Too hot to sleep? Take the bed outside

There is a photograph of what looks like a dark little greenhouse, or perhaps a garden shed, sitting atop the familiar curved portico of the White House. Dated 1920, it actually depicts a structure for outdoor sleeping erected 10 years earlier by President William Howard Taft. It would stay on the roof, providing escape from the famous DC summer heat, until a solarium was built in its place in 1927.

There’s something strange about this ad hoc structure on the Palladian perfection of the presidential home, but it was only one manifestation of an early 20th-century fashion for alfresco sleeping. The sleeping terrace, or porch, and the outdoor bedroom became an almost ubiquitous feature of early Modernism, a response to the tuberculosis rife in densely packed cities that was thought to be alleviated only by fresh air. It was revived during the “Spanish” flu epidemic after the first world war.

Even then, there was nothing new about it. My mother used to tell me of summers in Baghdad when, following a centuries-old tradition, her whole family would decamp to the flat roof of their house to sleep beneath the stars. The flat roofs of Middle Eastern and Asian cities constituted another layer of urban domesticity, a horizontal plane of sleep from Cairo to Kolkata. In India, it is still a frequent sight to see people sleeping on rooftops, both day and night.

The porches of 19th-century American houses in the southern states were often kitted out as entire bedrooms with rows of beds for the whole family. Even in mid-20th century New York, it was common to look down from skyscrapers at flat roofs inhabited by sleepers.

It might seem that with extreme global warming arriving faster than we imagined, this historic mode of sleeping might be due a comeback. But the widespread adoption of air-conditioning in the 20th century led to wealthier householders in hot climates relying on technology to make their interiors habitable, rather than adapting their lifestyles or their architecture to the climate.

Modernist architecture had at its heart a desire to overcome the dark, dank conditions of the 19th-century consumptive city. The villas and apartments of the 20th century were caricatured at the time for their resemblance to sanatoria, with their all white-tiled walls, tubular steel furniture and sun terraces.

Even in Letchworth Garden City, one of the town’s planners, Barry Parker, built a ‘sleeping tower’ that he used as an open bedroom

Think of Eileen Gray’s E-1027 villa in France (1926-29) or Richard Neutra’s Los Angeles Lovell Health House (1927-29). Both feature extensive webs of terraces and solariums, the latter with bedroom terraces for outdoor sleeping.

Rudolph Schindler, a Viennese contemporary of Neutra’s, designed his eponymous House in West Hollywood in 1922 for himself, his wife and another couple, the Chaces, with rooftop “sleeping baskets” instead of bedrooms. Taking advantage of the California climate, this was Modernist plain-air sleeping at its zenith. (The Schindler House was also, incidentally, a house for swinging. For Rudolph and his wife Pauline, the sleeping baskets were open bedrooms for an open marriage.)

Modernists were not alone in adapting outdoor sleeping for the global north. The nature-loving, anti-industrial architects of the Arts & Crafts in Britain and the US were also preoccupied with alfresco dreams. In the unlikely setting of Letchworth Garden City, the settlement’s planners, garden city pioneers Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, designed Crabby Corner and Laneside (1904). When Parker moved into the house, he added a “sleeping tower”, a top-floor loggia that he used as an open bedroom.

In the warmer climes of Pasadena at around the same time, Greene and Greene were building the beautiful, if fussy, Gamble House (familiar perhaps for its role as Emmett “Doc” Brown’s house in Back to the Future).

This low-slung, intimate Craftsman home featured sleeping terraces for each of its three bedrooms. Irving Gill’s much more austere houses — proto-Modernist white cubes that imbibed in their architecture Greek vernacular, classicism and Pueblo houses — also accommodated outdoor sleeping. His 1911 Miltmore House, not far from the Gamble House, featured sleeping porches, as did many other of Gill’s designs.

Other American Arts & Crafts adherents, notably Purcell & Elmslie and Bernard Maybeck, frequently added sleeping porches to their houses, often on the upper storeys to better catch the cool breezes.

The outdoor and openable bedroom persisted into high Modernism and then mid-century modern. There are few better examples than Albert Frey’s own residence, Frey House II, in Palm Springs, its bedroom walls replaced by sliding glass doors and vivid yellow curtains, their pleats flapping in the desert breeze like an Issey Miyake dress. In Frey’s flexible indoor/outdoor sleeping space, the fluidity of the curtains was deliberately contrasted with the surreal mass of rock that intruded into the room from the other side. Rather than blast through it, the architect made it a feature.

Curtains reappeared in Shigeru Ban’s Curtain Wall House in Tokyo (1995), which plays on the inflexibility of the glass curtain wall, Modernism’s most singular and recognisable feature, here made literal. Deep terraces have white curtains drawn around them to create an indoor/outdoor sleeping space while providing privacy in a hyper-urban setting that could not be further from the isolation of Frey’s desert dwelling.

At the edge of another desert, Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy designed housing in a hybrid of Modernist and vernacular forms, using concrete to replace mud in settlements that built on the blocky, white courtyard language of the historic Arab city. These were houses for both the middle classes and the poor, with terraces as outdoor rooms, complete with fireplaces, seating and alcoves, always with sleeping under the stars in mind.

These are some of the great houses and housing designs of the modern era. Yet a little over a century ago, the outdoor sleeping they incorporated was mainstream. Catalogues for American house-types featured sleeping porches wrapping around colonial-style houses. It was also a British colonial staple. From Sydney to Singapore, sleeping porches, decks and sleep-outs (an Australian term) were almost de rigueur, stymied only by the arrival of air-con.

At the beginning of the 20th century, pre-A/C, outdoor beds were marketed in an array of technological innovations. The adverts of the California Fresh Air Bed Company stand out. The company was established by William Young Kinleyside in San Francisco and made a space-saving bed that was half bay window and half sleeping nook. With a rolling top (like the revolving lid of a bread bin), users could be in an indoor/outdoor state with the basket projecting beyond the outer wall, a mesh screen allowing fresh air to flow through while excluding bugs. But Kinleyside turned out to be a conman and the business was never the success it might have been.

Baby cages, on the other hand, did become a thing. Suspended from city windows, the wire cages contained a baby in a cot, giving a semblance of the outdoors to the apartment-dwelling infant. Photographed against a background of skyscrapers, traffic and soot-stained walls, they look profoundly unsettling. In their place came the first-generation dripping air-con units.

If baby cages are no longer a familiar sight in New York, Sukkah balconies still are, around the festival of Sukkot. Mostly erected by Orthodox Jewish families, these are temporary sleeping structures either on existing balconies or bolted on to buildings. With roofs of rush, reed or palm, they are meant to evoke desert life — a reminder in Brooklyn that in the Middle East, there is nothing unusual about sleeping outside.

Outdoor sleeping has been a historical response to both disease and hot weather. And here we are again, living in fear of an airborne respiratory disease and having to adapt to extreme shifts in climate. Air conditioning has encouraged us to live in the least sustainable of places, but the responses to global warming can no longer be solely technological and energy-reliant; we must, surely, use whatever breeze we have in the most efficient manner.

Yet in spite of attempts to resurrect the concept, few architects are designing homes with outdoor sleeping areas. Berkeley-based Fernau + Hartman are among them, their slightly agricultural/industrial-looking houses building on vernacular languages and traditions while remaining contemporary in design.

Australian architect Glenn Murcutt has been doing something similar for decades, using the materials of an almost agricultural architecture (corrugated iron, weatherboarding, galvanised steel) to create indoor/outdoor spaces that project into the landscape.

Sleeping outside isn’t always easy. Mosquitoes and beasts, noise, security, comfort, privacy, harsh weather: each space throws up its own set of issues. Yet many of them are barely different from the effects of opening a window. Each can be addressed, often by low-tech means: nets, upper-storey locations, screens and so on.

It won’t be for everyone but the option of a summer guest room or elevated relief from steamy nights is one element of early eco-architecture that surely merits revisiting.

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic

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