The paper examines the hypothesis, that school buildings construct the future citizens of the nation-state. We specifically ask, how such national constructions play out in multilingual nation-states. With a special focus on the development of school architecture in a variety of regions including as major cases Luxembourg and Switzerland, the paper analyses school buildings as the spaces where the act of physically going to school takes place. As a dominant of the local scenery, schools were also actively involved in the presentation of spaces, displaying concepts of the nation or its sub-units. In Switzerland, it reveals the strong importance of the cantons and communities; in Luxembourg it showed the significant role of the capital as well as the local commune and demographical policies of the country: While national coherence was emphasized and also symbolically transported for instance through uniform school buildings or model school types, we found also that the school buildings were of overall importance for the profile finding of regions and communes and became powerful agents of societal planning in anchoring citizens to specific regions and shaping the core of the village. In both cases, the article demonstrates the significant contribution of school buildings to the manifold ways of unifying citizens and differentiating them according to societal needs.
This paper analyses and contrasts the evolution of school architecture competitions, selected submitted projects and built schoolhouses, programmatic and professional literature, school building exhibitions and public reactions to them aiming at answering the following research question: How did architecture competitions, educational reforms and programmatic or professional literature contribute to the educationalization of the school building between 1835 and 1950 in Switzerland? The question will be approached from a perspective of educationalization, knowledge transfer and circulation between professional and political knowledge or discourses on education and practices of architecture competitions by contextualizing school building reform discourses within general school and education reform processes. The evolution of school building architecture competitions in Switzerland and the participation of a variety of actors demonstrate how the school building became a co-educator, how historical building designs are constantly naturalised to fit reform programs, and the relevance of calls for tender as source for the history of education.
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