The German photographer Ursula Schulz-Dornburg took this picture at an adventure playground called Jongensland (“Boysland”) in Amsterdam in 1969. The site, which had been created just after the war, could only be reached by crossing a canal on a boat. In it, children – boys and girls, despite the name – were encouraged, or at liberty, to make days of adventure, building campfires and using scrap building materials to knock together dens and sheds.
When she discovered Jongensland, Schulz-Dornburg had lately been working on a project involving young heroin addicts in Düsseldorf, where she lived. She instinctively felt that the children in Amsterdam had the raw materials for a more constructive future. She ended up making many photographs of the structures built at the site. A new collection of them, Huts, Temples, Castles, is published this month.
As the architectural historian Tom Wilkinson points out in his thoughtful introduction to Schulz-Dornburg’s book, the idea of places such as Jongensland was no happy accident. It was, rather, a deliberate attempt by a group of enlightened European planners and child psychologists to undo the authoritarian ideas of child development that were integral to fascism. In their new vision, bomb sites would become places of free play and creativity.
The photographer reacted to the power of that idea in contrast to her own growing up: “Germany was terrible,” she says in the introduction. “It didn’t change very much, before and after the war. Places built for children were horrible. There was nothing to help you develop your personality. You couldn’t build, you couldn’t work with your hands, you didn’t have the possibility of working with others to discover what you could and couldn’t build. It didn’t exist.” Looking at them today, the Jongensland pictures celebrate an idea of childhood involving risk and teamwork and freedom; they are also a poignant record of a mostly lost utopia.
Huts, Temples, Castles by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg is published by Mack
