In the aftermath of World War II, with the aim of occupying the streets and parks of the rampaging children, the city of Amsterdam founded Jongensland, a space where boys (and occasionally girls, officially banned) could play, build, create and destroy, largely unsupervised. Located on an island accessible only by rowboat, Jongensland became a sprawling settlement built experimentally from waste materials by its young inhabitants.
Here, children cooked, raised animals, lit fires, and traded with each other. Without adult intervention, they relied on shared ingenuity and collaborative ingenuity.
In 1969, when architectural photographer Ursula Schulz-Dornburg moved to Düsseldorf with her two young children, she discovered Jongensland just across the border from Germany's strictly regulated playgrounds. Fascinated by the makeshift buildings where her children would play, she made extensive photographs capturing them as they were built, used, demolished, and remodeled.
His images capture an intuitive architectural intelligence and capture a vernacular building genre with its own conventions and innovations, illuminating the role of imagination in defining a building's identity and purpose. This book features Schulz-Dornburg's largely unseen series along with a lengthy essay by architectural historian Tom Wilkinson that reflects on the architectural themes and lessons that Jongensland continues to offer.
embossed hard cover
21x29cm,
96 pages
