Huts, Temples, Castles
In the years following the Second World War, the City of Amsterdam founded Jongensland Oost as a response to children occupying streets and parks with nowhere structured to play. Reachable only by rowboat, the site grew into a settlement built by its young inhabitants from salvaged materials — huts, towers, shelters, and compounds constructed, used, and dismantled without adult supervision. Children cooked, raised animals, lit fires, and traded among themselves, relying on shared resourcefulness rather than institutional planning.
In 1969, after moving to Düsseldorf with her two children, the architectural photographer Ursula Schulz-Dornburg encountered Jongensland on the other side of the border from Germany's more strictly regulated playgrounds. She photographed the improvised structures extensively as they were built, inhabited, demolished, and reshaped, registering an intuitive architectural intelligence rather than treating the scenes as incidental or picturesque.
The resulting series occupies a position between photobook, architectural record, and artist publication. It documents a genre of vernacular construction with its own conventions, pointing to the role of imagination in defining a building's identity and purpose before institutions impose their own logic. An extended essay by architectural historian Tom Wilkinson accompanies the images, reflecting on the architectural themes Jongensland continues to raise.
Published by MACK Books in September 2022 as an embossed hardcover of 80 pages, the book is largely unseen material from Schulz-Dornburg's archive, presented in English.
Signed edition
This copy is the signed edition of Huts, Temples, Castles. It includes a slip signed by the artist, bound into the inside back cover, with the label wording "Signed by the artist, July 2022, Düsseldorf." The underlying book is the standard 2022 MACK edition; the signed slip is the distinguishing element of this copy, discreet but verifiable. For readers of Photography Books & Photobooks interested in documentary approaches to architecture and the built environment, the volume sits alongside related material in Land, Ruins & Isolation.
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (born 1938, Berlin) works in Düsseldorf and is associated with the documentary, typological approach of the Düsseldorf School. Her photography follows a minimalist, conceptual method, most often applied to historical and vernacular architecture across Europe, the Caucasus, and the Middle East.
