Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood

Program Type:

Author Talk

Age Group:

Adults
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Program Description

Event Details

Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood


Architectural historian Abigail Van Slyck will talk about her most recent book, which explores
children’s playhouses built on British and American estates between the 1850s and the mid-
1930s, notably the 1886 children’s cottage constructed on the grounds of the Breakers,
Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Newport mansion. This illustrated presentation will situate that
relatively nearby building in the context of cottages and playhouses that came before and
after, with particular attention to the Swiss Cottage built for Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert’s children in 1853 and the miniature bungalow designed for the heiress to the Dodge
Brothers Motor Car Company in 1926.

Abigail Van Slyck is an architectural historian recognized for her ground-breaking research at the
intersection of building typologies, gender analysis, and the spaces of childhood. In 2022, she was
inducted as a Fellow in the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) in acknowledgement of her
significant contributions to the field of architectural history. Her most recent book is Playhouses and
Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood (University of Minnesota Press, 2025). She is also the
author of A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890-1960
(University of Minnesota Press, 2006), which won both the SAH’s Alice Davis Hitchcock Award and the
Abbott Lowell Cummings Award from the Vernacular Architecture Forum (VAF). Her first book was Free
to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890-1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1995). She has
twice been a Fulbright scholar, most recently in the U.K. in 2019. Van Slyck has served her field in
multiple leadership roles, included as President of both SAH and VAF.


Van Slyck is Dayton Professor Emerita of Art History and Architectural Studies at Connecticut College.
She received her undergraduate education at Smith College and earned a Ph.D. in Architecture at the
University of California, Berkeley. After teaching at the University of Arizona for ten years, she joined
the faculty of Connecticut College in 1999. There she took on increasingly responsible leadership roles
before her retirement in 2019, culminating in a term as Dean of the Faculty, the College’s chief academic
officer.

 

 


 

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