Transnational School Construction

Abstract

During the postwar era, education was profoundly transformed. In the 1950s, as the significance and duration of education expanded in the East and West, school buildings were scaled down from large, self-contained, multi-story structures to low-rise, pavilion-like facilities surrounded by green space. Decentralised, small-scale, and low-cost school buildings fulfilled the requirements of the Global South and of Western, socialist, and Non-Aligned countries. In the mid-1960s, architects in industrialised countries began to design larger schools. By 1970, expansive educational facilities, equipped to serve as neighbourhood centres, became the dominant building type in the West. Large school centres were feasible in the industrialised Global North but no longer transferable to developing countries, which had yet to establish their school systems. Founded in 1948 in Lausanne, the Union Internationale des Architectes (UIA) gradually established a global network of architects. The UIA utilised expert knowledge as a vehicle for overcoming political, economic, and aesthetic frontiers. In 1951, it set up the Commission on School Constructions (CSC), renamed the Working Group on Education in 1970. Architects such as Alfred Roth, Jean-Pierre Vouga, Jean-Pierre Cahen, Ernst J. Kump, Mario C. Celli, Jan Piet Kloos, Ciro Cicconcelli, Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, Wilhelm Schütte, Lukas Lang, Anton Schweighofer, Oton Gaspari, Helmut Trauzettel, Günter Wilhelm, and Yannis Michael served on this working group as delegates. Their role was threefold: they carried out comparative research by surveying case studies and emergent technologies, codified international standards, and acted as local arbitrators. The main aim of this study is to examine the mechanisms of knowledge exchange between the transnational agency of the UIA and three of its member states: Austria, the German Democratic Republic, and Slovenia (which was part of Yugoslavia during the postwar era). The goal is to study how construction modes, design briefs, standardisation, and building types that the UIA working group prescribed from a global perspective were transformed within the respective national settings. Simultaneously exploring the transnational level and demarcated territorial units, we will uncover the entangled histories of actors, networks, and events that shaped school-building policies against the backdrop of the Cold War. The conceptual framework of the study is transnational history. We will use primary historical sources: CSC documents and minutes, publications on the design of educational facilities, and historic building regulations, norms, and building documents. The methods used in this project include archival research and comparative analysis. Homepage: https://transnationalarchitecture.org/

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laufend