“Little Red School House, What Now?”
Two Centuries of American
Public School Architecture
Amy S. Weisser
Lower Manhattan Development Corporation
This article examines two centuries of public school architecture in the United States
with attention to the relationship between architectural form and reformist educational philosophy. Building types reviewed include the one-room schoolhouse, the
metropolitan school at 1900, the early twentieth-century suburban school, and the
late twentieth-century urban school. The siting, building plan, and exterior articulation of both ideal plans and built structures are reviewed as evidence of the expectation and realities of the public school as a democratic institution.
Keywords:
architectural history; public schools; modernism; schoolhouses
The average high school graduate has spent about 13,000 hours within the walls
of a public school building. These 13,000 hours are potentially the most impressionable and valuable hours of his life. . . . Through this environment . . . the
whole costly process of education may be encouraged or nullified. The school
building is the tangible and visible evidence of the attitude of the public towards
education.
—William G. Carr, National Education Association, 19351
Schooling is one of the fundamental responsibilities of democratic
society. The buildings that house our educational system are both containers and shapers of this program, providing a lasting image of our
community and nation. Too, they give physical testimony to the contradictions between intention and reality that pervade the histories of built
form, public education, and democratic culture. We know this empirically
as students, parents, and taxpayers. We know this anecdotally as we recall
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I offer my thanks to Dominic Vitiello, Journal of Planning History editor Christopher
Silver, and the two anonymous reviewers for their well-considered comments that helped shape this
essay. Thanks also to my fellow panelists, Michael Clapper, Roy Strickland, and George Thomas, and the
audience members at the 2003 St. Louis meeting of the Society for American City and Regional Planning
History for a thoughtful conversation about lessons to be learned from the history of school design. For
all my work on school architecture, I owe a significant debt to Adam Yarinsky, Ann Fabian, and the
many architects, teachers, and administrators who have shared their schools with me.
JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY, Vol. 5, No. 3, August 2006 196-217
DOI: 10.1177/1538513206289223
© 2006 Sage Publications
196
Weisser / AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL ARCHITECTURE
197
the drafty, unfinished, one-room former claim shanty of 1883 that Laura
Ingalls and her five homesteading students steadfastly reached through a
half-mile of snow in the Little House on the Prairie series or the “oneroom rotten wood building” Anne Moody and her fellow “colored” schoolmates suffered through in the 1940s in Coming of Age in Mississippi.2
William Carr posted his thoughts about the symbolic import of school
buildings at a moment when educators, architects, and Americans in general saw their communities at the threshold of profound, symbiotic change.
For at least a century, American architects and educators had shared Carr’s
faith in architecture’s potential to give meaning to the public school as an
institution. A survey of American school architecture of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, with a special emphasis on the theories and buildings
of the 1930s, reveals this consistent confidence in the school building’s
capacity for reform. In the 1930s specifically, architects intent on positing
a “modern” architecture embraced the school program as an ideal one by
which to demonstrate the conviction that form should follow function in a
democratic society. Analysis of several school buildings of this era and those
that come after crystallizes the overall supposition that architecture is a
didactic display of a society’s agreement on the purposes of education.
As with any survey, the summary format neglects exceptions, such
as deviations based on regional socioeconomic differences. Ingalls’s and
Moody’s one-room schools, for example, took nearly identical forms despite
a sixty-year gap between the two authors’ experiences. Both attended
school in a building type that had long been discredited by education professionals. The broad-based historical study also discounts the potential
longevity of school buildings. In New York City in 2005, for instance, thousands of students attended high school in landmarked Gothic revival–style
school buildings built by the city a century earlier.3
Mindful of these and other divergences—brought on by the dichotomies
such as rural/urban, poor/rich, and white/nonwhite—this précis starts with
the one-room schoolhouse on a spare plot of land and progresses to a
school building of multiple identical classrooms around the time of the
Civil War. As educators add rooms distinguished by function to the schoolhouse program, the school becomes a multistoried functional building,
often located downtown. Around the turn of the twentieth century, schools
grow larger to accommodate expanded populations while architects use
planning strategies and historical styles to control the jumbled growth. In
the first half of the century, as educational practices evolve, the school
expands horizontally, reaching out to the landscape and moving from the
municipal center to residential precincts. In the second half of the century,
the alliance with suburbia strengthens, with classrooms understood as
workrooms; schools in urban areas address the multiple pressures of
changing demographics, aging building stock, and the high costs of land
and construction.4
198
JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2006
From the 1830s, architects and educators have consistently strived to
elevate public education by modernizing the school building. They have
expanded the classroom, adjusted its relationship to other building parts,
improved lighting and ventilation, and sought clarity in the building’s external appearance. Horace Mann, secretary to the Massachusetts Board of
Education, and Henry Barnard, who held similar posts in Connecticut and
Rhode Island, first drew wide attention to school design as essential to education reform. With School Architecture (1838, 1842), Barnard promoted
reform ideas throughout the Northeast. From the first paragraph, Barnard
launched his attack: “[Schoolhouses] are, almost universally, badly located,
exposed to the noise, dust and danger of the highway, unattractive, if not
positively repulsive in their external and internal experience.”5
The country schoolhouse loathed by Barnard was generally a oneroom, wood-frame building. Expediency governed its facilities. Irregularly
cut windows limited light and air, a wood-burning stove battled the winter’s cold, and an assortment of benches, chairs, and desks provided minimal workspace. The teacher’s desk and perhaps a blackboard marked the
front of the room.
To Barnard, this architecture seemed slipshod and demonstrated the
low priority given to schooling, especially in rural communities. Moreover,
Barnard disliked the conditions whereby a child learned life experience
on the farm, vocational skills during an apprenticeship, values from the
church, and only literacy and arithmetic at school.6
He set out to improve the status of the school by advancing teacher
education, curriculum reform, and school buildings. As a model one-room
schoolhouse, he offered a design by Horace Mann. Here, order prevailed
where chaos had reigned (see figure 1). The teacher’s desk—placed front
and center on a raised platform—allowed an easy view of the entire space.
Neat rows held fifty-six individual desks. Windows lined the two side
walls. The design’s spatial organization integrated Barnard’s reform agendas: it placed authority in the teacher and narrated a clear pedagogical
program. On walking in the door, one knew where to go and how to act.
The well-designed architectural shell, according to Barnard, also demonstrated a community’s commitment to education. Here, Barnard felt, lay
the breeding ground of democracy.7
In the second half of the nineteenth century, as modernization shifted
production outside the home and brought increasing social and cultural
diversity, the school deepened its commitment to civic responsibilities.
Like other social organizations of the period, most notably the reformbased settlement house, the school sought to augment the farm, church,
and family as the training ground for adult life. At school, a student
learned more than reading, writing, and arithmetic; he or she learned
common pieties like patriotism and Protestantism, and modes of behavior
like responsibility and respect for authority.8
Weisser / AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL ARCHITECTURE
199
Figure 1: Horace Mann, One-Room Schoolhouse, 1838, Plan
Source: Henry Barnard, School Architecture, 1848.
Schools struggled to meet the increased curricular and social demands.
Beginning in 1847, with Boston’s Quincy School, the country’s first fully
graded school, schools adapted the one-room prototype through either multiplication or combination, often with convoluted results. One large country school of 1870 was really a set of identical and autonomous schoolhouse
units, reminiscent of Horace Mann’s design, piled together. In an urban high
school of the same year, a broad list of curricular aims placed scientific and
vocational laboratories alongside basic classrooms. While the regularly
200
JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2006
spaced windows on the palazzo-like block suggested repetitive cellular units
inside, in reality the complex programmatic demands disrupted the plan’s
space, light, and air.9
By the turn of the twentieth century, these schoolhouses—often factorylike, dark, and dank—had grown so disorganized in program and plan that
reformers renewed their calls for wholesome environments for the nation’s
youth. In their view, the school did not only supplement the home. It was
the home’s replacement. Reformers again charged the school with moving
beyond textual education to education for life, for the benefit not only of the
students but also of society at large.10
To such advocates, a clean, orderly school building seemed a foil to the
“immoral” tenement environment that housed many young Americans.
At the turn of the century, reformers advanced the standard classroom
plan by attending more closely to illumination, ventilation, and sanitation.
Then, they enlarged the building to meet the school’s increased responsibilities. Gymnasiums, auditoriums, cafeterias, locker rooms, clinics, laboratories, and workshops housed physical training, exercises in citizenship,
health care, and experience in science and the fine and practical arts.
Architects used the classroom as an interior building block, the large collective facilities to create a visual hierarchy, and bilateral symmetry and
overscaled entranceways to establish the school as a coherent architectural whole. The proud stance of the elevation and the ample provision of
facilities transformed the nondescript factory-like schoolhouse of most of
the nineteenth century into a civic monument. This monument expressed
an investment in children and education. Reformers believed that “the
schoolhouses of any community are gauges of its enlightenment.”11
New York City, for example, expanded and restructured its school system
in the 1890s. The Board of Education signified the importance of buildings
by creating a department devoted to school architecture, with C. B. J.
Snyder as its superintendent. In 1896, Snyder introduced the innovation of
the H-plan, an arrangement that allowed inexpensive midblock plots
to serve as school sites. By ringing two open courts with classrooms, the
H-plan drew light to the classrooms and reserved ground space for outdoor
play. Snyder provided his schools with broad windows, forced air, indoor
toilets, central heat, fireproof materials, and fire escapes.12 (See figure 2).
Out of such reform efforts in New York City and other metropolitan areas
grew large building programs to accommodate population increases and
modernize outdated facilities. Snyder, along with Dwight Heald Perkins in
Chicago; William B. Ittner in St. Louis; E. M. Wheelwright in Boston; James
O. Betelle in Newark, New Jersey; J. J. Donovan in Oakland, California; and
others, established detailed guidelines for lighting, air quality, sanitation,
fire safety, and square footage per pupil.13
In the twentieth century, while metropolitan architects and social
reformers reworked the school building, as well as other municipal structures, to guarantee safety, order, and respect, educational theorists began to
Weisser / AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL ARCHITECTURE
201
Figure 2: CBJ Snyder, DeWitt Clinton High School, New York City, 1906, Exterior
Source: Columbia University Teacher’s College, Special Collections. Used with permission.
rethink the process of education. Identifying a traditional academic curriculum as inadequate in the wake of major social changes, John Dewey and
fellow educational theorists also railed against traditional architecture. For
Dewey, the impassiveness of the standard classroom thwarted opportunities
for student communication, curiosity, construction, and creativity. Dewey
made a direct connection between the physical arrangement of the institutional space and programmatic possibilities. He wrote,
[I]f we put before the mind’s eye the ordinary schoolroom, with its rows of ugly
desks placed in geometrical order, crowded together so that there shall be as little
moving room as possible, desks almost all of the same size, with just space enough
to hold books, pencils, and paper, and add a table, some chairs, the bare walls, and
possibly a few pictures, we can reconstruct the only educational activity that can
possibly go on in such a place. It is all made “for listening”—because simply studying lessons out of a book is only another kind of listening; it marks the dependency
of one mind upon another.
The standard classroom treated students as an aggregate mass by enforcing “uniformity of material and method.” Dewey believed children did not
naturally cohere as a unit: “The moment children act they individualize
themselves.”14
Dewey’s ideal school figuratively penetrated the boundary walls of the
classroom and school building to link abstract theoretical knowledge,
202
JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2006
experimental activities, and the concrete reality of the greater community.
In parallel with the concurrent City Beautiful movement with its substantial rethinking of public institutions, Dewey diagrammed the school as centered on a library and reaching out to home, park, university, museum,
public library, and business through its rooms devoted to textiles, shop,
kitchen, and dining. Experimentation in the work/classrooms led inward to
scholarly research and outward to active participation in the community.15
In terms of actual built structures, Dewey’s progressive education meant
movable desks, increased storage, natural light, and fresh air. It meant
informality in classroom identifications, expansion of school activities to
the outdoors, and classrooms harboring different activities concurrently.
Images of the Lincoln School at Columbia University Teachers College,
with which Dewey was associated in the 1910s and 1920s, show large
classrooms with blackboards, bulletin boards, storage, window seats, and
movable furniture. While the plan of the room loosened and expanded, the
shell of the classroom and the school building differed little from those of
the traditional school.16
Dewey’s agenda did not significantly affect most public schools in the
first several decades of the century. In the 1910s and 1920s, architects
continued to refine established design rules that ensured efficient use of
light and space. These standards had at their base the assumption that
desks and chairs sat in stationary rows. To prevent shadows on the desk,
light ideally came from the left side, and slightly in front, of the student.
Architects thus insisted that windows run the full length of a single side of
the room. To guarantee that light reached the inner edge of the classroom,
architects mandated that the windows cover 40-50 percent of the area of
the exterior wall, equivalent to 25 percent of the floor area, and that the
width of the room not exceed two times the overall height of the windows.
Windows started three to three-and-a-half feet above the floor, a sufficient
height to avoid glare, and ended six inches below the ceiling.17 Standard
makers calculated specific dimensions for room, aisle, and desk. In a typical “how to” article of 1916, the ideal classroom measured twenty-three by
twenty-nine feet, with a height of twelve feet. These dimensions permitted
42 desks, arranged in 7 rows of 6. The age (size) of the students determined
the exact placement of the desks. For the seventh grade, for instance, the
desks measured 16 by 23 inches and were placed 2 feet, 7 inches, back
to back.18
School standards held fast. A survey of “modern elementary schools” in
twenty-nine cities in the United States, conducted in 1933, found that
82 percent of the classrooms had widths between 22 feet, 6 inches, and
24 feet, 6 inches, and lengths between 29 feet, 6 inches, and 32 feet,
6 inches. Their heights ranged from 11 feet, 6 inches, to 13 feet, 4 inches.19
School façades, too, saw little alteration, continuing to make use of historical styles for the resonance of these images. In the 1930s, the classi-
Weisser / AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL ARCHITECTURE
203
cism on the façade of a school (or post office or town hall) suggested an
American heritage originating in Greek democracy or the Roman republic.
A Colonial Revival exterior offered a link to national history. Regional
styles, like the Spanish Revival in the Southwest, connected the school
with local community values.20 Many architects and communities believed,
“One of the important functions of school architecture is to sell education to the public. This is accomplished by making attractive that side of
education which the public see[s] most.”21 “A pleasing composition of the
exterior” communicated the institution’s importance to its viewers.
Nevertheless, during the Depression decade, educators renewed the call
to reform the school. Like their predecessors, these theorists responded
to demographic and social pressures. Population growth, migration, and
lack of employment opportunities broadened the public school to include
more working-class, rural, and nonwhite students, and meshed with a progressive social consciousness, a legacy from the beginning of the century.
Educators across the country saw the school as a tool with which to make
substantial improvements, or to control considerable changes, in students’
lives in the trail of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration.22 By the
1930s, a broad array of communities embraced the progressive program of
public education described by Dewey, with its focus on the “whole child” and
its consideration of psychological and physical as well as mental development.
Progressive pedagogy believed in a child’s inherent ability to learn and took
its cues from the child’s interests rather than from organized subjects. In
institutional terms, progressivism yielded broader, more comprehensive, and
more flexible programs. The expansion of nursery schools and kindergartens
extended the school’s formative role. The development of junior high schools
identified the needs of young adolescents as distinct. Criteria for grouping students by age or ability could be loosened to accommodate individual differences. Materials of instruction could become more closely keyed to children’s
aptitudes, concerns, and local context. The school’s mandate expanded
beyond the classical subjects of language, mathematics, history, and science to
include physical education, health education, vocational education, and other
subjects geared toward the betterment of local family and community life.23
To support these pedagogical and social goals, reform-minded architects
recommended transforming the overall structure of the school building.
They cast a skeptical eye at the H-shaped, as well as U- and T-shaped,
schools, which they saw as behemoths bulging under the weight of new
scholastic activities, equipment, and mechanical systems. Architects sought
to restructure the hierarchical relationship among student, teacher, and
community, and to welcome a curriculum influenced by Dewey. Although
some revisionist suggestions emerged before 1929, they flowered in the
forced incubation of the early years of the Depression.
As early as 1922, Boston architect William Roger Greeley echoed Dewey
with a dismissal of the modern schoolroom he saw around him, calling it
204
JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2006
“depressing with its monotonous desks, screwed to the floor, its windows
along one wall only, its walls completely covered with blackboard, its
unfluctuating temperature and dry air, and with the child allowed no movement.” According to Greeley,
Probably the object is to produce a standardized American by the use of new, standardized desks, in a standardized room with standard air at a standard temperature,
under standardized teachers whose old age will be pensioned by Standard Oil. . . .
Until a perfect form has been evolved, to standardize is to stifle further development.
This is the case with schoolhouse design.
Greeley looked to changing educational methods and the specific needs of
the community for guidance.24
At the same time, William Lescaze, Richard Neutra, and other modern
architects attacked the external arrangement of the conventional school.
Believing, like Barnard, Snyder, and Dewey, that environment influenced
psychological well-being, they asked how students could be prepared for
the future in an architectural shell representing the past. While still claiming concerns about light and air as guiding forces, they went beyond reorganizing the classroom’s functional amenities. They reconfigured the place
of the classroom in the overall building plan, and they altered the role of
the building’s exterior. The architects expressed interior activities on the
exterior, removing historical veneers of values. By declaring an affinity
between new forms and social concerns, modernists catapulted the process
of making space into the definition of the school as an institution.
In Architectural Forum’s “School Reference Number” of January 1935,
four architects presented conjectural designs that advanced a new school
architecture. Among these, recent émigré Richard Neutra proposed ideas
for an “experimental” school, the progenitor for his six-room addition to
the Corona Avenue Elementary School in Bell (Los Angeles), California,
built 1934–1935. Echoing Dewey, Neutra denounced the traditional “listening school,” with its
classrooms with four substantial walls, floors, ceilings, windows, and some provision for
heat, light, and air. In these schools, the teacher does the thinking, planning, and initiating, while children sit passively accumulating information about the world in which
they live. (See figure 3).
Neutra took Dewey one step further, however, when he exploded the shell
of the classroom to facilitate “learning through living.” Neutra’s “basic
unit of education—the individual classroom” had windows on two sides;
provided movable desks, storage closets, and a sink for an activity program;
and opened to an exterior work space.25
At Corona, the physical realization of Neutra’s Forum proposal, which
received national press at its completion in the fall of 1935,26 twelve-foot-wide
sliding glass doors opened the classrooms in the one-story building to the
Weisser / AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL ARCHITECTURE
205
Figure 3: Richard Neutra, Corona Avenue School, Bell, California, 1935, Exterior
Source: Security Pacific National Bank Photograph Collection, Los Angeles Public Library. Used with
permission.
school grounds and established a physical link with the neighboring houses.
The rooms abandoned a traditional order implied by fixed rows of desks
and a single set of windows for an “activity” room of movable furnishings
uniformly lit from east to west.
While Neutra emphasized the organization of the individual classroom,
Swiss-born architect William Lescaze, in his Forum design, attacked the
overall design of the typical school. Lescaze mocked the terms used by
architects who specialized in school buildings: 4 stories, 2,910 pupils, 1
auditorium, 2 gymnasiums, a kindergarten, 22 special rooms, and 46 classrooms. He rejected the implication that design was a matter of fitting these
units into a prescribed shape, like a T or U. Instead, Lescaze demanded
sensitivity to local geographic and demographic conditions and educational expectations. He advocated zoning schoolrooms according to their
function, considering the location of the sun in placing room types, clarifying traffic patterns, and orienting the building to minimize street noise.27
Lescaze soon realized these mandates with Ansonia High School,
Ansonia, Connecticut, built 1935–1937. The two-story building responds
to its residential setting with its mass forming an L set close to its two
adjacent streets (see figure 4). Lettering and a dynamic play of solids and
voids along the main façade articulate the school’s public functions.
206
JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2006
Figure 4: Lescaze and Sears, Ansonia High School, Ansonia, Connecticut, 1935-1937
Source: Architectural Forum, December 1937. Used with Permission.
The placement of the school’s entrance suggests an approach to the
school by foot; collective functions (such as auditorium and gymnasium)
are pulled away from the classroom core to simplify circulation and allow
community use of the nonclassroom facilities for town meetings and athletics; and the two bars of the building form on their nonstreet sides a
courtyard of playing fields.28
The Forum’s four conjectural designs caused much exclamation.
“Letters have come,” the Forum reported, “not in dozens, but in hundreds.”
The magazine printed 120 of the letters as a “cross-section of contemporary architectural thinking.” The issue challenged local school boards,
politicians, and parents. While a detractor “doubt[ed] very much if it
would be possible to ‘sell’ any of those January issue schools to an average
suburban school board building committee,” a supporter contradicted,
Weisser / AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL ARCHITECTURE
207
“Would you kindly put me in touch with these architects? We are contemplating building a high school.”29
Journals and books through the 1930s and into the 1940s continued to
study new school architecture. The June 1936 issue of the Architectural
Record focused on school buildings and highlighted Neutra’s Corona
Avenue School and Lescaze’s Ansonia High School, the latter then under
construction.30 Yet these images are more promotional than reflective of a
new architectural reality. Instead, most modernization of schools in the
1930s came in terms not of reconceptualization of the plan and embrace
of functionally expressive exteriors but of the continued improvement of
mechanical systems, systemization of classroom layouts, addition of group
facilities like auditoria and gymnasia, and clarification of the relationship of
classrooms to these larger amenities.31
Indeed, with 127,531 school districts in America in 1931, each directed
by a separate group of administrators, public schools varied considerably
from the pictures presented in books and magazines. Financial resources
and political culture played significant roles in the relationship between
traditionalism and progressivism in both education and architecture.32
Moreover, in the 1930s, as at other times, a significant number of students
and teachers persevered under deplorable physical conditions. According to a survey by the National Education Association (NEA), 687,611 students attended school in condemned buildings, while many others
attended school only part-time because of limited availability of school
facilities or attended school in portable, rented, or other temporary structures. The NEA extrapolated that 2,700,000 students nationwide were
inadequately housed. Moreover, 25 percent of the school buildings in use
were more than fifty years old.33
To spur economic recovery during the Depression, the Public Works
Administration, a federal agency created in 1933, facilitated an enormous increase in school building through 1939 by providing local communities with financing for 70 percent of new construction—including
the Corona Avenue School and Ansonia High School. During some years
of the decade, school building topped all other public building types in
the number of dollars spent on construction.34 The availability of funding for school buildings, regardless of any radical changes in school
design, altered the state of education by increasing access to education
and the diversity of educational offerings—sometimes in the face of
local opposition to the changes involved. Rural districts consolidated
their one-room schools into large central buildings, exchanging the convenience of neighborhood schools for the efficiency and expanded
opportunities of greater scale. Cramped, fire-prone, wood-frame grade
schools gave way to large, secure, steel-frame elementary schools. Small
school districts extended their educational offerings from the eighth
grade to the twelfth.35
208
JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2006
Although World War II interrupted school and other construction,
wartime building introduced new building technologies and materials.
Wartime concerns also gave attention to labor and material economy that,
with the nationwide marketing of school building products, came to represent efficiency. Open floor plans and exteriors devoid of historicist detail
gained currency through their perceived practicality and affordability.
The population boom of the postwar period brought an escalated need
for school buildings. During the half century between 1920 and 1970, the
United States population doubled to 203 million residents, with 70 percent
of the growth coming after 1940.36 While public school enrollment held
steady from 1930 to 1950 (at approximately 25.5 million), the number of
children in public schools climbed markedly in the next twenty years,
gaining 10 million students each decade. The delay in school construction
brought on by the Depression and the Second World War combined with
the rapidly rising enrollment to create a crisis in academic housing. In
1950, the public spent $1,133,000,000 on educational buildings (including
those at colleges and universities), more than twice as much as it had spent
a decade earlier. The dollar value of new public educational construction
doubled in 1960 and again in 1970.37 At the beginning of the 1960s, schools
accounted for one fifth of all public building. At that time, almost half of
American youngsters attended school in a building constructed in the previous fifteen years. In 1960, Time enumerated the national capital investment in school plants at $30 billion and estimated that another $25.5
billion would be spent on schools in the next decade.38 Much of the growth
in population and school building took place in suburbs, with key suburban schools setting the standard for design.
Architectural publications and New York City’s Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA) waged campaigns during and after the war to bring modern design
to the average American. Schools were a key building type in this promotion. This initiative dovetailed with the federal government’s support for
suburban home ownership and helped make suburban school architecture
a paradigm for the postwar period.39 All three major architectural publications, Architectural Forum, Architectural Record, and Progressive
Architecture, printed special school issues in 1945 as the end of the war
approached.40 From 1942 to 1946, MoMA circulated around the country a
traveling exhibition, Modern Architecture for the Modern School. This was
followed by Modern Buildings for Schools and Colleges from 1947 to 1951.
Modern Architecture for the Modern School featured Corona Avenue
School; the Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois; and other visually
modern buildings.41
Crow Island was particularly commended. Designed by Perkins,
Wheeler and Will with Eliel and Eero Saarinen in 1939-1940, the school
building was planned to be the architectural expression of Winnetka’s
superintendent of schools’ nationally recognized educational philosophy
Weisser / AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL ARCHITECTURE
209
Figure 5:
Eliel and Eero Saarinen with Perkins, Wheeler and Will, Crow Island School, Winnetka,
Illinois, 1939-1940, Exterior
Source: Author.
(see figures 5 and 6). Crow Island is organized around a central hub for
administration and assembly. The entrance faces Winnetka’s main thoroughfare across a broad lawn. Classroom wings reach out from this hub
into the generous site. The schoolrooms are L-shaped and designed to
provide specific space for different modes of learning (individual/group,
and academic/nonacademic). The L also permits each classroom direct
access to the outdoors. With details such as individualized ceramic wall
sculptures to identify each outdoor classroom and with auditorium seating graduated in size to accommodate children from the smallest to the
tallest, Crow Island exemplified for many of this period the ideal in progressive school architecture.42 (Recognition as such continued to come
with the American Institute of Architects’ presentation of its second
Twenty-five Year Award to the school, in 1971, and the designation of the
school as a National Historic Landmark in 1990.)
School boards, taxpayers, and architects were spurred forward by the
continued publication of guides to good school design that reinforced modernist guidelines of façades expressive of the interior functions, programdriven plans, and site development that responded to the physical makeup
of the community. In Schools, 1949, architect Larry Perkins of Perkins
and Will (formerly Perkins, Wheeler and Will) and Walter Cocking, editor
of Progressive Architecture, outlined the contemporary process of school
design and its ideal results, calling a school an efficient center for learning “tools” for future life.43 Perkins and Cocking predicted the future
210
JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2006
Figure 6:
Eliel and Eero Saarinen with Perkins, Wheeler and Will, Crow Island School, Winnetka,
Illinois, 1939-1940
Source: Architectural Forum, August 1941. Used with permission.
school: it would no longer be one building but a series of function-specific
unpretentious units; these would be one story and of simple (modular)
construction; the classroom would be flexible with few fixed spaces, and
beauty would derive from utility.44
One school of the period that became a model for many others is Heathcote
Elementary School in Scarsdale, New York. The school was designed in the
1950s by Perkins and Will, the Chicago firm that first gained public prominence from its work on the Crow Island School. Heathcote developed
within social circumstances reminiscent of those in Winnetka, Illinois. Like
Winnetka, Scarsdale, an upper-middle-class suburban village within commuting distance of a major metropolis, was devoted to the maintenance of an
affluent and stable suburban community with desirable residential real
estate and a positive reputation. Scarsdale residents understood that a strong
educational system advanced the town’s desired public image. When school
board members decided to construct a new elementary school, they hired
well-regarded school architects. To this, they added an ample construction
budget and a construction schedule that supported design development.45
In fashioning the plans for the Heathcote School, Perkins and Will
recalled many lessons of Crow Island (see figure 7). The firm designed the
Weisser / AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL ARCHITECTURE
211
Figure 7: Perkins and Will, Heathcote School, Scarsdale, New York, 1952
Source: Architectural Forum, July 1954. Used with permission.
school in coordination with the community, sitting in on classes and
working with teachers to plan the building.46 The eventual plan accepted
the basic organization of the institution proposed by Crow Island, with its
emphasis on the classrooms as school homes, its identification of the center of the building as a gathering place for the community of the school
and for the greater town population, and its distinct zoning of programmatic elements. At Heathcote, Perkins and Will intensified these qualities
by pulling the classrooms further away from the building’s institutional
heart, increasing the size and flexibility of the individual classrooms, and
expanding the collective facilities at the hub of the building. As at Crow
Island, architects and educators agreed that architectural space could
influence the success of an educational program.47
212
JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2006
Although exemplary of an architectural solution that addressed the spatial and emotional aims of the program, the Heathcote School was more
of an exception than a representative of the schools of its time period. The
rarefied social environment in which Heathcote was created contributed
to the success of the building, grounding period concerns about the adaptability and economy of the institution in a specific understanding of the
link between architecture and promotional image.
When the context is not as generous, physical solutions do not always
meet social goals. Urban schools in particular are constructed under circumstances that threaten the easy success of the school building. A city
does not often build an individual school as a showcase; instead, it juggles a
number of school housing demands. Land, financing, and bureaucratic
attention are often restricted. During the postwar period, suburbs filled with
new residents, new houses, and new schools; cities suffered under aging
citizens, aging building stock, falling population, and falling tax revenue.
In the 1950s and 1960s, New Haven, Connecticut, like Scarsdale,
New York, linked community development and social construction. New
Haven, like the suburbs, hired noted educators and architects to ensure
that the new schools excelled according to progressive standards. New
Haven’s public schools, however, did not become a source of pride for the
community or a model for others.
New Haven’s school construction program was a component of an elaborate urban redevelopment program the city designed in response to the
Federal Housing Act of 1949 and 1954. The New Haven Redevelopment
Agency (NHRA) privileged visible changes over more systemic ones.
School architecture fit this model:
Significant physical changes, among other things, appear necessary to create the
symbolism necessary for a personal sense of identification with an area and a feeling of satisfaction with the living space. . . . The school building can become this
symbolic focus.48
The Board of Education hired Dr. Cyril G. Sargent, a professor of education at Harvard University, to study the existing school system. Sargent
recommended reorganizing the district to put elementary schools in the
middle of residential neighborhoods, thereby permitting the schools to
serve as after-school resources to the community.
In 1961, Perkins and Will, in association with local architect Carleton
Granbery, designed a prototype elementary school. The architects sought to
maximize a limited site while maintaining a one-story building; they used
the roof for play space and an interior court for light and air (the Quinnipiac
School, 1964). Nationally recognized architects constructed other New
Haven schools, including one building that predated the renewal program—
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s Henry A. Conte School, Wooster Square,
1960—and Eero Saarinen’s (later Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and
Weisser / AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL ARCHITECTURE
213
Associates) Richard C. Lee High School, Church Street South, 1964. The
fame of the architects brought outside interest to New Haven; magazines
praised each of these schools as they were built.49
Despite the input of experts and the surfeit of good intentions, the
school buildings did not have long-standing effect on the success of the
institution or the neighborhood. Although the rationally planned schools
met functional needs, the buildings failed to translate a message of renewal
and hope to residents. New Haven’s population became smaller, poorer,
and more segregated under renewal, and feelings of despair intensified.50
The example of New Haven represents an extreme attempt at linking
school architecture and social reform. The architects’ influence extended
only to the façade and plan of the school buildings. The NHRA controlled
their siting; the Board of Education dictated a construction system that
emphasized efficiency and easy expansion; the redevelopment plan limited
funding and speeded construction; roads, parking, and slum clearance
received greater attention than institutional development; the redevelopment process absented local residents from decisions about the character
of their neighborhoods; and residents of redevelopment areas believed the
new programs benefited business concerns, the middle class, and local Yale
University more than themselves.51
In 1995 and 1996, after a comprehensive study of the nation’s school
facilities, the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that at least a third
of all schools in the country needed extensive repair or replacement,
and estimated the overall financial burden for this work at $112 billion.52
With the economic boom of the 1990s, construction expenditures
grew substantially, reaching a high of $24.7 billion in 199753 and another
high in 2001 of $44.4 billion. (From 2001 to 2004, with the national economic downturn, aggregate dollars spent on educational construction
declined.)54 The substantial construction growth of the late 1990s did
not, however, entirely meet the demand for new and renovated facilities,
and aging buildings coupled with population changes regularly increased
the load.
Addressing the nationwide requirements for educational facilities
remains a diverse task. Today, the U.S. public educational system consists
of approximately 17,000 public school districts or other administrative
agencies serving 47,700,000 students and taught by 3,000,000 teachers.
This system operates through 94,000 individual schools, some with multiple buildings.55
Architectural solutions to the necessary housing of school activities
are also varied. They range from Perkins and Will’s lauded Perry Community Education Village in Ohio, a sprawling, well-appointed, kindergarten
through twelfth-grade campus of the 1990s designed to provide community
facilities along with specific learning environments appropriate to students
of various ages, to modest “school-within-a-school” retrofits giving individ-
214
JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2006
ualized identities to themed New Century high schools set within New York
City public high school buildings built earlier in the twentieth century.56 As
disparate as these solutions are, they share a dependency on their physical
and cultural context and the history of school typology.
American public school architecture developed from negotiations among
communities, students, teachers, school boards, architects, and outside
experts as to the purpose of education and the responsibilities of architecture to support this agenda. As the collective understanding of these two disciplines shifted, so too did their interrelationship. The history of American
public school architecture during the past two centuries is a typical
American story of call and response: reformers consistently demand greater
clarity and amenity in the face of perceived unhealthy disarray, and communities regularly soldier on with inherited structures that have proven suitable for generations. Coupled with this dissonance is the reality that the
American educational system is by definition wide-ranging and dispersed,
and of local control and funding. Midcentury school buildings of lasting local
and national value illustrate the importance of community unanimity on
function to give bold forms common meaning. While a community of unified
aspirations, such as an upper-middle-class suburb like Winnetka (or even a
little town on the prairie), is able to reach a lasting, positive agreement on
the significance of a new school building, in a district where the social forces
are not as bucolic, school architecture—both new and old—loses meaning.
Notes
1. Quoted in Architectural Record, September 1935.
2. Laura Ingalls Wilder, These Happy Golden Years (1943; reprint, New York: Harper & Row,
1953), 13; and Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968; reprint, New York: Dell, 1974), 21.
3. Curtis High School, Staten Island, 1902-1904 and additions; Erasmus Hall High School,
Brooklyn, 1903-1911 and additions; Flushing High School, Queens, 1912-1915; and Morris High
School, the Bronx, 1904.
4. See also William W. Cutler III, “Cathedral of Culture: The Schoolhouse in American
Educational Thought and Practice since 1820,” History of American Education Quarterly 29 (Spring
1989): 1-40.
5. Henry Barnard, School Architecture, 2nd ed., ed. Jean and Robert McClintock (1848; reprint,
New York: Teachers College Press, 1970), 23.
6. Lawrence A. Cremin, Traditions of American Education (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 12;
and Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 (New
York: Hill & Wang, 1983), 14.
7. Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American
Education, 1876-1957 (1961; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1964), 8, 14.
8. Cremin, Traditions of American Education, 45-47. See also Michael B. Katz, The Irony of
Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).
9. William Andrus Alcott, Essay on the Construction of Schoolhouses to Which Was Awarded the
Prize Offered by the American Institute of Instruction August 1831 . . . (Boston, 1832); Thomas H.
Burrows, ed., Pennsylvania School Architecture: A Manual of Directions and Plans for . . . Common
School Houses (Harrisburg, Pa., 1855); Charles P. Dwyer, The Economy of Church, Parsonage and
School Architecture Adapted to Small Societies and Rural Districts (Buffalo, N.Y., 1856); and
Weisser / AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL ARCHITECTURE
215
James Johonnot, Country School-Houses; Containing Elevations, Plans and Specifications . . .
(New York, 1859).
10. Adele Marie Shaw, “True Character of New York Public Schools,” World’s Work 7 (December
1902): 4205-6, as cited in: Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, and John Montague Massengale,
New York 1900: Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism, 1890-1915 (New York: Rizzoli, 1983), 78.
11. Frank Irving Cooper, “The Planning of School Houses,” American Architect 96 (November 17,
1909): 189-90; and A. D. F. Hamlin, “Consideration in School House Design,” American Architect 96
(November 17, 1909): 192.
12. C. B. J. Snyder, “Public School Buildings in the City of New York,” pts. 1-4, American
Architecture and Building News 93 (January 25–March 11, 1908): 27-30, 35-41, 75-77, 83-85.
13. Perkins, Fellows and Hamilton, Educational Buildings (Chicago, 1925); William B. Ittner, The
Planning and Construction of Modern School Plants (St. Louis, Mo., 1922); Edmund M. Wheelwright,
School Architecture: A General Treatise for the Use of Architects and Others (Boston: Rogers and
Manson, 1901); James O. Betelle, “Architectural Styles as Applied to School Buildings: A Study in
Architectural Types,” pamphlet from American School Board Journal (1919); and John J. Donovan,
School Architecture: Principles and Practices (New York: Macmillan, 1921).
14. John Dewey, The School and Society; and The Child and the Curriculum, ed. Philip W.
Jackson (1900 and 1902; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 31-33.
15. Dewey, The School and Society, 81.
16. Harold Rugg and Ann Shumaker, The Child-Centered School: An Appraisal of the New
Education (Yonkers-on-Hudson, N.Y.: World Book, 1928): 1; and “Dedication of the Horace Mann
School for Boys,” Teachers College Record 16 (January 1915): 1.
17. A. D. F. Hamlin, “Consideration in School House Design, Part II,” American Architect 96
(November 24, 1909): 226-27.
18. Walter H. Kilham, “The Modern Schoolhouse,” Brickbuilder 24 (January 1915): 3.
19. R. S. Pitkin, K. E. Oberholzter, and G. D. Strayer Jr., “Housing the Modern Elementary
School,” School Executives Magazine 52 (June 1933): 323-24.
20. Lisa B. Reitzes, “Moderately Modern: Interpreting the Architecture of the Public Works
Administration” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1989), 472-516.
21. Donovan, School Architecture, 24.
22. David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974).
23. Arthur Zilversmit, Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice, 1930-1960
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 5-7, 18; and Cremin, The Transformation of the School,
viii, 306-8.
24. William Roger Greeley, “The Fourth Dimension in Schoolhouse Design,” Architectural Forum
36 (April 1922): 128-30.
25. Richard J. Neutra, “New Elementary Schools for America,” Architectural Forum 62 (January
1935): 23-26.
26. For press clippings, including notices in the Christian Science Monitor, Fortune, the Los
Angeles Examiner, the New York Times, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Morning, see
Richard J. Neutra Papers, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles, box 195.
27. William Lescaze, “Letters about a Modern School,” Architectural Forum 62 (January 1935):
46-50, 55.
28. “Ansonia High School, Ansonia, Conn,” Architectural Forum 67 (December 1937): 487-92;
and “Ansonia High School, Ansonia, Connecticut,” in “Schools: Building Types,” Architectural
Record 81 (April 1937): BT 13-15.
29. “Letters [to the Editor],” Architectural Forum 62 (March-May 1935): i-xvi, 6-8.
30. “Portfolio of Recent Schools,” Architectural Record 79 (June 1936): 436-40, 457-59.
31. C. W. Short and R. Stanley-Brown, eds., Public Buildings: Architecture under the Public
Works Administration, 1933-39 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939; reprint, with
intro. by Richard Guy Wilson, New York: Da Capo, 1986), 153-263.
32. Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 24, 88-89; Arthur Zilversmit, “Education—Ideology and
Practice: Case Studies in Progressive Education” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the
American Studies Association, San Antonio, Texas, November 6-8, 1975), 14, cited in David Tyack,
Robert Lowe, and Elisabeth Hansot, Public Schools in Hard Times: The Great Depression and Recent
Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 160; and Ray L. Hamon, “Trends in Types
of School Seating,” Nation’s Schools 16 (September 1935): 57-58.
216
JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2006
33. “The Nation’s School Building Needs,” Research Bulletin of the National Education
Association 13 (January 1935): 9-12.
34. L. Seth Schnitman, “Striking Improvement Occurs in Educational Building: Further Gains
Likely,” Architectural Record 79 (June 1936): 422.
35. Cremin, Traditions of American Education, 101.
36. U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to
1970 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), I:8.
37. U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States, II:618-19.
38. “Schools of Tomorrow,” Time 76 (September 12, 1960): 74-79.
39. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 203-7.
40. Progressive Architecture 26 (April 1945); Architectural Forum 82 (June 1945); and
Architectural Record 98 (July 1945).
41. “Finder’s Guide,” Archives, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and “Modern Architecture for
the Modern School,” Circulating Exhibition Album A4, Archives, the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
42. “Crow Island School, Winnetka, Ill., Architectural Forum 75 (August 1941): 79-92; “Schools:
A Look Backward and Forward,” Architectural Forum 103 (October 1955): 129; and Carleton W.
Washburne and Sidney P. Marland Jr., Winnetka: The History and Significance of an Educational
Experiment (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963).
43. Lawrence B. Perkins and Walter D. Cocking, Schools (New York: Reinhold, 1949), 3-18.
44. Perkins repeated these lessons with Workplace for Learning in 1957; Lawrence B. Perkins,
Workplace for Learning (New York: Reinhold, 1957).
45. “Clusters of Classrooms,” Life 37 (November 15, 1954): 73-74, 77-78; Carol A. O’Connor,
A Sort of Utopia: Scarsdale, 1891-1981 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983): 65-80,
171-73; and Scarsdale, New York, Board of Education, Planning an Elementary School (Scarsdale,
N.Y.: Board of Education, 1949).
46. Archibald B. Shaw and Lawrence B. Perkins, “Planning an Elementary School,” School
Executive 73 (July 1954): 58-59.
47. “Organic School,” Architectural Forum 97 (October 1952): 114-18; and “Heathcote: A
Pioneering School in Plan and Atmosphere,” Architectural Forum 101 (July 1954): 98-105.
48. Terry Ferrer, The School and Urban Renewal: A Case Study from New Haven (New York:
Educational Facilities Laboratory, 1964), 5; “Urban Planning and Urban Revolt: A Case Study,”
Progressive Architecture 49 (January 1969): 139; “Profile of a City: New Haven,” Urban Renewal Notes
(July-August 1966): 8-9; Allan R. Talbot, The Mayor’s Game: Richard Lee of New Haven and the Politics
of Change (New York: Harper & Row, 1967); 173-77, 211-22; “How to Get Renewal off Dead Center,”
Architectural Forum 105 (October 1956): 166-69; and “The Anatomy of a New Project: New Haven
Comprehensive Redevelopment Plan,” Architectural and Engineering News 3 (April 1961): 80-81.
49. Ferrer, The School and Urban Renewal, 5, 9-12; “Flexible Structure for Progressive Primary
School,” Architectural Record 139 (February 1966): 174-75; and “Gateway School,” Progressive
Architecture 48 (November 1967): 146-51.
50. Chester Rapkin and Grace Milgram, Population and Housing in New Haven, 1960-1980 (New
Haven, Conn.: New Haven Redevelopment Agency, 1964), 2-8.
51. Mitchell Sviridoff, “The Seeds of Urban Revival,” Public Interest, no. 114 (Winter 1994): 82-103.
52. U.S. General Accounting Office, School Facilities: Condition of America’s Schools,
GAO/HEHS-95-61, February (Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office, 1995); and U.S.
General Accounting Office, School Facilities: America’s Schools Report Differing Conditions,
GAO/HEHS-96-106, June (Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office, 1996).
53. U.S. General Accounting Office, School Facilities: Construction Expenditures Have Grown
Significantly in Recent Years, GAO/HEHS-00-41, March (Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting
Office, 2000), 6.
54. Jayne Merkel, “Small Schools, No Small Effort,” Architectural Record Review Schools (July
2004): 9.
55. National Center for Education Statistics, “Overview of Public Elementary and Secondary
Schools and Data” (2003), cited in http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/overview03/table_02.asp.
56. Laura Kurgan, Claiming Space for Small Schools: A Report on the New Century Schools, the
Bronx, New York, 2002-2003 (New York: Laura Kurgan, 2003).
Weisser / AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL ARCHITECTURE
217
Amy S. Weisser looks at the relationship between architecture and institutions in her
explorations as an architectural historian and arts administrator. She is presently at the
Lower Manhattan Development Corporation as assistant vice president of memorial,
cultural, and civic programs at the World Trade Center site. Prior to assuming this post,
she worked on cultural projects at the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, as
assistant director for Dia:Beacon at Dia Art Foundation, and at the American Museum
of Natural History. Ms. Weisser holds a doctorate in art history from Yale University. Her
dissertation examined modernism and American public school buildings from the
Depression through the Second World War.