18 C O N T E X T 1 1 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 1 althy environments Healthy environments althy environments environments Healthy Healthy environments environments Healthy environments CHRIS POND AND GRAHAM TITE A good start in life Open-air schools, surviving today here and there in a few fragments, once had a pioneering role in exploring new ways of living and developing building design. From the towers used for brewing or making lead-shot, to tram sheds, beam engine houses or telephone kiosks, numerous building types evolved their own unique forms in response to technological needs or social patterns, frequently short-lived. In their time these buildings generated a literature of design and architecture that, in some cases, is the main evidence of their former existence, with their sites long-ago cleared and the memory of their appearance fading. An example is the open-air school, once typical of the UK and other western industrialised countries. Such schools were found widely during the first half of the 20th century. To the authors’ knowledge, there is no British example that still operates on this model except for a lone, but listed, example in south east London. Elsewhere, all of these former school buildings have either been demolished or whittled down to a few fragments used in other ways and hardly capable of recognition. Through using archives, however, the story of the open-air school experiment can still be told. Fresh air and sunshine had become recognised as therapeutic for many consumptives since 1840. The open-air school movement was an adaptation of established sanatorium treatments for physically weakened children.The layout and typical elevations of the buildings evolved to make much use of widely spaced and open-sided structures. These can be contrasted with typical board schools in cities during the final decades of the 19th century; and the open-air system perhaps made vital contributions to the realisation of early-20th century modernism, with its emphasis on glass-sided design and the reduction of structural elements to minimal proportions of the whole. An example of a former open-air school site is located in one of the most remote parts of rural Essex. The first open-air school building at Mayland, as altered, in March 2011, now in use as the Henry Samuels Memorial Hall and (below) shown on postcard of about 1910. (Photo: Chris Pond)
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