in Greece by Alifragkis and Athanassiou illustrates how architects who were commissioned to design accommodation for mass tourism often embarked on a balancing act. The new tourist infrastructure—often constructed in sparsely developed regions in the Mediterranean with a great natural appeal—was on the one hand to provide modern comfort for the growing tourist class (and thus had to follow a ‘contemporary’ design), while on the other hand it had to exude a certain ‘exoticism’ or ‘colour locale’, making
630
Downloaded by [University of Hawaii at Manoa] at 13:43 20 November 2013
Architecture for leisure in post-war Europe, 1945–1989: between experimentation, liberation and patronisation Janina Gosseye, Hilde Heynen
reference to local (historical) building traditions. The former was to express the contemporaneity of the tourist destination and, by extension, of the country in which it was located, whilst the latter was to articulate the region’s identity and to enhance the tourist’s feeling of ‘being elsewhere’. Likewise, the tourism infrastructure that was constructed in Portugal around the mid-twentieth century displays this ambivalence between the desire for authenticity and regionalism on the one hand, and the economic logic of accommodating mass tourism on the other hand. In his paper on the Algarve, Ricardo Agarez traces its history between the early 1930s and the late 1950s. Citing archival documents from the Estado Novo regime, Agarez details the shift that occurred in attitudes towards tourism in Portugal over three decades. Whereas the initial focus was primarily oriented towards accommodating the ‘lone’ traveller, by the mid-twentieth century it shifted towards building large-scale infrastructure for the mass tourist. This increase in scale, which was accompanied by a better understanding of the disambiguation between a ‘traveller’ and a ‘tourist’, was paralleled by a geographical reorientation. The 1930s’ Pousada, a roadside inn typology, was traditionally implanted in—and oriented towards— the Algarve’s bucolic landscape, while the hotels that were built twenty years later were commonly located on the region’s rugged coastline, offering scenic views over the Atlantic Ocean. Nevertheless, in spite of these scalar and geographical changes, Agarez maintains that expressing regional identity was an important component in 1930s’ and 1950s’ tourist construction alike. Whilst in the case
of the Pousadas, which were part of a state-sponsored programme, the government had great control over the design of the buildings, by the 1950s it was passing this responsibility on to private developers whose key goal was commercial profit. Agarez concludes by suggesting that the resulting ‘wire walking’ between modernity and tradition became an even more precarious exercise after Faro opened its international airport in the mid 1960s.
Conclusion In exploring the development of leisure infrastructure in post-war Europe, this special issue evokes, once again, the close interconnections between architectural experimentation, cultural tendencies, economic development and socio-political issues. The unravelling of the stories behind French youth clubs, Swiss open schools, Romanian sport stadia, German towers, and Portuguese and Greek hotels, demonstrates how architectural typologies intimately reflect changing socio-political constellations. Although the case studies accumulated in this volume cannot claim to offer a comprehensive picture, they do eloquently depict how leisure was one of the domains in which the welfare state, in its various Western and Eastern European embodiments, was forced to confront its own paradoxes.
Notes and references 1. Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire. America’s Advance through 20th Century Europe (Cambridge/ Harvard, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 14.
631
Downloaded by [University of Hawaii at Manoa] at 13:43 20 November 2013
The Journal of Architecture Volume 18 Number 5
2. As early as 1951, at the eighth International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) held in Hoddesdon (England), this reorientation in the conception of architecture (and urbanism) became palpable as the built environment was redefined as a culturally determined matter of inextricably related objective and subjective elements. The topic of the ‘core’ was chosen as the central theme for this meeting and was to illustrate this new approach. Neither a purely physical matter nor an exclusively social issue, the ‘core’ denoted a perceptual and conceptual entity that inextricably linked the spatial and the social: an element of urban culture. See Tom Avermaete, Another Modern. The Post-war Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis— Josic—Woods (Rotterdam, NAi Publishers, 2005), pp. 70–74. 3. In his book Homo Ludens, which was published in 1938, the Dutch historian and philosopher Johan Huizinga argues that as the pace of living accelerated with every passing year because of new developments in science, communication and transport, society had come to neglect the cultural and psychological importance of play. Huizinga’s work had a major impact on post-war architectural culture and was a great source of inspiration for Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon. 4. Hilde Heynen, ‘New Babylon: The Antinomies of Utopia’, Assemblage, 29 (April, 1996), p. 26. 5. V. De Grazia, op. cit., p. 345. 6. Maarten Hajer, Arnold Reijndorp, In Search of the New Public Domain (Rotterdam, NAi Publishers, 2001), p. 77. 7. Although ‘government’ in the context of Foucault’s ‘governmentality’ should not first and foremost be understood within the framework of politics proper but rather as ‘revolving around the art of government itself’, in the context of this introduction, we use this concept to elucidate the reciprocity between the state (or ‘the government’) and its citizens.
8. The ‘application’ of ‘governmentality’ in leisure policies is the subject of an interesting paper by Ylva Habel, which takes the ‘Modern Leisure’ Exhibition held in Ystad (Sweden) in 1936 as its case study: Ylva Habel, ‘The Exhibition Modern Leisure as a Site of Governmentality’, in, Helena Mattsson, Sven-Olof Wallenstein, eds, Swedish Modernism. Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State (London, Black Dog Publishing, 2010), pp. 122–133. 9. The term ‘counterculture’ is generally used to describe the social movements common to most Western societies in the mid 1960s and 1970s which consisted of young people believing in, and acting out, opposition to the dominant values of their society. 10. This account of 1960s’ counterculture is largely based on Jeremy Suri’s illuminating essay in The American Historical review: Jeremy Suri, ‘The Rise and Fall of an International Counterculture, 1960–1975’, The American Historical Review, 114, 1 (February, 2009), pp. 45–68. 11. Herbert Marcuse, one of the most renowned philosophers of the countercultural movement, suggests in his writings that this growing sentiment of disillusionment sprang from the state-directed pursuit of material abundance in the post-war era, which prevented the free and ‘natural’ exploitation of individual fulfilment: Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York, Random House, 1961; 1955). 12. Hilde Heynen, ‘Het vragen waard. Heideggers rol in de architectuurtheorie’, Archis, 12 (1993), pp. 42–49. 13. Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Réjean Legault, ‘Introduction: Critical Themes of Post-war Modernism’ in, Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Réjean Legault, eds, Anxious Modernisms. Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (Montreal, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Cambridge, Mass./London, The MIT Press, 2000), pp. 20–21.
