Tea and Talk - Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood

Architectural historian Abigail Van Slyck will talk about her latest book, Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood, in which she examines children’s cottages and playhouses built by upper-class families on both sides of the Atlantic. A tea will be served after her presentation.

The adult grandchildren of Commodore Vanderbilt have an important role in the story, as they were among the first Americans to embrace a practice that had been pioneered by Queen Victoria, building small, yet habitable structures for the use of their children in Newport, on Long Island, and right here in the Berkshires.  Disarmingly quaint, these charming buildings were nonetheless deeply enmeshed in adult concerns, supporting parental ambitions for their offspring and for themselves.

Abby Van Slyck is an architectural historian and the author of three books: Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood (University of Minnesota Press, 2025); A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890-1960 (University of Minnesota Press, 2006)—winner of both the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award; and Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890-1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1995). 

Raised in the suburbs of Detroit, Abby received her undergraduate education at Smith College before earning a Ph.D. in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.  She is Dayton Professor Emerita of Art History and Architectural Studies at Connecticut College and a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians.  She lives in Mystic, Connecticut, where she spends as much time as she can in the garden.