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.

In the years following the Second World War, UNESCO, the International Bureau of Education (IBE) and, later, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) began to play a leading role in shaping educational policy. They promoted new ideas about progressive education and encouraged countries to expand and modernise their school systems. By the 1960s, education was widely recognised as a driving force for development and modernisation, with school construction becoming a central element of this vision. Alongside these large intergovernmental bodies, the smaller but influential International Union of Architects (UIA) and its Commission des Constructions Scolaires (CCS) fostered the global exchange of expertise in school design and construction, thereby bridging the Cold War divides. This project chronicled the history of the CCS from 1951 to 1979. The working commission played a key role in promoting international cooperation on school design and construction during the post-war decades of reconstruction and educational expansion. Adopting a transnational approach, the project examined how ideas about education and school architecture circulated across geopolitical divides and were adapted to different national and regional contexts. Three case studies provided detailed insights into these exchanges. The first examined how the CCS and UNESCO's Technical Assistance Program influenced school reform and construction in socialist Yugoslavia during the 1950s. The second focused on Austria in the 1960s, where architects Wilhelm Schütte and Lukas Lang advanced the CCS's ideas while new methods of educational planning from the OECD shaped national school-building policies. The third case study investigated the role of CCS delegate Helmut Trauzettel, who acted as a critical mediator of internationalism in the German Democratic Republic. Together, these case studies demonstrated that international cooperation had a lasting impact on the design of schools within national contexts. However, the practical lessons and experiences gained in different countries were often not fully recognised by the organisations themselves, including the CCS. The project uncovered how architects, educators, and economists, working against the backdrop of post-war internationalism, pioneered an autonomous approach to school-building, using regulation, standardization, prefabrication, and modular coordination to create adaptable and affordable spaces for learning. By shedding light on the work of these international networks and their impact on school-building, the project reveals how postwar architecture and education were linked in the pursuit of equality and modernisation.