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.
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