Institutional Revisions: Modernism and American Public Schools from the Depression through the Second World War

Across the United States, from the onset of the Depression through the outbreak of World War II, public schools underwent widespread revision to meet the demands of progressive education. At the same time, architects investigated the meaning of modernism for architecture; they specifically identified the public school building as a venue for modernist experimentation. This dissertation uses the case study of modern public school architecture to address the way architecture carries public meaning. Accepting that buildings are documents that articulate a culture's definition of itself, it asks what part the expression of modernism played in the public reconception of the educational institution. With a focus on the specific in opposition to a generalized history of institutions and modernism, this study examines individual school buildings of the 1930s within their local and national contexts. It explores the way a school's multiple makers--clients, users and designers--participated in the creation of the physical entity and understood its meaning. It reveals the school as the product of a design and construction process--as a text whose meaning is mutable and contingent--not as a fixed and singular object. Modernism gave voice to concerns about civic stature, changes in the social role of education, and delineations of social segregation. The schools analyzed include the Corona Avenue School in Los Angeles, California (Richard Neutra), the Crow Island Elementary School in Winnetka, Illinois (Saarinen and Saarinen, with Perkins, Wheeler and Will), the Ansonia High School in Ansonia, Connecticut (Lescaze and Sears) as well as schools by Lyndon and Smith, John Lloyd Wright, Langford and Finney, Perry, Shaw and Hepburn, Overstreet and Town, and Burnham Hoyt. Modern schools were not abstract products of an aesthetic code but emerged from the social acts of their design and construction. Changing architectural aims, educational philosophies, federal financing, state guidelines, local needs and individual desires all transformed the architecture of the public school. Rather than exemplifying singular architectural solutions of universal meaning, these new schools establish the modern movement as fractured and conditional, dependent in each situation upon client, architect and program.