Here Comes the Sun: Architecture and Public Space in Twentieth Century European Culture

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Here Comes the Sun, Architecture and Public Space in 20th Century European Culture

Ken Worpole, Reakton Books 2000

Worpole's book investigates the public spaces in and between buildings used for leisure. He has previously written on urban environmental and cultural policy, and has now completed this descriptive history of this activity type. It is learning from history so that we might do things differently, and possibly better, when we come to do them again.

After the First World War, policy makers pictured youthful, working class bodies, made healthy by exercise and tanned by the sun, and they imagined an escape route from cities. The book with its appropriate bright yellow cover, featuring a horizontal sunbather sheltered by a swirling masonry wall, high up above the city, concentrates less on the Modern Movement 'hero architects', but more on the connective tissue: the parks, open air museums promenades and lidos. It describes how social reformers, planners and architects in the early 20th century tried to remake the city in the image of a sunlit, ordered utopia, primarily in Northern Europe with their dreams of release from the confines of overcrowded slums and terraces.

It is a discursive narrative survey with some illustrations of activities, and the buildings supporting them. It begins with the Garden Cities, the social programme of the Modern Movement. The illustrations are good and heroic using black and white and colour photography, with descriptive text but few subheadings and no plans and building drawings, and little on quantities, sizes and detailed site planning. This is not a book on architecture, more a polemic. More comparisons, tables and period ephemera would have enlivened it. There are references in the footnotes, but no bibliography as such.

Seven chapters start with Port Sunlight, the Fabians, health and efficiency, life outdoors, health centres (Finsbury, Peckham), progressive schools, sun terraces and roof gardens, white formalism, concrete and glass. Progressive Holland and Scandanavia feature well. The survey ends in the 90s with the medium and larger sized open air, harder textured public spaces, now more common on the Continent than Britain, in cities like Paris and Barcelona. The worthy Mile End, East London planted bridge over the road, is his last example. There is no concluding section.

It tells us about the ideas, ideals and progressive thinking, the lessons and projects of a braver new world. These still need to be more widely promulgated in the amenity-starved areas of inter war, and post -war suburban development. Is the private sector providing a better future? The regeneration task is not over.

(This review was first published in Urban Design Quarterly 82, Spring 2002 and is reproduced with the Editor's kind permission)