This article examines the changing architectural environments of deaf education in the nineteenth century, taking the national institutes in Paris and Bordeaux as its main focus. Founded in the late eighteenth century and initially housed in government-expropriated properties, both schools underwent comprehensive renovation and reconstruction…

This paper discusses the duality between global perspectives and local realities that have influenced the design of the school architecture by examining and comparing state school projects in two geographically distant countries: Chile and Portugal. The proposals and experiences of the "Society for the Construction of Educational…

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s architectural education saw to the emergence of radical attempts to reconnect pedagogy with "the real world" and to forge greater social responsibility in architecture. From this epoch of important political, social, and environmental action, this article discusses three "encounters" between…

'New people create new buildings, but new buildings also create New people', so wrote the German art critic Fritz Wichhert in "The New Building: Art as Educator" in 1928. The social and psychological legacy of the First World War was deeply profound and affected how people thought about the future. Children were seen to symbolise a new…

Today, the use of photographs in publications and exhibitions is commonplace, but this was not always so. This article shows how photographs of certain schools that have had lasting impact on design stand in ambiguous relationships to the buildings themselves. Photographs function as part of the design process; they record details of construction…

This article reports on the opening up of a new, rich seam of interdisciplinary research that brings together historians of education with historians of art and architecture to examine the meaning and incidence of "The Decorated School". It examines the origins of the idea of art as educator in the nineteenth century and discusses how…

Recent work on the history of education has been registering a "spatial turn" in its historiography. These reflections from a historical geographer working on the spatiality of knowledge enterprises (science in particular) reviews some recent developments in the field before turning to three themes--landscape agency, geographies of textuality, and…

This paper examines the development of educational institutions and buildings in one slice of a big city over a long timescale. The city is London and the slice Battersea, an inner suburb of mixed character and volatile fortunes. The narrative explores the shifts and interactions between state and voluntary provision, local community needs and…

Invoking a statement by the cultural geographer David Livingstone--that location is essential to knowing--this paper focuses on Danish school architecture during the 1950s and 1960s and the interplay between local geography and developments and discussions on the national and international scene. Through exhibitions and study tours and…

Walter Gropius built the internationally known movement and art school known as the Bauhaus between the years 1919 and 1928. This new institution was born by combining two fledging schools: the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts with the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts. In this new academy all media were regarded as acceptable as Gropius sought to…

What narratives may a micro-study within a school reveal about past lives, roles and design? What traces may be contained within a single room? This paper focuses on an oral history of a "welfare room" in a postwar Infants school as told by a welfare assistant. The school is an early example of school designed by Mary (Crowley) Medd…

This paper examines, through one school's location in Australia, the international reach and nature of the networks associated with New Education; the aims and ideals of Clive and Janet Nield, the main protagonists behind the venture of Koornong School; what transformations they brought to progressive education; and the deliberate assembling of a…

This article explores the European dimension of a collaborative approach to school design through the lives and relationships of a group of key individuals who in England set about transforming school in the post-war era. The philosophy and practice of this group of architects, educators, designers and policy makers, who regarded the school…

As physical evidence of institutional aspiration and achievement, ambition and accomplishment, campus heritage (broadly defined) has emerged as a major component in comprehensive campus planning and in devising a site-specific sense of place. Physical actions related to campus heritage include the renewal and/or repurposing of landmark…

This article reconstructs women's entry into the architecture classrooms of Germany's "Technische Hochschulen," which were, and remain, the nation's primary institutions for training architects. Created in the 1860s and '70s to supply an industrializing nation with well-educated engineers and building officials, these elite colleges…