Huts, Temples, Castles

Huts, Temples, Castles – Signed Edition

Huts, Temples, Castles brings together photographs made by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg in Amsterdam between 1969 and 1970. The subject is Jongensland Oost, an experimental postwar playground where children built and dismantled improvised structures — huts, towers, shelters, compounds — from salvaged materials, outside adult planning and institutional logic.

Schulz-Dornburg does not treat these constructions as charming or incidental. She photographs them as a serious form of vernacular architecture: built, inhabited, altered, and rebuilt. The resulting series occupies an unusual position between photobook, architectural record, and artist publication. The images register material decisions and social use rather than romanticising play.

Read now, the work feels contemporary again — not only as a document of postwar Amsterdam but as a study of how imagination produces space before institutions define it. An essay by architectural historian Tom Wilkinson frames the social and spatial questions the Jongensland series raises.

Published by MACK Books in September 2022, the edition is produced as an embossed hardcover. Its restraint — in sequencing, in design, in scale — suits the material it contains.

Signed edition

This copy is the signed edition of Huts, Temples, Castles. It includes an artist-signed slip bound into the inside back cover. The underlying book is the standard 2022 MACK edition; the signed slip introduces a direct trace of Ursula Schulz-Dornburg into the physical copy. For collectors of Photobooks and artist publications, the distinction is discreet but meaningful — the archival character of the object is preserved while the copy itself becomes singular.