Transnational School Construction

During the post-war era, schooling was profoundly transformed. While the significance and duration of education expanded in the East and West, schoolhouses were scaled down from large self-contained multi-story buildings to lower, pavilion-like facilities amid green spaces. In 1951, the Union Internationale des Architectes (UIA) set up the Commission on School Constructions (CSC), dedicated to the promotion of international exchange of ideas in dealing with the design and technical solutions for school construction. The CSC working group conducted comparative research in the Global North and South and developed overarching principles for school construction and design, distributed by the delegates in their national contexts. The CSC established new ways of reciprocal knowledge exchange. The cross-border making of the New Schoolhouse from the perspective of CSC as a transnational agency and the role of CSC national delegates as the mediators between the transnational and the local were both not yet explored in previous research. In this project, we will explore the modus operandi of the UIA Commission on School Constructions was a collaborative and intertwined process of knowledge generation between the transnational agency and the local contexts, with national delegates acting as mediators of mutual exchange. The conceptual framework of this study is transnational history. The methods include archival research, qualitative content analysis, and comparative analysis. The focus of our research is on the Commission on School Constructions, and three of its member states Austria, German Democratic Republic and Slovenia (during the post-war era part of Yugoslavia). We will analyse main modes of construction and examine the processes of standardisation and establishment of normative frameworks. By studying the transnational level and the three demarcated territorial units simultaneously, our research will uncover the mechanisms of mutual generation of standards, building techniques and building types and identify crucial actors and processes in the production of educational space, taking into account the normative framework and materialities of schooling.