Politics of Learning, Politics of Space: Architecture and the Education Shock of the 1960s and 1970s 9783110726046, 9783110710946

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Politics of Learning, Politics of Space Architecture and the Education Shock of the 1960s and 1970s

Tom Holert Politics of Learning, Politics of Space Architecture and the Education Shock of the 1960s and 1970s

This book is published in conjunction with the HKW exhibition “Education Shock: Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s” February 11, 2021 to May 2, 2021 Supported by

ISBN 978-3-11-071094-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-072604-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020952349 Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Editing: Leah Whitman-Salkin Proofreading: Julia Oswald, Raphael Wolf Image research: Janne Hagge-Ellhoeft Cover photos: George Zimbel (front), Ludger Blanke (back) Design: HIT, Berlin Typesetting: hawemannundmosch, Berlin Printing and binding: Beltz Grafische Betriebe GmbH, Bad Langensalza www.degruyter.com

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Preface

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Open Plan and Limited Access: The Embattled Classrooms of the 1960s and 1970s

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School’s In/Out: OSZ Wedding, Berlin, or Learning from a Resilient Learning Environment

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Educationalize and Fail: The 1967 Rice Design Fete and the Blind Spots of Transgressive Planning

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Spaces of the Learning Self: Interiority and Instructional Design, ca. 1969

Preface The Covid-19 pandemic amply demonstrated the importance of the spatial dimension of learning. In the course of 2020, the longstanding neglect of educational facilities (public schools in particular)—so often lamented, so rarely overcome, and usually in the periphery of the public eye—abruptly moved center stage. To meet health requirements and hygiene protocols, the scene of learning had to be transformed in an incredibly short time frame. The spatial organization of schools, from preschools to universities, usually goes unnoticed. Suddenly what was always taken for granted assumed hypervisibility as a crisis of spatiality. Pushed by the pandemic, the functionality and dysfunctionality of built environments, technological infrastructures, and geospatial realities of learning came to the fore. Digital learning tools and online classes, long waiting to be deployed on a larger scale, were now activated as a way out of the potential dangers of physical presence and face-to-face contact. Physical distancing had to be enforced where gestural vivacity and verbal exchange in proximity to others—students and educators—are indispensable to the learning process and to behavioral and intellectual development. Not surprisingly, the consequences of the closings and the transfer to online instruction are suffered particularly painfully by millions of students around the world without (stable) Internet connections or sufficient private space for classwork and studying. Locked in their rooms, if they have one of their own, students struggle with remote teaching material, often lacking the necessary computer equipment and support. Economical inequalities and ethnic and racial divides revealed themselves even more starkly when, in many places, the private educational sector opened its schools in advance of the public-school system to enable in-person education for the affluent. Many of the current debates concerning learning and teaching environments, physical and virtual, echo those of the 1960s and 1970s, the “Education Shock” era, which constitutes the subject of a long-term research project and resulting exhibition. Openness and flexibility, integration and desegregation, accessibility and participation have been among the values pursued in the thinking, planning, and experiencing of educational spaces. But the Education Shock decades also proved to be a time of experimentation: with the dispersal of the classroom into extramural realities new communication media, and with charter and free schools, elements of the “new normal” today were foreshadowed fifty years ago. To engage the long post-Sputnik-crisis decades, with their particular conjuncture of new models of learning, politics, and architecture, was the objective of the 2016–2017 exhibition “Learning Laboratories: Architecture, Instructional Tech-

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nology, and the Social Production of Pedagogical Space around 1970” at basis voor actuele kunst (BAK) in Utrecht, a first step toward “Education Shock: Learning, Politics, and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), in Berlin. This small book complements Bildungsschock. Lernen, Politik und Architektur in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren, a resource volume of the eponymous research and exhibition project at HKW. In the absence of a comprehensive English publication on the Bildungsschock project, a collection of writings on an assortment of aspects pertaining to the edu-spatialities of the 1960s and 1970s seemed apt to provide some navigational aid. A substantially expanded version of the introductory essay of the Bildungsschock publication constitutes its core, supplemented by three shorter, previously published and revised essays, which serve as extended footnotes to the primary text. Without the support of HKW and the willingness of De Gruyter this rather spontaneously drafted supplementary publication would not have been possible. To carry it into its present form I relied on the competence and cooperation of many colleagues and friends. At HKW, Agnes Wegner, Marleen Schröder, Lena Reuter, and Janne Hagge Ellhöft provided crucial assistance on many fronts; Lina Grumm and Annette Lux at HIT Studio designed the cover and the layout of the book; the indispensable editorial diligence of Leah Whitman-Salkin improved the texts substantially; e-flux Architecture’s Nick Axel and Nikolaus Hirsch have been very generous offering me the environment for some of these forays into the territories of architectural and educational history; and, crucially, the numerous experts, scholars, artists, educators, and students who contributed to and parti­cipated in the Bildungsschock project, without whom hardly any of the ideas presented here would have been possible. Berlin, October 2020

Preface  Tom Holert

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Open Plan and Limited Access: The Embattled Classrooms of the 1960s and 1970s

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Politics of Learning, Politics of Space

PBZ – Planungsgruppe Bildungszentren, scale model for a secondary school building typology in West Berlin, Germany, 1972

Archive of Experiments How can the history of education be told as a global story? And what kind of history would that be if it were primarily concerned with the spatialities and geographies, the architectures and infrastructures of learning? These two questions guide and structure the project Education Shock. Collaborative research, speculation, and artistic research are the methods of choice for addressing them. To draw together the terms “education” and “shock” seems paradoxical at first. Rather than create lifelong traumas, shouldn’t education, according to a venerable, traditional understanding, enable (through the transmission of knowledge, judgment, empathy, etc.) the student to lead a life as a citizen and to work in a profession? The semantics and etymology of the very German concept of Bildung (only insufficiently translatable as “education”) are multivalent to the extreme. They carry aesthetic meanings of plastic and plasticity, of image and imaginability, of the self-cultivation documented in the Bildungsroman. And, let’s not forget, the German word is only two letters away from building. What’s more, besides such visual and spatial aspects, it’s only a short leap from Bildung to development.1 In the nineteenth century, the concept of Bildung began to replace earlier, feudalistic, pre-bourgeois types of entitlement and status. However, in its more modern and policy-related meanings, Bildung transcends the realm of the individual and pertains to the general terrain of education.2 From a certain sociological point of view, the term has provided the educational system with the means to “respond

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to the loss of external (social, role-based) indicators to what the individual is or will be.”3 For this reason, Bildung (and education, for that matter) has long held institutional connotations, while the Bildungssystem (education system), according to an essentially Western understanding, denotes the totality of public and private facilities intent on forming, training, and qualifying children’s and adults’ pre­ paredness to participate in the economic, political, and cultural proceedings of a society. This said, such a system may produce a shocking effect—for example, when it propels individuals and collectives out of their familiar environments, communal fabrics, and accustomed workplaces, and surely wherever it performs a colonizing function, being put in place to impose universalist ideas of knowledge and personhood, thereby yielding alienation and oppression. On the other hand, the education system itself can be pushed to the limits of its capacity, can become shock afflicted—when it has to expand unexpectedly and in a very short time, for example. Shocks of both kinds could be observed in the 1960s and 1970s. And this twofoldness was initiated and accompanied by additio­ nal shocks: the shock of the Sputnik crisis (Sputnikschock in German), the “future shock” (diagnosed by journalists and futurologists in the late 1960s), the choc pétrolier (or “oil crisis” of 1973), and others. Focusing on a period of roughly twenty-five years—beginning around 1957 and ending in the early 1980s—the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)-based research and exhibition endeavor Education Shock conceives the “long” 1960s and 1970s as an archive of past futures, unfinished projects, abandoned experiments, and forgotten but hugely impactful education reforms. While engaging these essential temporal dimensions, Education Shock attends mainly to the spaces and spatialities where education as a pedagogical practice took shape and place, became reconfigured, and where the national (and often transnational) systems of education materialized. Monuments in the shape of Brutalist campuses or openplan schools, these systems were, however, increasingly confronted and challenged by social and political movements that sought to escape the limiting spatial and pedagogical conditions of mass education. All over the world, radical alter­natives that pursued integration and decolonization struggled to find liberating and self-determined ways of pedagogical place-making. Making accessible this archive of political, architectural, and pedagogical designs and counter-designs hopefully renders tangible and sensible its value as a resource—a resource of materials and tools with which to think and act within and alongside currently existing spaces and temporalities of education, as well as for the political debates and pedagogical practices that aim at rebuilding, if not

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overhauling, learning environments that fail to meet the requirements of a given moment. There are not only examples of best practices in this archive. On the contrary, attempts by those during the global Cold War who sought to make education accessible to an ever-increasing number of people, while expanding it to ever more areas of the social fabric and everyday life, included ample contradictions, aber­ rations, and failures. Nevertheless, a far-reaching political endorsement of the notion of learning, from above and below, on governmental and grassroots levels, could be discerned around the world. It went beyond the development-aid model of training-based learning, which the radical educator Paulo Freire rejected in favor of creativity and self-empowerment.4 There was indeed a widely shared imperative to raise individual and collective levels of education. This urge to elevate entire populations’ skills and knowledge pointed to fundamental transformations of political systems, technological environments, and modes of social and economic reproduction. It was evident in the literacy campaigns in the Global South as well as in the proclaimed activation of untapped Bildungsreserven (educational reserves) in the Global North; in the polytechnic secondary schools of the Soviet Union and its allies, such as Poland, Czechos­ lovakia, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR); in the progressivist experiments with social forms and architectural designs in model welfare states such as the Netherlands or those in Scandinavia; and in the numerous new universities and reforms of higher and secondary education in the United Kingdom, Italy, and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). The zeal for educational reform was also tangible in the fierce commitment of radical pedagogues, students, and architects who opposed the continued existence of institutions of formal education and their architectural casings, while testing alternatives. In many respects, restorative and radical, authoritarian and antiauthoritarian educational stances resembled each other in the 1960s and 1970s, insofar as they both awarded education an absolute primacy. To what extent this prioritization of education manifested in political and spatial terms is one of the guiding questions of Education Shock. What kind of theories and programs—of generative and rote learning, of empowering and disciplining pedagogies—have informed the design and use of classrooms, school buildings, campuses, as well as other learning environments of the 1960s and 1970s? How did educational and spatial politics interact and intersect, be it on the actual site of learning and teaching or on the scale of national and geopolitical educational planning? And what about the materialization of contested spatial concepts such as desegregation, integration, access, or participation?

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Pretty straightforward answers to these questions were given by physical archi­ tecture—by spatial objects such as kindergartens, playgrounds, schools, universities, libraries, and research institutes, which in the 1960s and 1970s were designed and produced in unprecedented numbers. In Western Europe and North America most of these buildings resulted from public contracts awarded in often elaborate and lengthy competitions and tenders (albeit sometimes in a rush). In the Soviet Union and other countries of the Communist bloc, as different as the mechanisms of competition and commission may have been, the archives likewise contain huge numbers of designs left unrealized. Often applications were submitted by architects and design teams who were on their way to international renown, as the explosive expansion of the educatio­ nal realm provided ample opportunity to plan and build. All too customary in the trade, only a few women architects took part in these competitions and building schemes. Still, most of the women involved in the planning and production of educational spaces, among other spaces, have gone uncredited and unrecognized. Those who have been named include Urmila Eulie Chowdhury, Gira Sarabhai, Milica Čolak-Antić Krstić, Jane Drew, Maria do Carmo Matos, Mary Medd, Lucy Hillebrand, Ruth Golan, Sibylle Kriesche, Leonie Rothbarth, Guiti Afrouz Kardan, Josefina Rebellón, and Zohreh Ghara Gosloo.5 Their male colleagues, many of whom are far more prominent, in both senses of the word, include Hans Scharoun, Pier Luigi Nervi, Giancarlo De Carlo, Vittorio Gregotti, Herman Hertzberger, Maxwell Fry, Arthur Erickson, Arieh Sharon, Oscar Niemeyer, Alfred Roth, Walter Gropius, João Batista Vilanova Artigas, Günter Behnisch, Ludwig Leo, Thomas Vreeland, Cedric Price, John Bancroft, James Stirling, Norman Foster, and Jean Nouvel. Architects frequently specialized in educational architecture. A case in point is Hugh Stubbins, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based architect of the Congress Hall in Berlin, HKW’s building and the site of the Education Shock exhibition. Besides this landmark Cold War building, which from the outset was to embody a particular Modernist, ostensibly universalist Western idea of education, Stubbins designed numerous schools and colleges in the United States—as early as 1963, the magazine Progressive Architecture reported on more than twenty-five school buildings by Stubbins’s firm in the Boston area alone.6 However, while architectural spaces figure as a major subject for discussion and investigation, Education Shock is not a project primarily about school and university architecture, nor is it in any way committed to maintaining the canon of great names and historical-building culture. Reluctant with regard to solely aesthetic, formal readings of their respective values or misgivings, the project’s interests veer more toward spatial politics that pursue functionality independent of a parti­ cular architect’s signature. Attending to the spatial production of education—

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School built via a modular construction system, Morocco, 1960s

the building of Bildung—in terms of the numerous histories of education politics, rather than those of architectural history, Education Shock proposes a somewhat undisciplined perspective on the intersections of planning, design, and social struggle. The project is also an attempt to pay tribute and do justice to the scholarly and activist work of feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, indigenous, and dis­ability politics pertaining to the spatial production of education, inside and outside of academia. Staying within the realm of architecture proper for a moment, it is important to recognize the impact that typological structures, modular mass-produced goods, and prefabricated constructions had on spaces of learning.7 They arguably had far greater influence on the everyday life of the steadily growing number of students than iconic school buildings did. The former are often open structures made of simple local materials, such as those built for the experimental schools of the poor and illiterate in the Natal district of northeastern Brazil in the early 1960s;8 school buildings in the intermediary period between colonial and postcolonial planning, as in the new urban settlements in Ghana and Nigeria in the 1960s;9 a seemingly bucolic campus of green spaces and pavilions, like the “city of pioneers” in a park on the outskirts of Zagreb, a site of pedagogical experiments from the 1950s until the early 1960s;10 school building systems, like those built nationwide in the 1960s by the Ministries of Education in Mexico and Morocco to promote literacy;11 or the 1970s prefab buildings of the Escuelas Secundaria Básica en el Campo, which were intended to support literacy in rural Cuba.12

Open Plan and Limited Access  Tom Holert

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These examples, individually and collectively, testify to the power of statecontrolled building and educational planning, which were focused on standards and norms but yielded considerable innovation. For these campaigns to expand, edu­cational infrastructures were driven by demands to meet often specific climatic conditions or challenging social predicaments. The resulting architectural products, in their brute functionality, may have appeared unexceptional (and in retrospect perhaps even more so). But they also bespeak continuous experimental convergences and frictions between changing pedagogical concepts, structural and constructional factors, and requirements of local stakeholders. More than individual architects, therefore, it was policy bodies, educational authorities, the building industry, as well as the respective communities of learners and teachers, who generated (and continue to produce) these material environments of education. For that reason, Education Shock also attends to various research and consulting institutes that were set up—by national ministries of education, private foundations, and transnational agencies such as UNESCO, whose brief is to establish a proper science of educational facilities, in pedagogical but even more so in economic terms. Since the 1950s, such institutions in the United States, Chile, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, the FRG, and the Soviet Union were to steer the structural change in the educational system from an architectural and planning point of view.13 For the most part, they propagated cost-effective and functionally efficient prefabricated building systems such as those developed by the Serviço Nacional de Aprendizagem Comercial (SENAC, Brazil), the Consortium of Local Authorities Special Programme (CLASP, United Kingdom), and the School Construction Systems Development (SCSD, United States).14 In the course of such projects of standardization, however, certain models of pedagogical practice still reflected the specificities of local and national educational cultures and economies.

The Spatial Turn of Educational Research Education Shock focuses on practices, politics, and policies of space—on the use of learning spaces by those who were to learn and teach in them, and who were often also their opponents. The 1960s and 1970s were marked globally by both euphoria and a deep skepticism toward the very political and educational programs to which architectural Raumprogramme (spatial programs) contributed. The contestation of the authority of institutions and their architectural manifes­ tations took on ever new forms: from the teach-ins and sit-ins adapted from the Black civil rights movement to the numerous strikes and occupations of the later 1960s and 1970s. To this day, historical accounts of these on-campus and intra­

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Students on strike at Beirut University College, Lebanon, 1972

Allen Building sit-in, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States, November 13, 1967

mural struggles, in particular their performative vocabularies (that turned the body-to-building ratio into a prime object of contestation and spectacle), are scattered across literature on the civil rights movement, student protests, anti­colonial upheavals, and countercultural lives, but remain sparse otherwise. Education Shock therefore puts emphasis on the socio-spatial environments of schools and universities as historical sites of struggle and radical politics. A guiding, albeit largely unresolved question has been how the structural and architectural conditions of educational facilities elicited particular types of action and protest, and whether the institutional encoding of the built environment provoked specific strategies of decoding the spatialities of educations. Concerning the alleged progressive nature of educational planning in the 1960s and 1970s, the stakeholders and proponents of these developments became increa­ singly aware of the fact that the spatial conditions for the production of citizen-­ subjects, the training of workers, and the mediation and production of knowledge were to be understood not as a rigid given, but as subject to alter­ation, if not overhaul. The political dynamics generated by growing insights into the conceptual and material flexibility of learning environments proved to be as generative as they were difficult to control. Education Shock sets out to trace this dynamic—replete with questions about, and demands for, accessibility, openness, mobility, practicability, and legitimacy (and their respective opposites)—in its local and translocal, restorative and revo­ lutionary, urban, suburban, and rural dimensions. The particular interaction of the politics of learning and the politics of space not only left its mark on urban planning, but likewise informed the design of entire societal projects and their respective imageries of the future.

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While the debates in educational policy and planning of the 1960s and 1970s bear obvious resemblances with their counterparts of the 2010s and 2020s, these usually go unnoticed and unnamed by the public. However, the experiments and reforms of the Education Shock decades continue to enact significant effects. This is evident in current criticism around the poor condition of school buildings and academic environments and in rising concerns over the challenges of all-day care, changing demographics, and the transformation of the labor market. Partly in response to the crisis, a distinct reorientation of school and university planning is taking place. Obvious resemblances with 1960s and 1970s planning principles and design concepts can be seen in the trend toward multistory open-plan schools such as the 2007 Ørestad College in Copenhagen, designed by 3XN architects. Meanwhile in Germany, concepts such as Lernhaus (house of learning) or Bil­ dungs­landschaft (edu-scape) are occasionally being successfully filtered into the planning processes of projects that, due to miscalculated demographic changes and economic circumstances, are much more frequently carried out in haste, with little participation from students, teachers, or parents, and limited knowledge of recent developments in educational theory.15 With examples such as Ørestad College in mind, an integral, holistic approach toward pedagogy, architecture, and urban planning has again become a declared aim of agendas and initiatives, as they seek to raise awareness of the sociopolitical and pedagogical significance of the spatiality of learning. In this context, a spatial turn, enhanced attention to the significance that space and spatiality have for the practice and theory of education, is occasionally being called for.16 Albeit often unacknowledged, this alleged turn has taken inspiration from elements of reform pedagogy and architectural psychology, as well as from particular architectural practices dating from the 1960s and 1970s.17 It informs measures of educational policy that aim at integration and inclusion, and works to reorient the debate around educational facilities.18 In addition, socio-spatial categories at the interfaces of educational research, human geography, and sociology are gaining importance in current theorizations of pedagogy and learning.19 New design strategies for school and campus facilities, as well as the critical-analytical discourses on which they draw, rely on the involvement of various actors and users engaged in practices and processes of education.20 Research on the materiality of interactions in spaces of learning increasingly focuses on the impact of factors that are believed to influence learning success in concert with, and sometimes independently of, pedagogical theory and practice. In many respects, such a turn to matters and materialities of socio-spatiality has already been undertaken by the progressive-reformist movements of the Education Shock decades. These movements, steered by a variety of agents and agencies, contested the formats and functions of postwar educational architecture that continued to be designed largely according to principles originating in the disciplinary

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societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their criticism, in light of what Michel Foucault called “institutions of confinement,” was launched against such a repressive reading of education and learning environments.21 It therefore was also a struggle for a different political understanding and practice of space, one that was geared toward emancipation, self-efficacy, and autonomy. An ostensibly radical demand for the “deschooling” of the educational system (and society in general) was famously raised by the theologian and philosopher Ivan Illich.22  Illich wanted to revolutionize educational systems of the Global North and the Global South alike, which he saw as being organized along economic parameters and based in notions of meritocracy. Even before the neo­ liberalization of education came into full bloom after the 1980s, Illich detected a pernicious tendency toward the commodification of education and the contingency of access to it on wealth—both on an individual and a global, geopolitical level.23 In 1970 he wrote: “The radical deschooling of society begins, therefore, with the unmasking by cultural revolutionaries of the myth of schooling. It continues with the struggle to liberate other men’s minds from the false ideology of schooling—an ideology that makes domestication by schooling inevitable.”24 Illich’s influence was huge. His theory of deschooling aligned with the lingering dissatisfaction and frustration of educators, students, and planners who were facing educational modernization of which many conceived as cosmetic with regard to the persistence of traditionalist and class-based notions of schooling and learning. Illich, often read in combination with radical educators such as Freire, resisted the ideology nurtured by social engineers from mainstream conservative and liberal politics, according to whom formal education was seen as the indispensable prerequisite of individual growth and social mobility. This resistance also pertained to the spatial dimension of formal education. It increasingly became directed against the existing architectures and infrastructures of the school and university. These structures were criticized for being purposely dehumanizing and stale. Moreover, they were criticized for seeking to level the individualizing appreciation of children by their families and to turn them into the subject of metric testing and normativizing qualifi­cation.25 Rooted in and relayed via the Global South, voices such as Illich’s and Freire’s strongly resonated in the debate around education. Directed against the hegemony of Western modern models of education and knowledge, their writings also contributed to a crisis of the ideologies underlying educational architecture. Trust in the spatial offerings of educational planning and learning technologies increasingly turned fragile—especially where these were presented as progressive and inno­ vative. At the same time, contrary to what the charged discourse of deschooling often made believe, it did not represent a position that was anti-school per se. Rather, triggered by the deschooling argument, radical pedagogues were determined to uncover the utopian core of the school within or below the system

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of formal education. Not least informed by these reconceptualizations, Education Shock is interested in precisely such contradictions or dialectics, and especially in situations where designs and counter-designs, programs and counter-­programs, utopias and realities of learning collided in the 1960s and 1970s.

Sputnik Crisis and School Apparatus The symbolic starting point for the Education Shock age was the “shock” that struck the West on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet satellite Sputnik I entered into orbit. “Never before had so small and so harmless an object created such consternation,” noted historian Daniel J. Boorstin, a theoretician of the media “pseudo-event.”26  The United States, and soon also their allies, was so deeply impressed by the Soviet successes in satellite technology and space travel that they launched an unprecedented program to modernize and expand education and knowledge production. The National Defense Education Act and other reactionary measures such as the activities of the Physical Science Studies Committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were intended to help close the supposed “technological gap” amid Cold War competition.27 That said, not everything that happened in education and science after 1957 can be explained by this technological event. Many of the reform efforts made in the 1960s and 1970s originated in developments predating the Sputnik flight, or are rooted at a deeper structural level.28 However, without a doubt the happily spinning, eighty kilogram, antenna-equipped shiny sphere did broadcast a decisive signal. It was quite literally a beeping—deafening for Western science and education systems—that spurred much of the effort to restore lost balance or, better still, construct a new hegemony. The first look into the abyss of the “technological gap” was awe-inspiring, or, indeed, shocking, hence the German term Sputnikschock. It is not by coincidence that subsequent accounts of the alleged backwardness of national education systems deployed the metaphors of shock or catastrophe while invoking the 1957 event. Take, for example, the expression Bildungskatastrophe (education catastrophe), introduced by West German educationalist Georg Picht, which stirred a heated debate in 1964, featuring considerable reformist zeal. Only if the Bildungsnotstand (education emergency) was overcome could there be a correspondence between the “modern Leistungsgesellschaft [meritocracy]” and the “fair distribution of educational opportunities.”29 The same terminology was reactivated almost four decades later with the German phrase PISA-Schock, following the publica-

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tion of the first Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study on December 4, 2001.30 Another ten years later, Barack Obama, in his second State of the Union address, used the analogy of the “Sputnik moment” to convince his supporters and the Republicans in Congress of his plans to raise technological and scientific productivity in the face of its new rival, China.31 The historical phase that followed the initial shock of October 4, 1957, is central to the policy challenges around education and child-rearing that marked this epoch. The 1960s and 1970s were characterized by the rapid, often hasty, sometimes radical expansion of the institutions of learning, teaching, and research. A veritable educational hype swept through societies. For years, the subject was more present in the media than ever before or after. General-interest publishers such as Rowohlt in West Germany and Penguin in the United Kingdom contributed to the presence of educational matters across various sectors of public discourse. On a grassroots and countercultural level, educational literature was being published by a wide spectrum of alternative media. At their peak, around 1970, these offerings ranged from, say, the decidedly educational “access to tools” approach of the Whole Earth Catalog and the journal Radical Software in the United States, to mimeographed readers circulating in the feminist childcare and Kinderladen movement (leading to the founding of the West Berlin Basis Verlag), to the important Canadian journal This Magazine Is about Schools.32 The leading cause of this multilevel institutional and cultural development was the need to manage and moderate the far-reaching transformations of the relations of production brought about by the impending transition from “industrial societies” to the “technological age” and, ultimately, to “post-industrial” societies.33 The skills and subjectivities required to master and survive these often shock-like shifts were expected to be provided by schools and universities, switching points of the state and social order. In a much-quoted text from 1970, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser identified the “school apparatus” as the most inconspicuous but ultimately most dominant of the “ideological state apparatuses” of capitalist societies.34 According to Althusser, every individual, after being placed under the inevitable, massive influence of the ideology of the ruling class in institutions of formal education, “falls” out of the schools and universities and into the place in society and “production” designated for them. Without explicitly addressing the architectural dimensions of the school apparatus, Althusser’s seemingly scientific yet highly metaphoric language was guided by a notion of a pernicious spatiality of educational institutions through which children and adolescents pass, only to emerge from them as subjects more or less prepared and formatted to fit into the ever-evolving machinery of social production (and reproduction).

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Diane Lasch, caricature of the US education system, 1969

Around 1970 it seemed obligatory to many liberals to perform the theory of ideo­ logy and criticize the disfiguring violence of the school apparatus, even though they may have never read a line of Althusser. Expressions such as “learning factory” or Untertanenfabrik (factory of the subjected) polemically envisaged a relation between school and university and the sites of industrial exploitation and automation. It is “frightening” to note “that the student is often not primarily seen as a person, but merely as the ‘material’ of industrial society,” worried the authors of a handbook on the planning of school buildings from 1969.35 Metaphors of dehumanization and the factory also demonstrate how important the quality and semantics of specific educational sites and their architectures were deemed.36 The resistance against the factory-school was directly bound to experiences in the often newly built environments of educational institutions. Occasionally, attempts were made to record and evaluate student and staff responses to the spatial conditions engendered by educational reform.37 Since the mid-1960s, students around the world have voiced their repudiation of capitalism and patriarchal bourgeois society, colonialism, and war by addressing reactionary educational structures and a lack of historical responsibility embodied by schools and universities. Often enough, their protests had a physical address, with actions culminating in the occupation of buildings or in physical vandalism. Usually, however, students interested in differently engaging with the given architectures took a less confrontational route, by, for example, converting existing spaces into

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Politics of Learning, Politics of Space

Students occupy the rectorate of Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, Germany, May 28, 1968

On the campus of the Uni­ versity of Nanterre, Paris, France, March 23, 1968

places of autonomous educational events.38 Thus they put the lived and institutional realities of school and university up for debate—at least rhetorically. The writer and former teacher Annie Ernaux precisely captures a feeling that had spread to many other cities around the world in May 1968 and the following months and years: “Places such as universities, factories, and theaters, whose functions were determined by age-old rules and which admitted only specified popu­lations, were now open to all. There, we talked, ate, slept, loved, did everything except the thing for which the place had been intended. Institutional, sanctified spaces were a thing of the past.”39 The architect Giancarlo De Carlo made similar observations. In a pathbreaking 1969 essay about the end of the

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school building form, he contended that this counter-usage of buildings for education had shown “a new architecture of the school which neither architects nor educators had ever imagined.”40 As much as the intensive reforms and expansive planning initiated by governments and administrations were supported by considerable political euphoria and welfare state (or socialist) futurity, they were met with increasingly fierce opposition in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only did their critics from the left mobilize resistance, but conservative forces, for whom the renewals went far too far, took issue as well. Everyone was outraged. In addition to the constantly changing economic and demographic conditions, it was these political controversies that forced the pro­ ponents of the education sector to constantly produce new plans and models. Reforming and rebuilding educational institutions ranked high on the agendas of parties, administrations, and civil society groups. Thus educational innovations and reforms became ever-more ingrained in social discourses and individual lives.

Education and the Knowledge Economy Since the late 1950s pundits talked, mostly in a concerned voice, of an “educationalization” or Pädagogisierung of society.41 These terms bespoke worries about an exorbitant expansion of the field of educational activity as such and, more specifically, suspicion of the state’s control and codification of educational matters. The latter was considered detrimental to the individual’s educational development. At the same time, the 1960s and 1970s saw an increasing expectation that societal crises could be remedied with pedagogical measures. What’s more, those who had previously been excluded from the amenities of higher education or even from the most elementary educational pathways were now increasingly gaining (or struggling to gain) access. Demands for equal opportu­nities and demo­ cratization, integration and desegregation, and participation and emanci­pation were becoming intricately bound to the concepts of schooling and edu­cation. It is thus no coincidence that the notion of “lifelong learning,” referring to the individual’s continuing education into old age, was embraced at the level of official policy.42 In addition, the concept of the “learning society” launched onto the scene of social and economic theory.43 This discursive extension of the “learning” trope was expected to have an immediate bearing even on urban and regional planning: “It would be worth testing,” mused Karl-Hermann Koch, a specialist in school building well informed about international debates, “to what extent transport routes and public facilities could be deployed for the field of education.”44 As Edgar Faure, former French Minister of Education, stated in the 1972 report of an international commission of experts for UNESCO: “If learning involves

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all of one’s life, in the sense of both time-span and diversity, and all of society, including its social and economic as well as its educational resources, then we must go even further than the necessary overhaul of ‘educational systems’ until we reach the stage of a learning society.”45 Closely linked to this conceptual broadening of the institution of education were demands for the “scientific orientation of education,” understood as a prerequisite for survival in the “meritocracy.” As the (West) German Education Council formulated in 1970: “The learner should be enabled to become aware, step by step, of the pervasiveness of science and to carry it critically into his or her own life.”46 This notion of a scientization of individual learning (and living) was also indebted to terms such as “knowledge work” and “knowledge society,” which emerged in the early 1960s. In an influential speech on the future functions of the US university system, which he conceived of as a “multi-versity” focused on research and development, Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California, made the following decisive point: “New knowledge is the most important factor in economic and social growth.”47 Economists such as Peter F. Drucker and Fritz Machlup launched the topic of knowledge production into academic and public conversation beginning in the 1950s. In his 1969 bestseller The Age of Discontinuity, Drucker claimed that “knowledge” had become a productive force on a previously unknown scale—and by no means limited to the hard sciences.48 He succinctly formulated one of the guiding principles behind global education-planning measures of the 1960s and 1970s, complete with a ranking of their effectiveness: “There is a close relationship between an economy’s ability to grow and compete and the rate at which its population of people over the age of fifteen still attends school— with the United States, Japan, Israel and the Soviet Union at the top and Britain at the bottom of the list of developed industrial countries.”49 Thus, the integration of education and economics was believed to be a precon­ dition of the competitiveness of any economy. Educational policy became closely affiliated with labor market policy, and the peculiar dialectics of this affinity laid hold of even the proponents of progressive and radical educational politics. Now increasingly intelligible, such capitalization of education had already been researched by Alfred Sohn-Rethel for decades. The veteran of critical theory had been living in exile in London until his appointment to the newly founded University of Bremen in the early 1970s. Rediscovered by the undogmatic left of the late 1960s, Sohn-Rethel’s entire theoretical work was devoted to questions of the commodification of thought, the industrialization of the intellect, and the systematic devaluation of manual labor.50

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And in fact, in around 1970, some critics accused the FRG of having completely surrendered its educational system to economic principles, not without pointing to the complicity of the 1968 protests and the Phasenbeschleunigung (phase acceleration) due to the student movement. For in this rigorously anti-capitalist view, countercultural tactics, such as “individual initiative and self-management (collective learning in small groups), overcoming the narrowness of disciplines, reduction of compulsory courses, the implementation of self-monitoring instead of selection—everything against the rigid ideas of the ‘apparatuses’ [...] proved to serve as the most effective concepts of the most advanced monopolies.”51 Thus the project of the “knowledge society” was arguably driven by two forces: an economic demand for new knowledge and the “knowledge workers” genera­ting it, in what the sociologist Daniel Bell and others called areas of “post-­industrial” production,52 and the desire for a fundamental emancipation to be accomplished by education (not without split at revolutionizing its infrastructures and pedagogical practices). But this new knowledge economy was predicated on furthering social and economic disparities, and calls for a fair distribution of education and knowledge became ever louder. Social movements struggling for self-determination and equal rights—in schools and universities, in factories and offices, in the Global South and North—demanded access, as well as participation in planning processes and curriculum development and, more generally, appreciation and respect. The “knowledge society” was a hegemonic project based on capitalist epistemology; as such, it relied on the neoclassical (soon to be neoliberal) dyad of knowledge and economy to nurture the potential of sociopolitical resistance and upheaval, and even to drive rapid changes in culture, consumer habits, and lifestyles.

The Architecture of the “Future Shock” Political debates and policy measures that sought to democratize education were closely linked to speculations about the consequences of the emerging knowledge societies, and the societal effects of technological and economic acceleration. Similar to earlier stages of modernity and modernization, these debates and speculations entailed cultural critique that occasionally turned alarmist. A highly successful example of such critique, verging on dark prescience, was published in 1970 by the journalist and futurologist Alvin Toffler (his coauthor, Heidi Toffler, remained uncredited). According to their bestselling nonfiction book Future Shock (further enriching the list of “shocks”), US citizens escaping into irrationalism, sub­cultures, drugs, and subjectivism were suffering from a collective patho­ logy. An imminent future of cybernetics and robotics was about to traumatize a present unprepared to cope with this shock: “Millions sense the pathology that

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pervades the air,” caused by the “uncontrolled, non-selective nature of our lunge into the future” and the inability to “consciously and imaginatively […] advance toward super-industrialism.”53 In the programmatic final section of Future Shock, dedicated to “strategies for survival,” education moved to center stage.54 Here, the Tofflers recommended the establishment of democratic “Councils of the Future” (modeled after Robert Jungk’s “prognostic cells”) at every school, and that Marx and Freud be thrown into the ideological dump. Such supposedly unbiased,“future-­oriented, future-shaping task forces” could help to “revolutionize the revolution of the young,” as well as forge new alliances in order to create “broad political support for the super-industrial revolution in edu­cation.”55 Alvin [and Heidi] Toffler, Future Shock, 1970

In the successful reversal of the “future shock,” classroom teaching and compulsory education were themselves considered to be things of the past. Instead, the Tofflers expected an increase in homeschooling and free schools for the middle and upper classes on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a growth in community schooling (the closest possible entanglement of school and urban life) in working-class neighborhoods. Both models, which represented the extremes of private and public, of (neo)liberal and social-democratic educational policy, were experimented with in the 1960s. These educational forms, like the experimental and technocratic policies they were to replace or advance, proved to be multiscalar test batteries used on students, teachers, and families. At the same time, the institution of education itself, subject to continuous reform and adaptation to changing demands and necessities, was put under pressure. How far could this restructuring of education go, many educational progressives of the time wondered. Or was education to be dismantled entirely and rebuilt from scratch? The Tofflers were convinced that the end of the “factory-model school” was inevitable. It would be replaced by the school’s “dispersal in geographical and social space,” which in turn would be “accompanied by dispersal

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in time”—in the form of lifelong learning, given the dual premises of rapidly abating forms of thinking and increasing life expectancy.56 Future Shock advocated that education must above all teach the ability to cope with the sociotechnical changes of the present and near future. The path to such adaptability, it said, is the speculative anticipation of the future while continuously adjusting to increasing changes made in the technological environment by futurological prognostics. Translated into the terminology of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, writing twenty years later, the Tofflers demanded the acknowledgment of a transition from the “apparent acquittal (between two confinements) in disciplinary societies” to the “endless postponement in (constantly changing) control societies.”57 And continuous variation and unlimited postponement have indeed since characterized the educational process. However, the signs have since been reversed. For Deleuze, toward the end of the 1980s, variation and postponement were forms of a new kind of governmentality; this continues to have an effect on present subjectivities, which are defined by incessant self-optimization and expanded individualized responsibility. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, flexibility and fluidity were seen as a promise. With the metaphors of change, growth, opening, and development, education became the focus of public debate. By defining education not only as a means of adapting to ever-changing knowledge requirements, but also as a vehicle for social advancement, personal development, and cultural change, it was able to unite supposedly contradictory meanings and functions. Future Shock’s recipes for survival were informed by this ambiguity. For the prognostic modeling, the Tofflers were able to refer to theorists and architects like Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, and Cedric Price, fellow sleepwalkers on the spectrum between utopia and technocracy, emancipation and control. Linear concepts of learning, they thought, were to be abandoned. Skills and knowledge were to be acquired via electronic media, infrastructures of mobility, and urban networks. The age of information could be mastered only by releasing learning from the institutional and temporal shackles of formal education. In this respect, comprehensive “automation” or “cybernation” renders traditional distinctions, such as those between culture and technology or work and leisure, obsolete. Instead, programmed reality entails the simultaneous activation of all abilities. Writing about the future of work in his 1964 book Understanding Media, McLuhan coined the phrase “learning a living in the automation age,” thus gesturing toward the techno-evolutionary conflation of education, labor, and production: “The very same process that causes a withdrawal of the present work force from industry causes learning itself to become the principal kind of production and consumption.”58

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Similar to McLuhan, Fuller propagated the idea that learning must sooner or later become a paid activity. In order to keep people locked permanently in the process of knowledge creation, he argued, investments have to be made in individuals as learners, since “our educational processes are in fact the upcoming major world industry.”59 Speaking in 1961 to students and faculty on the newly built campus of Southern Illinois University, Fuller claimed that as continuous learners, researchers, and travelers, students and faculty would no longer depend on “great, heavy, stone masonry.” Instead of “‘architecture,’” they would need nothing more than “a beautiful blank floor and beautiful blank walls upon which to cast our pictures or apply crayons.” To protect this white-cube learning lab from the elements, Fuller recommended his own transportable geodesic domes, for example, the Geoscope, “a large two-hundred-foot diameter (or more) lightweight geodesic sphere hung hoveringly at one hundred feet above mid-campus.” Hailed by Fuller as embodying a “circus concept,” mobile and flexible, his domes were conceived as models of “environment controlling facilit[ies],” and thus prototypes for learning spaces of the future.60 Price, who never realized any of his designs, but whose import as a planner and pamphleteer in the 1960s and 1970s was enormous, likewise argued that traditional ideas about architecture had become obsolete—as had the institutions of the school and university. Together with the theater director Joan Littlewood, he had been pursuing the project of a gigantic Fun Palace since 1960. This informal, flexible, and permeable multiplex architecture was intended to break down the boundaries between school, shopping mall, revue theater, cinema, and theme park (Littlewood spoke of a “university of the street” and a “laboratory of pleasure”).61 Visitors would have been invited to consume, to learn, to dance, to talk. Everything would be open and accessible: “Try to start a riot or paint a picture—or just lie back and stare at the sky.”62 Around 1964 Price began imagining and designing a new university for twenty thousand students in a disused industrial area in the West Midlands, the “Potteries Thinkbelt.” The boldly conceived urban project was intended to be large—with the explicit goal of ending the social isolation of university teaching and research by weaving it deeply into the urban fabric. An important precondition for this to happen was the integration of the university with local industries and residents. Not unlike Fuller and his concept of “education automation” (or the educational researchers Lê Thành Khôi and W. Kenneth Richmond’s contemporary notion of the “education industry”63), Price emphasized the “industrial” character of studying: the temporal structures of learning were to be reorganized and infrastructural connectivity was to be made a priority. In this visionary design, spatial planning, urban planning, and educational planning were perfectly synthesized.64

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Price continued his Thinkbelt considerations at the Rice Design Fete at Rice University in the summer of 1967, a ten-day workshop on “New Students in New Settlements,” where teams of students and scholars each worked with an architect on concepts for sustainable learning environments. The result was “ATOM,” a study on cybernetic learning boxes for new suburban developments, but also a proposal to distribute education across the entirety of urban space, from the shopping street to the sports field, by turning every conceivable surface into a canvas or screen for disseminating learning content.65 In 1968, when Price was guest editor of Architectural Design’s themed issue, “Learning,” his experiences and conceptualizations of the previous years were able to come to the fore. His editorial had a polemical ring. Price not only accused the institution of education of being cumbersome and incapable of reform; he also criticized the architectural profession of being ignorant to the actual needs of learners—particularly, and even worse, as it tried to control the learning process through design. Rather than designing new school buildings, Price believed that the most urgent task of the architect was to design functioning “audio-visual privacy” for the increasingly autonomous learner.66 Rarely would architecture come to be so removed from the world of formal education.

Education Policy = Development Policy? At the same time, innovations and reforms expanded on a global scale, steered and shaped by the interests of the two empires of the Cold War and their respective power blocs, but also by projects of newly independent nations in Africa and Asia. Under the seal of developmental policy, accompanied by economic aid and arms supplies, the declared aim of the international community was to export “modern education” across the most remote regions of the world. In the 1960s, UNESCO increasingly seized upon the coordination of transnational educational planning and the moderation of the debates evolving around education and its institutions. It was supported, and sometimes hindered, by other supranational organizations and development agencies and by governmental or semi-governmental institutions such as the OECD and the World Bank. All of them pursued the dissemination of education with the aim of extending political influence, opening up new markets, creating new production facilities, and training new workers. The soft-power policy of the Cold War led to diverse interventions in the school and university sector—within the framework of UNESCO, but also in transnational initiatives of the United States and the Soviet Union, which sought to exert influence on their own terms. Entire educational institutions, from their architecture to teaching and research staff, were exported to the Global South.67 As much

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as education has always been a national, and often a regional and local, matter, in the postwar decades it assumed a global scope. In particular, with their eyes set on the postcolonial “Third World,” interested parties in Washington, DC, Moscow, Paris, Geneva, London, and elsewhere sought to link development and education policy. In parallel, as the geopolitical scale of education was coming to be understood and broadcast, a series of international and regional conferences with corresponding decla­rations were held, with the intention to emphasize the primacy of education. Delegations from Asia, the Arab states, Africa, Western Europe, North America, and Latin America met in rapid succession in Karachi (January 1960), Beirut (March 1960), Bellagio (July 1960), Addis Ababa (June 1961), and Santiago de Chile (March 1962). On all these occasions, long-term “plans” for the respective regions were decided upon and subsequently communicated, primarily through UNESCO channels. At the end of the decade, these diplomatic, development policy initiatives culminated in a special symbolic campaign: the designation of 1970 as “International Education Year” (IEY) by the United Nations. The provisional decision to do so was made at a plenary session of the General Assembly on December 13, 1967. Two months before, in October 1967, an “International Conference on the World Education Crisis” had taken place in Williamsburg, Virginia, at which the plan for the IEY was drawn up. In alignment with the title of the meeting, Leo Fernig, a UNESCO official, observed about the alleged educational misery in postcolonial states of the Global South: “As populations have risen and economic structures have not expanded fast enough, the belief that investment in educational facilities is an economic investment has been tempered by a realization that education as it now exists is a slow and not very efficient process.” He was astonished to see “that the very structures of these educational systems—forms of schooling, curricula and teaching methods based upon patterns introduced before independence—are themselves charged with the possibility of a great deal of wastage or inefficiency.” His recommendation therefore was to pause and reflect on these undesirable conditions in an international discussion: “We will discover the need to change and we may, collectively, achieve some understanding of the nature of this change and therefore plan to bring it about. This seems to be the general idea behind the International Education Year (IEY).”68 The 1967 conference was conceived by Philip H. Coombs, then director of the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning and an education economist with a systems-analysis background. In his 1968 book, The World Educational Crisis, Coombs also addressed the spatial conditions of learning. Signi­ ficantly, however, he did not use the generic term “architecture.” Instead he used a very broadly defined term, “technology.” In his view, a completely new,

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integrated system of teaching and learning would not only require modern learning machines or standardized prefabricated buildings; it would have to be flexible and open to the future, “to circumvent these brick and plaster impediments to new educational technologies—by designing buildings which foster learning and invite innovation rather than hampering them.”69 By way of systems theory, Coombs thought it possible to address the manifold ways in which learning infrastructures were embedded in an environment that was changing rapidly. He was thus able to grasp the educational-economic dimension of the capitalist “world system.”70 Coombs’s notion of education, however, is to be taken as an instrument of a technocratic transformation of reality. The central importance of the question of space for this infrastructural turn, one based on systems theory, was demonstrated in an issue of the UNESCO journal Prospects from 1972, which focused on “Architecture and Educational Space.” The contributions largely agreed that postwar modernist architecture had reached a point where the supposedly efficient spatial programs made up of grids and cells to accelerate the process of construction were incompatible with certain current needs. John Beynon, head of the school construction section of UNESCO’s Department of Educational Planning and Financing, speaking of the Global South, called for community centers designed for the entire population of a town or neighborhood. Built with local materials and methods, independent of impor­ ted industrial goods, these centers could become “full-scale learning aids,” and everyone would participate in their planning and construction.71 Birgit Rodhe, a Swedish politician and Minister of Education from 1978 to 1979, took a slightly different approach with her vision of further enlarging the openplan interiors that, at the time, had already been realized in numerous Scandi­ navian school buildings.72 “The more the school opens up to its surroundings,” architect and urban planner Margrit Kennedy argued in a report on the “school as a community center” for the West Berlin Schulbauinstitut der Länder,

Perry Bussat and Kamal El Jack, Mobile Teaching Package, commissioned by the Regional Educational Buildings Institute for Africa, 1972

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“the more specific and better adapted to the special conditions” the organization and planning should be.73 Such integration could, and sometimes did, go even further, however—to the point where the school building as it was known largely disappeared into the urban environment. In another article of the 1972 issue of Prospects, architects Pierre Bussat and Kamal El Jack presented their Mobile Teaching Package (MTP), a concept for a nomadic learning unit. Developed in the context of the UNESCO-­funded Regional Educational Building Institute for Africa (REBIA) in Khartoum, Sudan, their study was regarded as a prelude to the production of minimalist teaching furniture and materials. Within Africa’s climatic conditions, the MTP was intended to help reduce the amount of time spent inside a school building and to be connectable to other public resources (social and health services, libraries, etc.).74

High-Tech Colonialism or the “University inside Me” The developmental policy of UNESCO subscribed to the principle of “Education for All,” as laid down in the Charter of the United Nations. But the organization was regulating a highly delicate network of relationships that continually reinforced binary setups of givers and takers, center and periphery, rich and poor. Even the most progressive models and designs that emerged from UNESCO’s efforts to foster the design and construction of new schools were not exempt from the realities of geopolitical asymmetries and power dynamics. The organization regularly fell short. Take, for example, ongoing anticolonial struggles, such as the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence from 1963 to 1974, with its enormous tactical, pedagogical,

Thatched-roof classroom in the “liberated zones” of Guinea-Bissau, November 1970

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A scarred school building in Esteli, Nicaragua, that was bombed by dictator Anastasio Somoza’s forces, 1980

and place-making inventiveness in providing education in the jungle and man­ grove forest regions; the radical popular pedagogy of self-empowerment among agricultural workers in northeastern Brazil in the early 1960s; or the pushing forward of “popular education” by the Sandinista movement in the late 1970s in Nicaragua amid its rebellion against the Somoza government, whose military bombed school buildings, old and new.75 In those instances, educational conceits largely driven by development policy either didn’t arrive at all or failed to have the desired effect, as they confronted radical politics that weren’t compatible with the diplomatic balances and ideas of progress embodied by UNESCO. Often, UNESCO projects in the Global South took the form of laboratories. In such settings new, untested concepts, like the MTP, were deployed. In Bouaké, Ivory Coast, for example, from 1968 to 1981, under the stewardship of a consortium of various development organizations coordinated by UNESCO, a “Télé complexe” for the production and testing of audiovisual teaching materials, complete with an attached boarding school, was planned and guided into operation on a university campus.76 The project was based on the assumption that only by turning to radio, television, and video could the effective dissemination of teaching materials, socially and spatially (and geographically), be achieved. The main concern was regions with limited infrastructure. Disconnected rural areas were to have access to education via the technical and didactic means of distanced learning. Animateurs trained in the “Télé complexe” were to be sent to village schools carrying and presenting the films produced in Bouaké, equipped with the required technical and pedagogical means to convey the material to pupils.

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Overcoming geographical and social distances and compensating for a lack of infrastructure could be attempted in a country like the Ivory Coast, which was considered to be compliant with Western notions of development and manageable enough in terms of size. The fact that French and West German television stations, among others, were involved in the program also testifies to the global structure in which such experiments with education took place. In the 1960s and 1970s, educational research and journalism in a Medienverbund (multimedia cluster) promoted a mixture of educational television and radio, media literacy, and the implementation of programmed instruction as a way out of the spatial and logis­ tical problems of schools, both within actual facilities and in terms of their geographical location outside of larger towns.77 Quite a few local stakeholders in Bouaké, however, did not agree with what they perceived as the continuation of colonial conditions and epistemic violence by other means, particularly with regard to the French government’s involvement.78 This criticism would become a driving force for the project’s end in the 1980s. Frequently, states (often their rural areas in particular) still in the process of coming to terms with their colonial past and present, and those still struggling for economic stability, have been used to test “innovations” of educational planning and engineering. Among such cases is the school system (and its facilities) in the Canadian Arctic. As in other parts of North America, the schooling of the Indigenous population (in this case Inuit) has long been a project of “civilization” in the tradition of settler colonialism, carried out tacitly and without much public discussion, particularly with the local Inuit population. Since the late 1960s, the progressive Montreal-based architectural firm Papineau, Gérin-Lajoie, Le Blanc (PGL) began planning and realizing schools in the village of Iqaluit (for some time known as Frobisher Bay) in Nunavut (for some time also known as the Northwest Territories) on the Labrador Sea. Using state-of-the-art fiberglass materials to withstand the Arctic climate, PGL built two futuristic, spacetravel inspired schools in the ice (Nakasuk Elementary School and Gordon Robertson Education Centre, now Inuksuk High School). The designs were not results of any research into Inuit pedagogies and knowledge systems. Instead, they were guided by a certain idea of how the everyday school life of local children and youth could be catapulted into the late modern age made manifest in open-plan, integrated comprehensive schools in metropolitan areas. However, the spatial programming of the schools did not work. There were acoustic problems in the large multipurpose interiors, while the classrooms proved to be too small. Shortly after the opening of the PGL schools in the mid-1970s, the Ottawa provincial government revised some of its curricular and planning principles. Finally, the local Inuit population was invited to participate in new building projects, and the Inuit language was integrated into the curricula. Apparently these measures changed the community’s relationship to PGL’s architecture, which was

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Papineau, Gérin-Lajoie, Le Blanc architectes (PGL), Gordon Robertson Education Centre (Inuksuk High School), Iqaluit, Canada, 1973

ultimately embraced by the population. Today, Nakasuk Elementary School is the pride of the community and a place of active school life.79 The political and educational particularities of the Arctic North were far more tied to other, seemingly less peripheral places than might have been expected, and this was true for Indigenous realities in general. Around 1970, critical accounts of violent, discriminatory colonial pasts and presents met idealizing, romantic views of Indigenous cultures among largely white, Western countercultural milieus. The “Indians” became the desired Other of a generation in despair of Western modernity and consumerist society. Indianerschulen: Als Indianer überleben—von Indianern lernen (Indian schools: surviving as Indians—learning from Indians) was the title of a 1979 book in the “politische Erziehung” (political schooling) series published by Rowohlt.80 Indigenous pedagogy, according to the book’s author, could provide blueprints for the Stadtindianer (urban Indian). At the same time, Indigenous traditions maintained in the “survival schools” of the North American reservations, which the volume presented through interviews with activists, educators, and students, proved to be a resource of anticolonial selfdetermination: “I have a universal university inside me,” stated one of the interviewees, the Lakota medicine man and activist Leonard Crow Dog, who refused any pedagogy rooted in Western education.81

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1968 and the Political Economy of Space Statements like the above echo those of the civil rights movement and the student revolts of the 1960s. Quite effectively, political actors of different ideological provenance transformed educational policy into a bustling arena of projects for governmental reform and of various models and practices of alternative education. In doing so, they drew their inspiration not only from predecessors of early twentieth-century progressive and reform pedagogy, but occasionally from non-­ Western traditions of learning and teaching as well.82  To some extent, the expansion of the conceptual and practical frameworks of thinking and doing education was in itself a global, transnational, and transcultural affair, and therefore decidedly spatial in its geopolitical reach. Additionally, political struggle in the 1960s and 1970s became particularly fierce and focused on (and beyond) the institutional territories of school and university. Arguably, resistance and world building from below and from the peripheries always implied an educational dimension, albeit one that may defy the conditions of formal education and their respective spatial environments. Still, it needs to be asked how the various reforms, revolts, insurgencies (and reactionary responses that sought to maintain more traditional notions of education) affected the very designs and buildings of educational architecture and their spatial programs, realized or not. More specifically: What relationships emerged between educational spaces, curricular reforms, and social movements? Some hints toward a response can be found in the context of the recurring commemoration of “1968.” The magnetism of the multiple events of May ’68 and its aftermath entailed the philosophical notion of an “event,” put forward by Alain Badiou and others.83 An event on the scale of 1968 has imminent and longstanding effects of world-making and community building, of epistemological rupture and social change, but also of sending shock waves and causing trauma.84 Exhibitions and publications in recent years have paid ample tribute to the complexity and internationality of the triggering events of the “red decade,”85 increasingly attending also to architecture and architects and planners.86 Historically, conceptually, and in conservationally, a rehabilitation has been long overdue, for example, of the architectural Brutalism of the era. This includes a number of iconic school and university projects. A question such as “pedagogy in concrete?,” raised at a meeting on school construction in West Berlin in 1967, can now be read as an attempt to grasp the relationship between the state of education and that of building.87 Moreover, raw concrete, Brutalism’s somewhat totalizing material of choice, becomes recognizable as the aesthetic cipher of a variety of late modernist ideologies, organized around ideas of democracy, socialism, accessibility, mobility, anti-elitism, etc.88

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Arguably, the semiotics of concrete promised a certain shared lingua franca, providing permeability and translatability with regard to the boundaries between otherwise separated zones of social production and reproduction, such as school and factory, university and office space. Beyond (and adding to) Brutalism’s more recent revival, several valuable studies and anthologies, some of which cover wide geographical areas, have been published on school construction, university architecture, and campus planning of the 1960s and 1970s.89 However, this conjuncture hasn’t reached its peak yet. Studies on the Education Shock era could be considerably advanced by inquiries into the relation of the massive expansion of the educational sector and its infrastructures to resistance movements, as well as to the global context of the debate on education, politics, and architecture. Out of the latter, a politics of learning emerged that proved to be inseparable from a politics of space. The Education Shock project draws on the notion of a “political economy of space,” first introduced by the Marxist philosopher and urban critic Henri Lefebvre, who around 1970 was marking a shift from the production of things in space to the production of space.90 In 1965, Lefebvre began teaching at the Uni­ versity of Nanterre, a satellite of the Sorbonne in a western suburb of Paris. There he found himself on a modernist campus grafted on the US model, within sight of social housing and in the immediate vicinity of a bidonville.

Construction site of the University of Nanterre with the shantytown (bidonville) that the future campus bordered in the foreground, Paris, France, 1964

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Immigrants from Algeria and other former French colonies lived in the bidonville. The experiences of the approximately 13,000 students and teachers of social sciences and law, who were shielded from the city but also from the slum area, engendered fierce discussions about the racism and segregation of French society, and not least about its articulation in the educational system. This is where the 1968 Movement of March 22nd was constituted, a pluralistic nucleus of May ’68. Just a few months later, Lefebvre published his long essay-pamphlet “L’irruption de Nanterre au sommet” (roughly: The irruption: from Nanterre to the summit), which was quickly republished as a book, followed by an English edition titled The Explosion: Marxism and the French Revolution.91 Lefebvre defined the campus of Nanterre as a “heterotopia,” as it was on the urban periphery, like a counter-campus to the “utopia” that was expected of the polis (cité). In his view, the protests at the Sorbonne and in the Latin Quarter produced an “effect of shock, or rather rupture” on the “superstructures,” and while “the university, culture” were the “breaking point,” they were deeply connected with de-urbanized, segregated areas of society, articulating fault lines and “hidden contradictions.”92 The geographical marginalization of the Nanterre campus and the social exclusion of the inhabitants of the surrounding areas stingingly demonstrated the contradictions of the capitalist order of knowledge, work, and housing. However, the tangible effects of a political economy of space also made students aware of the dialectics of the overall situation. They realized that the supposedly modernist campus, built under the direction of the office of Jean-Paul and Jacques Chauliat, was an anachronism. To identify it as such, they simply had to relate the Fordism symbolized in the architecture and planning to the process of deindustrialization observed in a city such as Paris. Moreover, they experienced their own social reality on the remote university campus as being an anticipation of a coming alienation.93 Lefebvre spoke of the “emptiness” of a functionalist architecture and education, from which a paradoxical community could emerge. Nanterre could become a “social condenser” not because of its architecture and urbanistic proposition, but against all the planning, aesthetics, and bureaucracy, due to its being a “negatively privileged place.”94 Thus Lefebvre made a point of the importance of “segregation” and “separation” for the explosivity of the situation in 1968. The Nanterre community of learners projected itself toward the disruptive utopias of urban centrality and revolution: “It is here that—more intensely than elsewhere— life partakes both of reality (its misery) and imagination (the splendor of history and the world!). This contributes substantially to the disintegration of culture, formal knowledge, and institutions.”95

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Like in a prism, Lefebvre’s dialectical gaze dissected the situation and made it readable in its contradictoriness and multidimensionality. The modernist-colonial project of the Western European state, which after World War II had to come to terms with the loss of its imperial power as well as with the growing doubts about a society marked by authoritarianism and pressure to conform, fell into a deep crisis in the 1960s. The exemplary coexistence of students from the French province and workers from the former colonies in the Paris suburb; the tension between center and periphery; and the questioning of traditional and hierarchical forms of learning and teaching, especially as postindustrial capitalist society calcified—such are the elements that suggest that Lefebvre’s political economy of space also contained a political economy of education. The campus of Nanterre, like the nearby bidonville built on a former Ministry of Defense site, was an ideological and territorial claim of the French state. The students, among them instant celebrity figures such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Jean-Pierre Duteuil, reacted to this in the months leading up to May ’68 with unforeseen uses and appropriations, such as the occupation of the administration building on March 22.96 The photographs and archival documents from this period convey the ways in which the formal space of learning and teaching was reinterpreted—how spatial conditions were created to be used for unauthorized assemblies, informal pedagogies, and self-managed practices of knowledge generation. Moments of self-empowerment and autonomy were achieved not only in opposition to the hierarchical order of French university life, but also against a certain late modernist architecture that was experienced as the physical embodiment of techno-capitalist rule.

“Integration without Equality” The very performative occupations of space by student protesters could also produce exclusionary spaces. Despite anti-imperialist gestures of solidarity with Vietnam or involvement in labor struggles in France’s factories, the view of the slum bordering the campus did not automatically lead to solidarity with the concerns of those who lived there. The prospect of a “critical university,” like the concurrent experiments in Berlin and Trento, was discussed in detail to both address the academic ghetto and take up the political struggle outside the university.97 But there was also a significant gap between the growing awareness of the divisive geographies and architectures of French society as a whole and a blindness regarding the systemic racism of educational institutions, manifested in the asymmetric spatial distribution of access to (and exclusion from) education.

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In Western Europe, the geopolitics of the Cold War, the consequences of decolonization, and an increasingly globalized economy became tangible in waves of immigration. In France and the United Kingdom, a new “multicultural” society was emerging, and with it the “multi-racial school.”98 The conflict around immigration policies and the tensions emerging in multiethnic immigrant communities immediately affected the reality in schools and universities. It was not until far into the 1970s, however, that the education and planning implications of the realities of postcolonial immigrant societies were recognized by policy makers and educationalists.99 At the same time, the Soviet Union and the GDR were inviting young people from socialist countries of the Global South to study there.100 However, African students, in particular, regularly experienced discrimination and anti-Black violence in socialist countries in Eastern Europe and in China. In response, students staged collective protests and strikes. In these cases, the multicultural campus figured as a somewhat contradictory space, signaling solidarity and internationalism while being the backdrop for the denial of equal rights for individual students and foreign students. Many escaped to Western Europe, often to very similar experiences of racist violence and exclusion. Certain geopolitical readings of these journeys however were (and are) misleading, as anthropologist Eric Burton emphasizes: “Dichotomizing Cold War categories concealed the diversity and complexity of students’ personal motives.”101 Beginning with the late 1950s, the economic situation in East and West Germany required the employment of Vertragsarbeiter (contract workers) or Gastarbeiter (guest workers), which not only caused a need for accommodation and housing, but also for additional teaching capacities—language courses, for example.102 In the FRG, the first binational recruitment agreement for migrant workers was signed with Italy in 1955 (further agreements with Spain, Greece, Turkey, Morocco, South Korea, Portugal, Tunisia, and Yugoslavia were to follow until 1968). A recession at the end of the 1960s reduced the need for “guest labor,” and the 1973 oil crisis led to an abrupt halt in recruitment. But there were already so many migrant families in the country that, in addition to language instruction and further training for adults, the schooling of migrant children had become a task for which the education system was hardly prepared. Some of the countries sending workers ran their own schools, with teachers instructing in their national languages.103 However, since children were subject to compulsory schooling under German law, the children of migrant workers also had to be “integrated” into preschools and schools (even though the authorities in 1970 still estimated that around 25 percent of school-age children weren’t attending school).104 There are hardly any systematic studies on how this integration has taken place in individual schools or nationwide, how and where the required additional teaching was organized, or whether (and, if so, how) planners and architects

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responded to the changing educational needs (preparatory classes, language teaching, the design and establishment of the migrant communities’ own schools,  etc.).105 “Integration without equality” stated the title of the leftist pedagogical journal Betrifft: Erziehung in a 1973 themed issue on “guest worker children.”106 Teachers were required to limit themselves to classroom instruction, officially disallowed from supporting migrant children outside of regular school hours. Appropriate spatial conditions for successful schooling did not exist in the buildings. Neither the education system nor indiThemed issue on education and immigration vidual schools and their facilities were of the leftist West German journal Betrifft: prepared to welcome and adequately Erziehung, 1973 attend to immigrant students. And the space available within their homes frequently did not suffice for children to learn successfully. Thus the interrelatedness of the spatial predicaments of education and housing was (and continues to be) parti­cularly tangible for students discriminated against in racialized societies. The issue of the equal and just provision of spaces for learning cannot be separated from societal conditions beyond the school, as much as theories of education have long emphasized the relative autonomy of the realm of pedagogy. Originating in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s educational theory (developed in Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years) and becoming since an influential concept in the Bildung lexicon, the phrase “pedagogical province” declares the school to be an area of performativity shielded from other social spaces.107 But there exists a close connection between school and housing to be reckoned with. Neglecting this connection means failing to identify the reasons for the segregation that continues to this day. In the United States, for example, the disproportionate, biased distribution of students in urban areas continues to be facilitated through zoning means, such as educational gerrymandering and the unequal funding of schools depending on a specific neighborhood’s income tax.108 Urban policies impinge on educational realities; the economic wellbeing of an urban area is reflected in the quality of its schools and the career outlooks of their alumni. On the other hand, any isolated treatment of education likely contributes to a “spatial paradox of education

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policy”; that is, reform efforts and investments in education may lead to individual social and geographical mobility, while little is changed with regard to the disenfranchisement of particular neighborhoods in relation to others.109

Feminist Organization of Learning Spaces Such difficulties and limitations for migrant families led parents to self-organize in the 1970s and 1980s—a little-known episode in the history of education and migration.110 Parallels and comparisons may be drawn, for example, to the scuole e quartiere movement in Italy, which, from the mid-1960s onward, attempted to compensate for the deficits of the urban educational system and schools’ capacity problems caused by internal migration from South to North through self-organized childcare and moving classes to shops and private kitchens.111 The Kinderläden (storefront kindergartens) and other forms of autonomous care and schooling that mushroomed in European cities around 1968 were fortunate to have references and models in the Italian initiatives, not least in terms of their origins in (proto-)feminist empowerment and reproductive-labor theory.112 Further into the 1970s, Italian feminist groups such as Rivolta Femminile foregrounded the issue of gendered spaces. In Milan and other cities, they created autonomous spaces for autocoscienza (consciousness raising) or writing workshops outside the confines of the private home. Meeting in bookshops and rented rooms, the women produced non-domestic geographies of subjectivity and self-determined learning.113 In parallel, around 1970 a labor struggle emerged that successfully sought to guarantee workers 150 waged hours per year of public adult education, ratified in 1972. Initially driven by factory workers and farmers, the “150 ore” movement encouraged feminist organizing of autonomous education and knowledge production in environments of informal learning throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.114 Thus the spatialities and temporalities of education were reconfigured in local and sometimes translocal assemblages of labor politics, applied theories of lifelong learning, and feminist practices of empowerment and deconfinement. Women’s leverage in issues of place-making had long been silenced and invisibilized. But, as the feminist architect group Matrix stated in the early 1980s, “precisely because women are brought up differently in our society we have different experiences and needs in relation to the built environment which are rarely expressed.”115 How these experiences and needs could be reflected in the design and planning of educational spaces and places emerged slowly as a point of contestation in the Education Shock years, starting with feminist redrawings of the

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private/public binarism and the creation of safe spaces of self-determined learning. But it would still be a while before a more intersectional critique of the built environment in general and the environments of formal and informal learning in particular was made.

School as a Space to Be Desegregated The (dis)connection of education, spatiality, and racism could probably be most acutely observed in the United States. The segregation of North American society was (and is) manifest in the urban, geographical, and architectural separation of white people and people of color. Segregation effectively structured, and continues to structure, the accessibility of schools and universities for people of color, and thus functioned as a lever of educational justice. Any critical addressing of the intimate ties between educational and spatial politics is therefore doomed to failure if it doesn’t take the issue of racialization and anti-Blackness into consideration, for it affects the entire gamut of spatial (regional, urban) planning, educational policy, architectural design, and pedagogical theory and practice. In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the Supreme Court voted that Black student exclusion from white elementary schooling on the grounds that schools for Blacks were “separate but equal” contradicted the very equality guaranteed by the Constitution. From this moment, the quest to abolish segregation, to desegregate, was no longer solely a priority of the civil rights movement and was taken up by the educational policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, all the while framed by a long and ever-intense media debate.116 The commitment to “integration” yielded infrastructural, urban, and architectural consequences. A blatant socio-spatial injustice had to be abolished, which also meant that the entire system of urban zoning and its effects on the distribution of educational opportunities had to be brought to the planning of new schools and the redesign of existing ones.117 Decades of political negotiation, fierce anti-racist struggle, and urban planning were to revolve around the question of how to arrive at actual desegregation. Among the various attempts to find a promising, non-­ racist future of education was the proposal of large, centralized school facilities, or “education parks,” designed (and occasionally realized) since the mid-1960s.118 Other examples of desegregated schooling models born in the ensuing years included inner-city neighborhood community schools. In addition, public magnet schools, introduced in the late 1960s, soon became a favorite medium of equity-­ pursuing educational politics, based on the ideal of the freedom of school choice.

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A soldier guarding a school busing station, United States, ca. 1970

Providing a particular curriculum, with theme-based programs around science, math, and performing arts, magnet schools aimed to stop white flight and attract ethnically diverse student bodies. Students were drawn both from beyond the assigned schooling district and from the school’s immediate neighborhood. This was supported by voluntary, though not particularly successful, desegregation plans on the city level that opposed mandatory school busing.119 School busing became one of the most controversial issues within education politics. Just like the magnet schools, which organized students into a desired demographic composition, busing proved to be a planning tool that produced a certain student population by geospatial means. Advocated for by proponents of the civil rights movement and a range of progressive educators, disenfranchised Black and white students were transported to desegregated schools, often located long distances from their homes. Envisioned to be a way to end racial divide and achieve desegregation, busing was however met with massive resistance in many parts of the country. During the 1970s it became a subject of increasingly bitter contestation—yet another palpable articulation of how deeply divided and racialized US society still was, despite all the struggles fought and progress made in the 1950s and 1960s.120

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In an influential 1972 article, the neoconservative sociologist Nathan Glazer, an opponent of busing, maintained that “white children were in effect being conscripted to create an environment which, it had been decided, was required to provide equality of education opportunity for black children.”121 In a typical inversion of the arguments by advocates of desegregation, Glazer accused the busing movement of enlisting students, white and Black, to provide a racial “environment.” On the other side of the debate, concerns were raised around the long, time-consuming transport on buses. Usually, Black students traveled from inner cities to newly built suburbs predominantly inhabited by whites. These dislocations were considered to be ultimately detrimental to the educational experience and learning success.122 After years of dealing with segregation and desegregation, educational researcher Meyer Weinberg’s 1967 study Race and Place was a devastating legal history of the struggle against exclusion. Weinberg candidly demonstrated how obviously the reality of segregation in schools, especially in southern US states, contradicted the political commitment to its abolition. Weinberg paid particular attention to the spatial aspects of the planning and allocation of schools, the distances to be overcome between home and school, and the spatial divisions that existed within individual school buildings. Contrary to the positions of white-dominated school administrations, Weinberg argued that these separations were not a natural given, but rather conditions created by humans and thus revisable. Such conditions ranged from the discriminatory zoning of school districts to the racist assumption that Black children could be expected to walk longer distances to school than white children.123 Supported by racist jurisprudence, rubber-stamped arbitrariness, and educational obstinacy, discrimination was thus spatially manifest and politically established all too permanently. And this situation certainly did not pertain only to the United States, but was to be found in numerous places worldwide— amid an atmosphere that was otherwise marked by liberal reformism and radical anti-authoritarianism.

Storefront Schools and the “Dream of the Black University” Frustration over failed or inconsequential desegregation and the radicalization of the Black struggle in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere entailed the creation of new counter-spaces of learning. From the mid-1960s onward, storefront schools and “street academies” opened in numerous cities. Social workers repurposed vacant shops, creating alternative spaces for social work and schooling for high school “forceouts” and disadvantaged youth.

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In the United Kingdom, the African-Caribbean community created the grassroots Black supplementary school movement in the mid-1960s. “Concerned parents, teachers, church groups, community organizations and members of the public set up educational provision on the weekends or evenings in order to provide black young people with basic school curricula and black history,” Kehinde Andrews noted, adding that the elusive archive of this movement has to be reconstructed from the experiences and memories of those who organized and passed through it.124 In Harlem, New York, the Urban League Street Academy Program helped prepare for college students who had walked out of the public-school system— which yielded the founding of the legendary Harlem Preparatory School in 1967.125 In Oakland, the Black Panther Party ran the Oakland Community School (OCS). The elementary school, founded in 1971, developed out of a combined daycare and homeschool known as the Children’s House, or the Intercommunal Youth Institute. After moving to a modernist former church building, OCS was in operation from 1973 until 1982, deploying elements of Freire’s radical pedagogy and earning acclaim from the California Department of Education and the governor of California.126 In major cities throughout the United States, alternative Black schools complemented and radicalized the existing system of (segregated) Black schools and colleges. With the reinvigoration of Black studies and the increasing militancy of the Black struggle in the 1960s, radical methodologies of education and tactical modes of knowledge production emerged that effectively politicized the space of the campus, and arguably the space of learning more generally. In 1967, Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK), an experimental, collaborative affirmative action program, was founded at the City College of New York. It targeted students, mainly from the Black and Puerto Rican communities, who were marginalized and otherwise excluded from educational institutions. Among the group of poets and writers to soon join the faculty were Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Raymond Patterson, Aijaz Ahmad, Adrienne Rich, and Toni Cade Bambara. Carving out an environment of de-hierarchized, open-ended, student-centered informal learning within the space of the college campus proved generative of specific ways of conceiving the spatial politics of alternative Black studies. Bambara, who taught and wrote “Realizing the Dream of the Black University” (the title of an essay from 1969), “challenged students to carefully investigate all the spaces they occupy (from the classroom to their homes), endowing her students with the courage and camaraderie to explore their own upbringings, ideologies and prejudices, instead of ignoring, dismissing, suppressing or trans­ mitting them.”127 Resonating with such edu-spatial poetics and politics was

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Adrienne Rich’s notion, found in teaching notes from 1970, of the polyvalence of the “classroom,” to be lived as confinement or communality: Classroom as cell—unit—enclosed & enclosing space in which teacher & students are alone together Can be prison cell commune trap junction—place of coming-together torture chamber128 Carefully attending to the malleability of classroom typology was an important dimension of the kind of Black (feminist) pedagogy practiced by Bambara, Rich, and others active in alternative educational endeavors such as SEEK or the Urban League Street Academy Program. Their invitation to think in spatial and pedagogical terms emphasized the performativity and the psychology of spaces, be they physical or epistemological. For these programs, dreaming the “dream of the black university” meant producing and maintaining spaces of Blackness within an otherwise anti-Black environment. Contesting racial segregation could thus result in the poetic subversion and imaginative revolution of educational norms. The storefront approach to learning and facilitating may have been short-lived and ephemeral, but its legacy is a lasting one. It deviated from the empty promise of desegregation where, “in the classroom, in the cafeteria, and in most social spaces,” as bell hooks pointed out, “racial apartheid prevailed.”129

Integration, Inclusion: “Special Schools” and Comprehensives In 1963, Meyer Weinberg, the author of Race and Place, founded the journal Integrated Education—a title chosen with care, as “integration” was the central discursive strategy for overcoming segregation within education. A political term, integration was also a spatial metaphor, invoking images of connection, inter­ weaving, and embeddedness. Arguably, this gesturing toward spatiality informed the ways in which integration gained normative force in the course of educational policies in the 1960s and 1970s. And indeed, the concept of integration, advanced to foster the principle of equality and the goal of overcoming social barriers, increasingly impacted the organization and the experience of schools and univer­ sities. In relation to the built environment, the term often assumed the meaning of a fact or state of things (rather than a process) to be materialized in policy and architecture. Accordingly, the education parks and community and magnet schools mentioned above represented the policies of desegregation as much by way of their curricula as their architectural form and geographical location.130 And, next to combating racial divisions, integration was used to remedy other forms of discrimination and inequality, such as those related to ableism. Integrat-

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ing students with disabilities meant liberating them from the purview of “special education” and its apparatus of auxiliary schools and bringing them into “normal” education.131 The project of integration/inclusion has always been inseparable from the issue of physical barriers. Architectural design and the layout of buildings has conti­ nually kept students with disabilities from attending public school. In response to this neglect, in the UK disability advocates, such as the architect Selwyn Goldsmith, himself paralyzed after contracting polio, have offered new frameworks for barrier-free planning since the early 1960s.132 The fact that architectural firms such as Foster Associates occasionally produced designs for “special schools” (see for example their 1975 Palmerston Special School in Liverpool) may attest to a growing awareness of the issue of inclusion among the profession in the 1970s. After the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968, which required that newly construc­ ted public buildings in the United States to meet basic standards of accessibility, Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975 (which has been known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act since 1997 and features the principle of the “least restrictive environment”).133 It took almost another twenty years until an international agreement of a similar nature was reached with the Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education in 1994. Regarding disability, the term “integration” has gradually been replaced by “inclusion.” Invoking a topology of inside and outside, inclusion seems to address the spatial dimension of equity even more effectively. Early on, the concept of inclusive schooling was linked to the unstreamed, nonhierarchical comprehensive school—the Gesamtschule or Enseignement secondaire. In his foreword to a volume on buildings for “handicapped” children from 1974, the architect and school building expert Manfred Scholz argued that allocating children “who do not meet the requirements of normal schools due to mental or physical disadvantages” to special schools only affirmed an anachronistic position. According to the “last apologists of the tripartite school system” a diverse student body could most efficiently be managed by a hierarchical layering of school types (Hauptschule, Real­schule, and Gymnasium in the West German context). Any categorizing of students, Scholz contended, relies on “traditional norms” that provide no support for the individual. Instead, they allow for a problematic “sorting out of those students who do not fit the norm.”134 Progressive educationalists sought to relate comprehensive school and education centers to the project of inclusion, which seemed to be a logical move due to the architecture and curriculum of such schools.135 Comprehensive schools were key

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Jacob B. Bakema, Jos Weber, Graaf & Schweger, Klaus Nickels, and Timm Ohrt, comprehensive school Mümmelmannsberg, Hamburg, Germany, 1969–1978

to policies of educational equity and efficaciousness promoted by social democrats. This school type, allegedly embodying the effort to transcend class difference, was the contested symbol of educational reforms in many Western European countries, especially in the United Kingdom and in West Germany. Featuring open-plan designs, multifunctional classrooms with movable walls, and stateof-the-art technological equipment, they were supposed to represent flexibility, mobility, and student-centered planning, while projecting a sense of self-sufficiency (comprehensive! all day!). However, the noble project of educational democratization regularly clashed with the prosaic demands of economic calculation and educational effectiveness. Moreover, the architectural language of massive school complexes wasn’t universally appreciated. It was read by many as a provocation, sparking protests by parents, politicians, teachers, and students. Identified with left-wing social-democratic educational policy, the comprehensive school, both in terms of its principled integration and structural design, was the target of choice of conservatives who were against the dismantlement of the tiered school system. The promotion of inclusion as a major project of disability politics suffered from the conflicted nature of the comprehensive school. However, in West Germany, bipartisan political consensus regarding the integration of young people with disabilities into the school system was almost reached around the time Manfred Scholz published his book. Thus, that he featured architectural designs for

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“special schools” may have already been considered anachronistic for some. Given this tension, it is all the more revealing to discover, for example, the various designs and plans for a rehabilitation center in Oberhausen for Vietnamese children traumatized by the war, built between 1967 and 1969. Or a children’s village in Ellwangen an der Jagst, inaugurated in 1973 for the therapeutic care, accommodation, and schooling of children with “learning disabilities” between the ages of two and fourteen. In addition, a programmatic statement, accompanied by five designs for “integrated primary schools,” was included in the book penned by a working group on “integrated special schools” (of which Scholz was a member) at the Technical University in Berlin. “In the awareness of the fact that separating special schools from ‘normal’ schools is an important cause of the social disinteg-

Manfred Scholz, study of a primary school unit, ca. 1973

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ration of the disabled in our society,” the group proposed innovative “models of integration,” drawing on literature on critical special education from Scandi­ navia, West Germany, and the GDR.136 The research and design resulted in the study of a primary school unit (complete with preschool), to be tested on two plots allocated for special education projects. “In particular, the task was to offer a large number of different, flexible rooms, whereby great importance was attached to a clear outline of the age groups and a sensible distribution of preparatory and remedial courses.”137 These considerations may have been taken as progressive in the early 1970s, but they completely disregarded the possibility of collaborative participation by future users. Even today, the self-determination of people with disabilities is hardly taken into account in the planning of educational institutions. Access is regarded as a purely technical matter; a constructional, not a political issue.138

Open Plan and Open Classroom The combination of integration and flexibility has been a constant feature of educational-planning discourse since the early 1960s. The open plan was regarded as the perfect matrix for an architecture that would respond to the pressing organizational, pedagogical, and economic requirements and demands of the time. The “school without walls” derived from the dominant postwar spatial idiom of the open-plan office or Bürolandschaft (officescape). With it came the promise of adapting to changing learning situations at any time while allowing for a student-centered approach and encouraging individual initiative and independent study.139

William E. Blurock & Associates, Sonora High School, Fullerton, California, United States, 1965–1966

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The open plan was strongly advocated for by the Educational Facilities Labora­ tories (EFL). The New York-based research and consulting institute was founded in 1958 by the Ford Foundation, in cooperation with the American Institute of Architects and the Teachers College of Columbia University, and it operated until the 1980s. The EFL disseminated advice on open-plan and prefab building systems (such as the School Construction Systems Development), primarily addressed to educational administrations in the United States, but also intended to inform school construction elsewhere. In addition to being a design paradigm, the open plan embodied, at least from a Western perspective, an entire ideological program, fostering progressive views on work, organization, pedagogy, and architecture—a program not necessarily shared in a global context. Carlo Testa, an independent consultant for educational architecture, pointed out in the mid-1970s that Soviet schools, for example, were planned according to a different set of typo­ logical standards than an EFL-type open plan, providing an alternative, “unusual mixture” of discipline, guidelines, and progressive teaching content, and suggesting “a critical reanalysis of some fashionable western theories like flexibility, permissiveness, etc.”140 In 1974, Helmut Trauzettel, an architect in the GDR specializing in school buildings, coordinated “Flexibility of Educational Buildings,” a conference hosted by the International Union of Architects, for which he defined flexibility as a contro­versial issue in need of interpretation and critique. Trauzettel noted a methodo­logical division within international discourse, where the demand for an “optimal offer for the versatile use of space” was pitted against a notion of a “planned readiness for structural change.”141 In his final report on the event, Trauzettel distinguished between the merely pragmatic “willingness to adapt and change” a building and the “effective functional bringing to life of the spatial envelope”: “An educational area, interwoven with social communication, should be relished as a stimulating offer, used in versatile ways and without temporal constraints.”142 As nuanced as such distinctions may seem, they did mark actually opposing positions in the East-West dialogues on spatial programs, pedagogical theories, and ideas about the socio-spatial embedding of school facilities. In a famous turn of phrase, the psychologist and educator Loris Malaguzzi called the spatial environment (ambiente) of learning the “third teacher” (terzo insegnante), alongside children of the same age and adults.143 Malaguzzi, who, in the 1940s, founded a new type of relational early education in Reggio Emilia in northern Italy (inspiring a nationwide network of childcare centers and kindergartens), conceived of pedagogy as a collective production of space. In Malaguzzi’s view, participants in the educational process were entitled to contribute to the planning and design of its spaces, thus challenging the traditional hierarchies within the design of the spatial relations of learning.

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Inspired by Malaguzzi and other progressive educators, architects and urban theorists in the 1960s and 1970s increasingly refocused attention on the needs and ideas of children. In 1967, Mechthild Schumpp, a young sociologist interested in the history of urban utopias, conducted intense, interview-based research on the way children perceived the architecture of the newly opened Mittelpunkts­chule Baunatal, near the West German city of Kassel. Through a contemplative analysis of scale models of schoolyards and classrooms, children were encouraged to talk about spatial behavior, participation, and everyday school life.144 The preoccupation with the immediate environment of learning and the possibilities of its transformation soon became a central component of new forms of teaching, especially in the context of “aesthetic education.”145 In addition, an emphasis was put on the urban “environment” of learners, in both its sociological and ecological meaning. In books such as The Child in the City, the anarchist architect and social theorist Colin Ward, an advocate of “environmental education,” believed that (in the words of a reviewer) the “only true international culture that we largely ignore in our search for ‘knowledge’” is children as user-­learners and producers of urban space.146 George Dennison, an elementary school teacher influenced by progressive educators such as John Dewey, A. S. Neill, and Leo Tolstoy, worked at the First Street School in New York with children and youth who were believed to be difficult to teach, but were in fact underprivileged. In his much-read book The Lives of Children from 1969, Dennison emphasized the character of the school as an “environment” to be experienced. In opposition to the conditions of a capitalist society, the space of the school was to be controlled in the interest of children; that is, without any coercion. Similar to Malaguzzi, Schumpp, or Ward, Dennison pleaded for the principle of relationality, pointing beyond material and institutional predicaments: “We might cease thinking of school as a place, and learn to believe that it is basically relationships: between children and adults, adults and adults, children and other children. The four walls and the principal’s office would cease to loom so hugely as the essential ingredients.”147 In the course of the 1960s and early 1970s, pedagogical practice and its terminology changed in many places—often stepping away from and contesting restorative tendencies. Programmatically, notions of “classroom” and “schoolhouse” were supplemented or even replaced by terms such as “learning environment” and “learning place,” thus invoking ideas rooted in behavioral studies and ecology.148 Meanwhile playgrounds and preschool facilities were increasingly unconfined, pulled out of isolation and placed in the urban environment.149

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Toward the end of the 1960s, “openness” had become a central trope of education, not only in the architectural programming of classrooms, as seen above, but also in the sense of a more widely conceived “open space” or “open education.” In 1969, the educator Herbert R. Kohl published his small book The Open Classroom, which quickly evolved into a manifesto of the radical, antiauthoritarian pedagogical movement. In a footnote, Guenther Weidle, the German translator of Kohl’s book, provided a short introduction to the phrase “open classroom” for the German reader: Open Classroom refers specifically to the classroom as a space that is not prestructured but is “left open” for a teaching process that develops spontaneously from the needs and interests of the students, and sometimes to this teaching process itself, which the teacher “keeps open” in every respect: temporally, openness referred to an organically developing, not programmed division of time and to unforeseen shifts in time; spatially, openness referred to the environ­ment, which is either a crucial part of the teaching or into which the students evade to learn on the spot; spiritually, openness referred to the spontaneity of the students and to unplanned initiatives and changes of direction that result from it.150 This compact commentary on the meaning of open classroom was supplemented by references to the semantics of “open” in the Anglo-American debate, such as Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies from 1945, and can also be related to the “university without walls,” an open-study program with evening classes and independent studies that was launched in the early 1970s in seventeen US colleges. The appeal of the semantics of openness was also evident in the name of the Open University in the United Kingdom, founded in 1969. It was another university “without walls,” and perhaps even more consistently so in many ways. For although the Open University had a physical campus in Milton Keynes, it primarily offered a program of distance learning, based on seminars and lectures that were broadcast on BBC television.151 The various modes or dimensions of openness that Weidle listed, and which are evidenced above all in a pedagogical expectation of the unexpected, were not to be confused with the opening up of schools and universities to technologically enhanced forms of education and to the possibility of part-time and distanced learning. However, they all share an interest in breaking down boundaries, overcoming outdated hierarchies, and empowering those who, as children, have no voice and no right to self-determined learning; or those who, as residents of a socially disadvantaged area, are given the chance of equal treatment in the radical, open classroom; or those who, living far away from a university, can attain a university degree only via distant learning.

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Parkway Program, course on law enforcement held in a courtroom, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, ca. 1970

These openings were reactions to what educational researcher Charles E. Silberman has called the “crisis in the classroom”—or, the failure of the public school. Silberman, in his book of the same title from 1970, traveled through the misery of the US school system and, in contrast, the glorious tradition of the progressive, reformist pedagogy of John Dewey et al., while also citing current examples of progressive initiatives. Between 1967 and 1972, for example, the Parkway Program in Philadelphia—sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the city’s school administration—pursued the experiment of a “school without walls” by providing high-school-level instruction throughout the city.152 The curriculum included tutorials, internships, self-managed learning, a high degree of autonomy, and a focus on the active interests of the students. As to be expected, this openness also turned out to be a problem, as it often resulted in student absences, exhaustion, and disorientation. But dissolving the brick-and-mortar school building as the centralized, compulsory site of pedagogical experience was observed with astonishment and admiration by an audience of international experts—to be adopted and continued in many other cities as a model for urban education.153

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The Future of the School, 1970 Regardless of whether learning groups, cooperation, desegregation, urban education, or community schooling were considered the best ways out of a widely perceived crisis of education and of coping with “future shock,” there was a general consensus, particularly in the United States, that the future was actually at stake. “Designing Education for the Future” was a project conducted among eight US states, which, between 1966 and 1967, resulted in three conferences and pub­ lications, each developing planning scenarios for the year 1980. The “future” at issue here was that of the nation and its economy.154 In this context, educational institutions, instructional technologies, teaching materials, and the like, served to adapt to this future smoothly and toward increasing economic prosperity. The “scenario” was the methodological tool for such forecasting, in which edu­ cational planning was placed alongside military, economic, and technological planning.155 Such adaptation efforts of adaptation were insistently called for. For in the 1960s, there was widespread concern among Cold War warriors or economic liberals, like sociologist Daniel Bell and futurologists Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener, that the future of the “postindustrial society” may well entail an improved and expanded education system, but at the same time an “erosion” within the middle class of both “work-oriented, achievement-oriented, advancement-oriented values” and “‘national interest’ values.” Instead, as Bell, Kahn, and Wiener disapprovingly predicted in their 1967 bestseller The Year 2000, “sensate, secular, humanist, perhaps self-indulgent criteria bec[a]me central.”156 Likewise, opinions differed on exactly how the schoolchild should be formed into an effective citizen. But until the beginning of the 1970s everyone seemed to agree that the future of school and the future of society were indivisible.157 Hildegard Hamm-Brücher, a West German educational politician and a member of the liberal party (FDP) in the Bundestag, shared this view. The title of one of her numerous books, Aufbruch ins Jahr 2000 oder Erziehung im technischen Zeitalter (Embarking into the year 2000, or education in the age of technology), published in 1967, was indicative of a late modernist orientation toward the future of learning. Hamm-Brücher had been an early advocate of the new discipline of educational research and, since 1961, had supervised the early years of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Her own far-reaching studies included trips to the Soviet Union, the GDR, Poland, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. Unusually blinkered ideologically, though in line with liberal positions and skep­ tical of the student movement, Hamm-Brücher supported a “pragmatic educational policy” that worked to link the reality of the school system and its sociality and the ideal of a “voluntary and liberal order.”158 Perhaps her most significant contribution to education policy was drafting the educational policy concept

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of the first social-liberal coalition under Chancellor Willy Brandt. In his government declaration of 1969, Brandt had already made clear his prioritization of reducing the “educational gap” between town and country in order to “mobilize considerable untapped reserves of achievement [Leistungsreserven] in our society” and to ensure equal opportunities. With his phrase, “The school of the nation is the school,” Brandt linked West Germany’s economic interests with the objective of “educating a critical, discerning citizen able to recognize the conditions of his own social existence through a permanent learning process, and to act accordingly.”159 Hamm-Brücher’s Bildungsbericht ’70 (Education report ’70) projected the school and university of the future based on this guiding principle of a policy that aimed to develop democracy and expand learning. The explicit budgetary objective was to double the share of the gross national product spent on education and research from 4 to “at least” 8 percent at the beginning of the 1980s (in 2016/2017 the share in Germany was 6.3 percent of the gross national product). The report also commented on educational facilities in detail: “The school building of the future should be a functional, simple, but attractive building. Its spatial design should be changeable and adaptable to changes in management and curriculum. In addition, it should also be ready to be used for other purposes, such as adult education.”160

From “Petrol Shock” to “Neo-Liberal Revolution” Already in the early 1970s, the Brandt administration’s optimistic, reform-minded and future-oriented educational plans were attacked, and steps toward structural reform were stopped in their tracks. Changing economic and political conditions, largely a result of the first “petrol shock,” triggered by the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, contributed to these signs of deflated enthusiasm for educational reform. Around this time, many countries were reassessing their educational planning. Even though Brandt was reelected in fall 1973 (only to resign following the revelation of a spy in his cabinet shortly thereafter), West German reform efforts at reform were met with increasing resistance in politics and administration, but also with growing concerns and uncertainty among students, teachers, and parents. The democratic élan of Brandt’s politics, and especially his statements on the role of education as empowering to critical self-knowledge, gave way to the economic pragmatism of realpolitik, to preserve above all the unity of “commodity-form and thought form.”161 This said, the geopolitical and macroeconomic crises of the 1970s did not fundamentally change the intention and willingness of governments, administrations, unions, and the scientific community to rebuild society according to knowledge-­

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based value creation—and quite literally at that, by planning and con­structing centers of the “knowledgeable society.”162 Public funds, including development aid money, were deployed to make investments in education and knowledge production, and these investments were ultimately to be regardedas deposits in the “human capital” that had been discovered, or rather invented, by economic theorists in the early stages of the Education Shock age. While economists had never been particularly concerned with education before, the concept of human capital had brought about a paradigm shift in the field. From 1960 onward, Theodore W. Schultz and younger economists such as Gary S. Becker and Jacob Mincer published influential studies on the potential to increase economic competitiveness through targeted “investment” in individual and societal (adult, after work) education, aiming to achieve the highest possible return on such educational investments.163 Ultimately, the schools and campuses mushrooming globally in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as their counterparts in innumerable informal, alternative, countercultural learning environments, were to be considered monuments to the discourse of human capital. Against this ideological backdrop, planners and architects were increasingly pressured to balance far-reaching demands for economic efficiency with individual projects and educational and social concerns. The combined “popu­lation explosion” and “baby boom” enhanced the urgency to act, as did the economic demand for increasing numbers of highly educated candidates on the job market.164 Changing demographics dominated the entirety of the educational policy discourse, both in national contexts and on the level of international agreements. Inadvertently the economics of education turned into a science of researching and designing growing volumes and parameters of planning, constantly struggling to master an exceptional economy of scale.165 After all, the educational actors and stakeholders engaged in these processes had to reckon with an ever-increasing number of students and ever-longer periods of schooling and academic training. Accounting for and considering these enormous shifts, the ensuing spatial needs and requirements had to be dealt with—politically, planning-wise, architecturally. An efficient allocation of educational institutions in geographical space had to be organized in sync with the demand-driven planning of individual buildings and facilities.166 The latter were expected to display flexibility and changeability, and, together with their placement within the national territory and school districts, the aim was to ensure that more and more people could acquire the qualifications needed by the economic and administrative sectors, albeit qualifications doomed to be rendered rapidly obsolete. However, the political economy of education did not necessarily follow the ideas of a new educational economy and human capital. It also bore (post-)Marxist

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traits and derived arguments for the necessity of overcoming capitalist conditions from the critique of socioeconomic power. Economists and sociologists such as Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (and their West German counterparts Joachim Hirsch and Stephan Leibfried) attempted to synthesize New Left discussions on the function of educational institutions in Western industrialized nations. One of the central findings of these studies was that the expansion of educational systems in the 1960s and 1970s also represented an expansion of the functions of state and government. The “pedagogization” of society was thus a reaction to the (potentially unsolvable) problems of capitalism. In their 1976 book Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, Bowles and Gintis wrote: “Increasingly, the government has taken responsibility for the attainment of social objectives unattainable within the capitalist economic framework: full employment, clean air, equality of opportunity, stable prices, and the elimination of poverty, to name only a few. The result: Social problems are increasingly politicized. People are increasingly coming both to understand the political origins of social and economic distress and to sense the possibility of political solution to these problems.”167 However, these assumptions were to be confirmed only to a very limited extent. For the question of forms of government and thus of the politicization of social conflicts was answered differently than the authors in their socialist optimism could have foreseen. Driven by political leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the “neo-liberal revolution” (Stuart Hall) radically redefined and reconfigured state and society.168 As the British Prime Minister put it in an interview in 1987 with unheard-of glib: “And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”169 At the beginning of the 1970s, Thatcher had been appointed Secretary of State for Education and Science; now she finally had the power and the overall ideological climate at her disposal to subject the relation of society and education, of state and school, to the rules of the free market and the competition between individuals it implied. The “learning society” had arrived at a point where it had to learn to cope with the conditions entailed by neoliberal forms of governing and being governed.

People’s Universities and “Open-Door Schooling” Observed from places in Eastern Europe and the Global South, however, these developments, contradictions, and critiques of a largely Western (yet by no means uniform and selfsame) educational scene might have had limited resonance or even no significance at all. In the late 1960s, the official position of the Soviet Union was one of acknowledging the interdependency and reciprocity of the

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A. Afanasyeva, proposal for a polytechnic secondary school for 1,200 students with boarding school facilities for 120 students, USSR, late 1960s

“building of communism, with its material and technical bases,” and the “ability to continue to raise the cultural level of the population.” This aim was deemed “inconceivable without the training of a new type of man, without the systematic improvement of man’s cultural level, sense of social responsibility and standard of education.”170 In the early 1970s, instructed by Leonid Brezhnev’s doctrine of “developed socialism,” the Soviet Union continued to conceive and operate its educational institutions as socializing agencies for this new, ostensibly communist type of man (and woman).171 Mixed legacies, including the revolutionary militancy of the 1920s and the tight ideological enclosure and authoritarianism of the Stalin era, were to be attuned to the rise of a more technocratic vision of socialist development, dating back to the Khrushchev era. Striving to attain a dense and enormous network of schools, polytechnics, universities, and “science-cities,” edu­ cational planning had to cope with the vast expanse of the multination country’s territory.172 As was the case in many places in the West, educational and urban planning in the Soviet Union (and other countries of the Warsaw Pact) were deeply intertwined. The necessity to house increasingly large numbers of students, for both secondary and higher education, yielded the construction of big all-day, part-boarding schools with dormitories as well as satellite educational towns, designed and built from scratch. Considerable regional differences and the lack of infrastructural

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facilities, however, also produced uneven accessibility to education.173 Partly in response to such structural inequities, a system of people’s universities (about forty-seven thousand by the 1980s) was maintained to secure the steady supply of adult edu­cation. Little scholarship has been done on the extent to which these and other facilities also allowed for informal curricula and experimental spatial environments, given the fact that education in the Soviet Union continued to be dependent on directives from the Party.174 The model subjectivity of the Komsomol learner undergirded the designs of huge schools and clustered institutions of higher education. Planning organizations, such as the Central Scientific Research Institute for Experimental Design of Educational Buildings (TsNIIEP uchebnykh zdanii) and the Soviet State Design Institute for Higher Learning Institutions (Giprovuz), proceeded according to the persuasion that spatial concentration and close alignment with the demands and sites of economic and industrial development were prerequisites of effective educational planning.175 The planning and construction activities of the Soviet Union’s education system, before and after the introduction of “developed socialism” (named “stagnation” by its detractors), were a steady source of interest, and often admiration, among foreign delegations of architects and educationalists.176 A similar interest, albeit displayed by a somewhat different set of enthused tourists and researchers from the West, was triggered by radical cuts to the structures of higher and elite education by the 1966–1976 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China and the reconstruction of an educational system in tatters after it ended. Mao enrolled the military in his campaign of massive educational overhaul. On August 5, 1966, he proclaimed: “The People’s Liberation Army should be a great school,” where its members were to be educated in politics, military affairs, and culture.177 Before, in May 1966, Mao had urged the students to shorten their time in school, to “revolutionize the instruction and learning process,” and to demolish every­ thing that is left of bourgeois education.178 The Red Guards were to execute these orders, while educational spaces started to migrate into factories and farms. A common slogan of the Cultural Revolution was, “run the schools with open doors” (kai men ban xue hao), which carried “the admonition to let the public in on the management of schools, bring in teachers from the community, link up with factories and farms.”179 Ronald F. Price, a veteran educational scholar of communist China, mentions an article from Tongji University’s “May 7” Commune Party Committee that used the term “open door” to “describe the way in which they are linking teaching, (architectural) designing and construction.”180 The phrase “open door,” in the language of the Cultural Revolution, is not to be confused with the “open class” of Western discourses of radical pedagogy.

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Entomology students from Sun Yat-sen University at their teaching base at Tasha commune, published in China Reconstructs (July 1976) (cover headline: “Open-Door Schooling is Good”)

In 1976, even before Mao’s death, when the legacy of the Cultural Revolution had already become the subject of heated debate, an article in the English-language China Reconstructs elaborated on how Sun Yat-sen University, on the outskirts of Guangzhou, began practicing “open-door schooling” when a “Thought Propaganda Team” entered and enforced Mao’s educational ideas: “In 1970 the school began admitting workers, peasants and soldiers with practical experience as students and started experimenting with programs which combine education with productive labor and make it serve proletarian politics. It set up its own factories and farms. It also established permanent links with outside factories, communes, army units, stores and meteorological, hydrological and geological units to serve as its ‘greater classrooms’ where these new university students get their training among the workers, peasants and soldiers.”181 Without a doubt, the participation and integration invoked by the open-door metaphor stand in stark contrast to the constrictive and violent reality of many aspects of the Cultural Revolution. In the Western educational context, the meaning of “openness” is decidedly antiauthoritarian, at least in its intentions, whereas the “open door” of the Cultural Revolution is imposed from above, to be executed from below. This said, it is quite remarkable how the vocabulary of “open door” and “greater classroom” in Chinese educational discourse appears to have been devoid of any link to the discussion of actual, physical facilities of learning.182

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This seeming absence of references to the built environment makes it even more tempting to explore the socio-spatial manifestations and performativities that notions of openness in either context have entailed.

From the Fenced School to the Murdered University Openness, however, was by no means undisputed in Western educational systems. This was partly due to the early shock waves of the neoliberal revolution that became palpable by the mid-1970s. Around this time, notions of openness and freedom, apparent conceptual siblings, started to evolve dialectical disparities. In 1976, Bowles and Gintis looked at wildcat strikes, worker insubordination, and, especially, absenteeism, Black liberation struggle, and campus protests to show how social movements of the 1960s and 1970s—with their resistance to authoritarian and repressive social relations—prompted a backlash from the powers of state and economy: “Armed students seized administration buildings, general strikes swept the colleges, and police patrolled high-school study halls.”183 Schools and universities, as physical spaces, were securitized to restore control in the aftermath of the resistance and autonomy claims of Black civil rights activists, workers, leftist students, feminists, and others.184 Especially in the United States, this development toward “defensible spaces” was accompanied by an evercloser interlocking of school and prison.185 Between the educational system and the prison-industrial complex, the outlines of today’s “school-to-prison pipeline” started to emerge.186 Thus the fortification of schools with fences, security gates, and guards became a visible signature of a rising backlash against the achievements of the civil rights movement and other social struggles.187 Already around 1970, after little more than a decade of struggles for desegregation, talk on “resegre­ gation” began to spread in US media.188 The criminalization of edu­cation has continuously impacted above all those to whom the promise of equal opportu­ nities and equal treatment had always rang somewhat shallow. Embittered, Bowles and Gintis noted that the liberal response to the weapon­ ization of the proponents of “law and order” was symptomatic of a peculiar “‘soft’ human relations school of labor management.” They maintained, “the key response to the movement against repressive social relations appeared in education.” But the free school movement, the alternative educational network emerging from the counterculture’s disenchantment with the system of public schooling, even though it may have reflected the highest ideals of progressive students and parents, was likewise endorsed by major foundations and supported by the US Office of Education: “The ‘open classroom’ was quickly perceived by liberal

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educators as a means of accommodating and circumscribing the growing anti­ authoritarianism of young people and keeping things from getting out of hand.” Hence, alternative models of schooling and learning became the perfect example of a kind of educational management and organization put in place to absorb the shocks of protest and radical movements and to translate them into the counter-shock of neoliberalism: “The educational system, perhaps more than any other contemporary social institution, has become the laboratory in which competing solutions to the problems of personal liberation and social equality are tested and the arena in which social struggles are fought out. The school system is a monument to the capacity of the advanced corporate economy to accommodate and deflect thrusts away from its foundations. Yet at the same time, the educational system mirrors the growing contradictions of the larger society, most dramatically in the disappointing results of reform efforts.”189 The failure of these attempts at reform was, for many, already a done deal by the mid-1970s. Signs of a waning of educational euphoria in the West lit up everywhere. At times they were particularly visible when various institutions began taking stock of the recent experiments between learning, politics, and architecture. For example, the 1974 exhibition “New Learning Spaces and Places” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, curated by Mildred S. Friedman, is a vivid example of such a view of the “context for learning”—that is, the conjuncture of school reforms and alternative countercultural pedagogy.190 The exhibition brought together well-researched examples of design objects, documentation, and theo­ retical findings relating to various openings and expansions of education and architecture. But it also invited viewers to consider the futurist leanings of these openings as phenomena from a time prior to the oil price crisis, the esca­lation of the war in Vietnam, and Richard Nixon holding office.

“New Learning Spaces and Places,” exhibition curated by Mildred S. Friedman, at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, 1974

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What was more of a hunch in 1974 was to quickly gain critical momentum in the following years. Interest in the radical pedagogies of experimental schools faded, the campaigning for comprehensive and all-day schools was met with increasing resistance by adherents to more traditional types of school, and the free school movement’s departure from the public-school system turned out to be a harbinger of the future privatization and financialization of education, which was to become increasingly widespread in large parts of the world. Bowles and Gintis and other critics trained in political economy predicted these developments early on, to almost no avail. A particularly painful conclusion to the era of breakthroughs, experiments, and reforms was the demolition of the campus of the University of Vincennes near Paris in August 1980. Constructed in a rush just under twelve years before, this modernist architecture, screwed together from prefabricated elements and always somewhat provisional looking but equipped with ample open spaces and arcades, was one of the most exciting places of learning in the late 1960s and 1970s. Not only did philosophers such as Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière,

At the campus of the University of Vincennes, Paris, France, March 1977

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and many others teach in Vincennes, above all, it was a veritably open and welcoming campus. Everyone, including those otherwise excluded from the academic realm—people without matriculation, without a French passport, without a middle-class background—were invited to study there. Campus life was diverse and multicultural; the seminar discussions intense; the workshops, video labora­tories, theater groups, and leaflet printing plants productive. The decision to move the faculties from the Vincennes campus to the University of Saint-Denis, of which they were nominally a part, was met with incomprehension and furious protests. But as adventurous as the thinking, the learning, the teaching had been, the traces of this pedagogical experiment were to be erased quickly. Within a few days the demolition team had cleared the area. L’université assassinée, murdered university, was the tellingly dramatic title of a book that, published in the year of the campus’s demolition, provided a chronicle of its turbulent and exciting past.191 The territory on which the campus was located has long since been reclaimed by vegetation and the forest. But the University of Vincennes, and with it many others—successful and less successful renewals and revolutions of the space of learning—live on. And their memory calls for action.

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This essay is a translation and adaptation of “Politik des Lernens, Politik des Raums: Der Bildungsschock der 1960er und 1970er Jahre,” in Bildungsschock: Lernen, Politik und Architektur in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren, ed. Tom Holert and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin: De Gruy­ ter, 2020), 14–64.

Spaces in Africa: Critical Histories to 21st Century Challenges and Change (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018); Łukasz Stanek, “Architects from Socialist Countries in Ghana (1957–67): Modern Architecture and Mondialisation,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74, no. 4 (December 2015): 416–42.

1  For a succinct introduction to the term’s semantics, see Alexandre Alves, “The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation (Bildung) and Its Historical Meaning,” Educação & Realidade 44, no. 2 (2019), https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S21756 2362019000200606&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en (accessed October 26, 2020).

10  See Ana Hušman and Dubravka Sekulić, “Nicht nachzeichnen—selbst entwerfen! Die Pionier-Stadt und die Simulation der Zukunft,” trans. Petar Milat, in Bildungsschock, 66–71.

2  For an instructive overview of the debates on the term, see Markus Rieger-Ladich, Bildungstheorien zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2019). 3  Niklas Luhmann, Das Erziehungssystem der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 186; unless otherwise noted, all translations from German are my own. 4  See Paulo Freire, “The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom [1970],” trans. Loretta Slover, Harvard Educational Review 68, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 482. 5  For recent collections of research papers on the postwar history of women architects, see Mary Pepchinski and Mariann Simon, eds., Ideological Equals: Women Architects in Socialist Europe 1945–1989 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); and Helena Seražin, Caterina Franchini, and Emilia Garda, eds., Women’s Creativity since the Modern Movement (1918–2018): Toward a New Perception and Reception (Ljubljana: ZRC SAZU, France Stele Institute of Art History, 2018). 6  “The School Environment. One Architect’s Approach,“ Progressive Architecture 33, no. 2 (February 1963): 112–31. 7  On the typological structures of polytechnic secondary schools in the GDR, see Dina Dorothea Falbe, “Lokale Besonderheiten: Varianten des DDR-Typenschulbaus,“ in Bildungsschock: Lernen, Politik und Architektur in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren, ed. Tom Holert and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020), 110–15. 8  See Ana Paula Koury and Maria Helena Paiva da Costa, “‘Auch barfuß lässt sich lesen lernen’: Die Camps der populären Alphabetisierungskampagne in Natal, Brasilien, 1961,” trans. Oliver Precht, in Bildungsschock, 170–75. 9  See Ola Uduku, “Vom Umgang mit der Umwelt: Lernorte in Westafrika vor und nach der Unabhängigkeit,” trans. Herwig Engelmann, in Bildungsschock, 158–163; Ola Uduku, Learning

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11  See Thomas Schmid and Carlo Testa, Bauen mit Systemen/Systems Building: Construction Modulaires (Zurich: Verlag für Architektur Artemis, 1969), 110–13. 12  See Lisa Schmid-Colinet, Alexander Schmoe­ger, and Florian Zeyfang, “La Nueva Escuela: Architektur und Bildung im postrevo­lutionären Kuba. Eine Videoinstallation,” in Bildungsschock, 176–79. 13  On school construction institutes in the Federal Republic of Germany, see Kerstin Renz, “Neue Standards: Schulbauinstitute in der Bun­ desrepublik Deutschland,” in Bildungsschock, 90–93; on the Educational Facilities Laboratories in the United States, see Amy F. Ogata, “Educational Facilities Laboratories: Debating and Designing the Postwar American Schoolhouse,” in Designing Schools: Space, Place, and Pedagogy, ed. Kate Darian-Smith and Julie Willis (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 55–67; on the history of the Informatiecentrum voor Scholenbouw in the Netherlands, see “Van het Informatie Centrum Scholenbouw naar ICSadviseurs,“ ICSadviseurs, https://www.icsadviseurs.nl/wij-zijn-ics/historie/ (accessed October 26, 2020); on the school building institute in Chile, see Maximiano Atria, “One Hand to School Them All: The Society for the Construction of Educational Facilities in Chile (SCEE),” Journal of Architecture 23, no. 2 (2018): 207–24. 14  On SCSD, see Joshua D. Lee, Flexibility and Design: Learning from the School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) Project (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019); on CLASP, see Elain Harwood, “System Building,” e-flux Architecture, March 3, 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/architec ture/education/322668/system-building/ (accessed October 26, 2020). 15  See, for example, Katharina Matzig, “Das Prinzip Lernhaus,” Bauwelt 104, nos. 29–30 (2013): 18–23; Richard Stang, Lernwelten im Wandel: Entwicklungen und Anforderungen bei der Gestaltung zukünftiger Lernumgebungen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016); Angela Million

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et al., Verflechtungen zwischen Pädagogik und Stadtplanung (Berlin: Jovis, 2017); Montag Stiftung Jugend und Gesellschaft, ed., Schulen planen und bauen 2.0: Grundlagen, Prozesse, Projekte (Berlin: Jovis, 2017). 16  See, for example, Lothar Wigger and Norbert Meder, eds., Raum und Räumlichkeit in der Pädagogik: Festschrift für Harm Paschen (Bielefeld: Janus, 2002); Jeanette Böhme, ed., Schularchi­ tektur im interdisziplinären Diskurs: Territoriali­ sierungenskrise und Gestaltungsperspektiven des schulischen Bildungsraums (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2009); Hildegard Schröteler von Brandt et al., eds., Raum für Bildung: Ästhetik und Architektur von Lern- und Lebensorten (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012); Constanze Berndt, Claudia Kalisch, and Anja Krüger, eds., Räume bilden—pädagogische Perspektiven auf den Raum (Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt, 2016). 17  See, for example, the inspiring take on the legacy of architects such as Giancarlo De Carlo and Herman Hertzberger in the recent research and writing of Adam Wood and Emma Dyer (who run the resourceful blog Architecture and Education, http://www.architectureandeducation.org: Adam Wood and Emma Dyer, “Reframing Education and the Architecture of Added Value,” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 44 (2017): 108–15; Adam Wood, “Giancarlo De Carlo’s Concept of Architec­ture—a Powerful and Inclusive Tool for Thinking about Educational Space,” Histories of Postwar Architecture 2, no. 5 (2019): 64–75. 18  See Henry Sanoff and Rotraut Walden, “School Environments,” in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental and Conservation Psychology, ed. Susan D. Clayton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 276–94; Rotraut Walden, ed., Schools for the Future: Design Proposals from Architectural Psychology (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2015). 19  See Kim Dovey and Kenn Fisher, “Designing for Adaptation: The School as Socio-Spatial Assemblage,” Journal of Architecture 19, no. 1 (2014): 43–63; Peter Kraftl, Geographies of Alternative Education: Diverse Learning Spaces for Children and Young People (Bristol: Policy Press, 2013); Paul Temple, ed., The Physical University: Contours of Space and Place in Higher Education (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014); Paul Temple, “Space, Place and Institutional Effectiveness in Higher Education,” Policy Reviews in Higher Education 2, no. 2 (2018): 133–50. 20  See Daniel R. Kenny, Ricardo Dumont, and Ginger Kenney, Mission and Place: Strengthening Learning and Community through Campus

Design (Westport: Praeger, 2005); Karen D. Kö­nings, Tina Seidel, and Jeroen J. G. van Merriënboer, “Participatory Design of Learning Environments: Integrating Perspectives of Students, Teachers, and Designers,” Instructional Science 42, no. 1 (January 2014): 1–9; Pamela Woolner, ed., School Design Together (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015); Tiina Mäkelä and Sacha Helfenstein, “Developing a Conceptual Framework for Participatory Design of Psychosocial and Physical Learning Environments,” Learning Environments Research 19, no. 3 (October 2016): 411–40. 21  Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). For a concise introduction to Foucault’s edu­cation theory, see Astrid Messerschmidt, “Michel Foucault (1926–1984): Den Befreiungen misstrauen— Foucaults Rekonstruktionen moderner Macht und der Aufstieg kontrollierter Subjekte,” in Klassiker der Pädagogik, ed. Bernd Dollinger (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2012), 289–310. 22  See Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); on Illich and the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC), a think tank and a free university in Cuernavaca, Mexico that he founded, see Todd Hartch, The Prophet of Cuernavaca: Ivan Illich and the Crisis of the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 23  However, it needs to be noted that in addition to his significant contribution to the critique of Western educational models from the perspective of the Global South, Illich also contributed to neoliberal educational concepts such as home­ schooling and education vouchers, a feat of his work that has recently been taken up again (see, for example, Romualdo Luiz Portela de Oliveira and Luciane Muniz Ribeiro Barbosa, “Neoliberalism as One of the Foundations of Homeschooling,” Pro-Posições 28, no. 2 [May–August 2017]: 193–212). 24  Ivan Illich, “The False Ideology of Schooling,” Saturday Review (October 17, 1970): 56–58, 68. 25  See Michael Huberman, “An Uncensored Version of: ‘Reflections on Democratization of Secondary and Higher Education,’” NASSP Bulletin 55, no. 354 (1971): 1–16; Ian Lister, Deschooling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 26  Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), 591; Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1961).

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27  See, for example, Carol Schutz Slobodin, “Sputnik and Its Aftermath: A Critical Look at the Form and the Substance of American Educational Thought and Practice Since 1957,” Elementary School Journal 77, no. 4 (March 1977): 259–64; Zuoyue Wang, In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Andrew Hartman, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 175–96; Igor J. Polianski and Matthias Schwartz, eds., Die Spur des Sputnik: Kultur­ historische Expeditionen ins kosmische Zeitalter (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2009); Kathleen Anderson Steeves et al., “Transforming American Educational Identity after Sputnik,” American Educational History Journal 36, no. 1 (2009): 71–87. On the Physical Science Studies Committee, see Mario Schulze, “Ein Kalter Krieg der Curricula: Das Physical Science Studies Committee,” in Bildungsschock, 122–27. 28  For an early attempt to put the effect of the Sputnik crisis into historical perspective, see Frank G. Jennings, “It Didn’t Start with Sputnik,” Saturday Review (September 16, 1967): 77–79, 95–97; on immediate and long-term effects, see Roger D. Launius, John M. Logsdon, and Robert W. Smith, eds., Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years Since the Soviet Satellite (London: Routledge, 2000). 29  Georg Picht, Die deutsche Bildungskatas­ trophe: Analyse und Dokumentationen (Olten: Walter Verlag, 1964); on Picht’s role in the edu­ cational policy discourse of the time, see Sören Messinger, “Katastrophe und Reform: Georg Pichts bildungspolitische Interventionen,” in 1964—das Jahr, mit dem “68” begann, ed. Robert Lorenz and Franz Walter (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014), 247–58. 30  See Frank-Olaf Radtke, “Die Erziehungs­ wissenschaft der OECD—Aussichten auf die neue Performanz-Kultur,” Erziehungswissenschaft 14, no. 27 (2003): 109–36; Andreas Seiverth, “Trau­ matisierung und Notstandssemantik. Bildungs­ politische Kontinuitäten vom Sputnik- zum PISA-Schock,” DIE—Zeitschrift für Erwach­ senenbildung 14, no. 4 (2007): 32–35. 31  Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in State of Union Address,” January 25, 2011, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press -office/2011/01/25/remarks-president-state -union-address (accessed October 26, 2020); see Sean Kay, “America’s Sputnik Moments,” Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 55, no. 2 (2013): 123–46.

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32  See, for example, Jack Perron, “Alternative Publishing and Education,” Phi Delta Kappan 54, no. 7 (March 1973): 461–64; Mike Smith, The Underground and Education: A Guide to the Alternative Press (York: Methuen, 1977). 33  See Raymond Aron, “The Education of the Citizen in Industrial Society,” Daedalus 91, no. 2 (Spring 1962): 249–63; Martin Keilhacker, Erziehung und Bildung in der Industriegesellschaft (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1967); Victor C. Ferkiss, Technological Man: The Myth and the Reality (New York: Braziller, 1967); John Vaizey, Edu­cation in the Modern World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967); Alain Touraine, La société post-industrielle: Naissance d’une société (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1969); Friedrich Ruthel, Bildung im Industriezeitalter (Munich: Ehrenwirth, 1970); Harold A. Linstone, “A University for the Post­ industrial Society,” Technological Forecasting 1 (1970): 263–81; Daniel Bell, “The Post-­Industrial Society: The Evolution of an Idea,” Survey 17, no. 2 (March 1971): 102–16; Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 34  Louis Althusser, “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État,” La Pensée 151 (June 1970); reprinted in Positions, 1964–1975 (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1976), 67–125. 35  Ferdinand Budde and Hans Wolfram Theil, Schulen: Handbuch für Planung und Durchführung von Schulbauten (Munich: Callwey, 1969), 6. 36  See Stephan Leibfried, ed., Wider die Untertanenfabrik: Handbuch zur Demokratisierung der Hochschule (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1967); André Gorz, ed., “L’usine et l‘école,” special issue, Les Temps Modernes 301 (August–September 1971). 37  See, for example, Mechthild Schumpp, “Ansätze zu einem konkreten Bauen. I. Bau­formen im Bewußtsein von Kindern,” (1967 in Bildungs­ schock, 202–11. 38  See Jakob Jakobsen on the corporeal and spatial politics of the Free University movement, “Lernkörper überall: Die Raumpolitik der Free-­ University-Bewegung,” trans. Bert Rebhandl, in Bildungsschock, 152–57. 39  Annie Ernaux, The Years, trans. Alison L. Strayer (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2017), 118. 40  Giancarlo De Carlo, “Why/How to Build School Buildings,” Harvard Educational Review 39, no. 4 (December 1969): 12–35, here 33–34.

Politics of Learning, Politics of Space

41  See the early, critical use of the terms “pedagogism” and “pedagogization” in the sense of an expansion of pedagogical competence in the West German context by one of the assistants of the sociologist Helmut Schelsky: Janpeter Kob, “Die Rollenproblematik des Lehrerberufs,” in “Soziologie der Schule,” ed. Peter Heintz, special issue, Cologne Journal for Sociology and Social Psychology 4 (1959): 91–107. See also Helmut Schelsky, Anpassung oder Widerstand? Sozio­ logische Bedenken zur Schulreform (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1961). For a more recent discussion of the term in the context of a critique of the neoliberal “pedagogization” of the social, see, for example, Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe, eds., Educational Research: The Educationalization of Social Problems (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008); Alfred Schäfer and Christiane Thompson, eds., Pädagogisierung (Halle: Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, 2013). 42  See “Continuing Education,” special issue, Journal of Education 147, no. 3 (February 1965); Frank W. Jessup, ed., Lifelong Learning: A Symposium on Continuing Education (Oxford: Pergamon, 1969); Jennifer Rogers, Adults Learning (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971); Dennis Kallen and Jarl Bengtsson, Recurrent Education: A Strategy for Lifelong Learning (Paris: OECD, 1973); Peter Jarvis, Adult and Continuing Education: Theory and Practice (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1983). 43  See Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Learning Society (New York: Praeger, 1968); Torsten Husén, The Learning Society (London: Methuen, 1974). 44  Karl-Hermann Koch, “Standort der Schule von morgen,” Bauwelt 21, no. 29 (July 21, 1969): 961; see also Karl-Hermann Koch, Schulbaubuch: Analysen, Modelle, Bauten (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1974), 36–43. 45  Edgar Faure, “Preamble,” in Learning to Be: The World of Education Today and Tomorrow: Report of the International Commission on the Development of Education, ed. Edgar Faure et al. (Paris: UNESCO, 1972), xxxiii. On the history of lifelong learning discourses and adult education as a core UNESCO project, see Moosung Lee and Tom Friedrich, “Continuously Reaffirmed, Subtly Accommodated, Obviously Missing and Fallaciously Critiqued: Ideologies in UNESCO’s Lifelong Learning Policy,” International Journal of Lifelong Education 30, no. 2 (2011): 151–69; Maren Elfert, UNESCO’s Utopia of Lifelong Learning: An Intellectual History (New York: Routledge, 2017).

46  Deutscher Bildungsrat, Empfehlungen der Bildungskommission: Strukturplan für das Bildungswesen [1970], quoted in Ludwig von Friedeburg, Bildungsreform in Deutschland: Geschichte und gesellschaftlicher Widerspruch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 377. 47  Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), v–vi. 48  Peter F. Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). 49  Ibid., 266. 50  See Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Geistige und körperliche Arbeit: Theoretische Schriften, 1947–1990, vols. 1 and 2 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Ça ira, 2018). 51  Johannes Berger, “Universität und Kapital,” Heidelberger Rotes Forum, no. 3 (1970): 42, quoted in Rudolf Hickel, “Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie der Gesamthochschule,” in Materialien zur Wissenschafts- und Bildungs­ politik, ed. Joachim Hirsch and Stephan Leibfried (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971), 297. 52  See Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. 53  Alvin Toffler (with Heidi Toffler), Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), 366. 54 Preceding Future Shock, in 1968 Toffler had published an anthology on the relationship between schools and urban crises in the United States. The Schoolhouse in the City collected voices from educational planning and policy as well as the civil rights movement. They raised pertinent issues such as the decay of inner cities, racism, and segregation, responding with new concepts of educational planning that allegedly countered these tendencies, such as the aforementioned “education park”; see Toffler, ed., The Schoolhouse in the City (New York: Praeger, 1968). 55 Toffler, Future Shock, 404–5. 56  Ibid., 407. 57  Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 179. 58  Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 301, 304. 59  R. Buckminster Fuller, Education Automation: Freeing the Scholar to Return to His Studies (New York: Anchor, 1971), 44–45.

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60  Ibid., 82–84. 61  Joan Littlewood, “A Laboratory of Fun,” New Scientist 22, no. 391 (May 14, 1964): 432. 62  Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price, “Fun Palace,” fundraising booklet, independent publication, unpaginated (1964), https://www.cca.qc.ca /en/search/details/collection/object/378822 (accessed October 26, 2020). 63  Lê Thành Khôi, L’industrie de l‘enseignement (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967) and W. Kenneth Richmond, The Education Industry (London: Methuen,1969). For a relevant anthology of source texts on the subject, see Pierre Mœglin, ed., Industrialiser l’éducation: Anthologie commentée (1913–2012) (Paris: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2016). 64  See Cedric Price, “Potteries Thinkbelt,” New Society 192 (June 2, 1966): 14–17; Cedric Price, “PTb Potteries Thinkbelt: A Plan for an Advanced Educational Industry in North Staffordshire,” Architectural Design 36, no. 10 (October 1966): 483–97. See also Samantha Hardingham and Kester Rattenbury, Cedric Price: Potteries Thinkbelt (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007); Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog, 2007). 65  See William Cannady, ed., New Schools for New Towns (New York: Educational Facilities Laboratories, 1967); Kathy Velikov, “Tuning Up the City: Cedric Price’s Detroit Think Grid,” Journal of Architectural Education 69, no. 1 (2015): 40–52; see also this book’s chapter “Edu­ cationalize and Fail,” 96–115. 66  Cedric Price, “Learning,” Architectural Design 38, no. 5 (May 1968): 242. 67  See Elke Beyer, “Sowjetische CampusExporte,” in Bildungsschock, 134–39; Elke Beyer, “Building Institutions in Kabul in the 1960s: Sites, Spaces, and Architectures of Development Cooperation,” Journal of Architecture 24, no. 5 (2019): 604–30. On East-South and South-South cooperation and exports, see also, for example, Łukasz Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); Stephen V. Ward, “Transnational Planners in a Postcolonial World,” in Crossing Borders: International Exchange and Planning Practices, ed. Patsy Healey and Robert Upton (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 47–72. For Israel acting as an export nation for urban and educational projects, see, for example, Neta Feniger and Rachel Kallus, “Expertise in the Name of Diplomacy: The Israeli Plan for Rebuilding the Qazvin Region, Iran,” International Journal of Islamic

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Architecture 5, no. 1 (2016): 103–34; Inbal BenAsher Gitler, “Campus Architecture as Nation Building: Israeli Architect Arieh Sharon’s Obafemi Awolowo University Campus, Ile-Ife, Nigeria,” in Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development, and Identity, ed. Duanfang Lu (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 113–40; Ayala Levin, Exporting Zionism: Architectural Modernism in Israeli-African Technical Cooperation, 1958–1973 (PhD thesis, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, New York, 2015). 68  Leo Fernig, “1970, International Education Year,” UNESCO Courier 23 (January 1970): 4–6. 69  Philip H. Coombs, The World Educational Crisis: A Systems Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 114. 70  The Marxist social historian Immanuel Wallerstein elaborated his economic theory of a system of global codependencies in the years around 1974, in articles such as “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16, no. 4 (September 1974): 387–415, or “Dependence in an Interdependent World: The Limited Possibilities of Transformation within the Capitalist World Economy,” African Studies Review 17, no. 1 (April 1974): 1–26. In the latter he discusses the connection between economic, developmental, and educational planning conditions in the global “peripheries” and “semi-peripheries” in which UNESCO’s activities unfolded. For recent criticism of Wallerstein’s “world system” thesis, see Augustine Ejiofor Onyishi and Chukwunonso Valentine Amoke, “A Critique of Immanuel Wallerstein’s World System Theory in The Modern World-System,” IOSR Journal Of Humanities and Social Science 21, no. 8 (August 2016): 1–6. 71  John Beynon, “Accommodating the Education Revolution,” Prospects: Quarterly Review of Education 2, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 60. On the context of Beynon’s activities and UNESCO’s commitment to school building in Africa, see Kim De Raedt, “Between ‘True Believers’ and Operational Experts: UNESCO Architects and School Building in Post-Colonial Africa,” Journal of Architecture 19, no. 1 (2014): 19–42. 72  Birgit Rodhe, “A Two-Way Open School,” Prospects: Quarterly Review of Education 2, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 99. 73  Margrit Kennedy, Die Schule als Gemeinschaftszentrum: Beispiele und Partizipations­modelle aus den USA (Berlin: Schriften des Schulbauinstituts der Länder, 1976), 7.

Politics of Learning, Politics of Space

74  Richard Marshall, “The Mobile Teaching Package in Africa,” Prospects: Quarterly Review of Education 2, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 78–83. On REBIA, see the account of a UNESCO staff member: L. Garcia del Solar, Report on the Activities of UNESCO’s Regional Educational Building Institute for Africa (REBIA) (Geneva: UNESCO, 1971). 75  See, for these cases, Sónia Vaz Borges and Filipa César, “Militant Mangrove School,” trans. Andrea Honecker und Alexandra Bootz, in Bildungsschock, 164–69; Ana Paula Koury and Maria Helena Paiva da Costa, “‘Auch barfuß lässt sich lessen lernen’”; Koury and Paiva da Costa, “A utopia popular materializada nos Acampamentos Escolares da Campanha De Pé no Chão Também se Aprende a Ler (Djalma Maranhão, Natal-RN, 1961),” arq.urb, no. 25 (May–August 2019): 141– 56; Robert F. Arnove and Anthony Dewees, “Education and Revolutionary Transformation in Nicaragua, 1979–1990,” in “Education and Socialist (R)Evo­lution,” special issue, Comparative Education Review 35, no. 1 (February 1991): 92–109. 76  For a retrospective account of a UNESCO staff member in charge of the project around 1970, see Jean-Claude Pauvert and Max Egly, Le “Complexe” de Bouaké 1967–1981 (Paris: Club Histoire Association des anciens fonctionnaires de l’Unesco, 2001). 77  See Dieter E. Zimmer, Ein Medium kommt auf die Welt: Video-Kassetten und das neue multimediale Lernen (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1970); Hayo Matthiesen, Bildung tut not: Berichte, Analysen, Kommentare (Munich: Hanser, 1977), 83– 180. 78  For a revealing documentation of these voices, see a 1974 film produced by French tele­vision that accompanies a twenty-four-year-old white female employee from Paris during her stay at the “Télé complexe” in Bouaké: “Joëlle Delpuget coopérante en Côte d’Ivoire,” JT 20H, July 3, 1974, https://www.ina.fr/video/I05220997 (accessed October 26, 2020). 79  Marie-Josée Therrien, “Built to Educate: The Architecture of Schools in the Arctic from 1950 to 2007,” Journal for the Study of Architecture in Canada 40, no. 2 (2015): 25–42. 80  Claus Biegert, Indianerschulen: Als Indianer überleben—von Indianern lernen (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1979). 81  Ibid., 140. 82  See, for example, Vine Deloria Jr., We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf (New York: Macmillan, 1970). For an instructive yet some-

what depoliticizing take, see the book by two (non-Indigenous) anthropologists Estelle Fuchs and Robert J. Havighurst, To Live on This Earth: American Indian Education (New York: Doubleday, 1972). 83  See, for example, Daniel Bensad, “Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event,” in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philo­sophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London: Continuum, 2007), 94–105; Christopher Pawling, “Reviving the Critical Spirit of May ’68: Alain Badiou and the Cultural Politics of the ‘Event,’” in Critical Theory and Political Engagement: From May ’68 to the Arab Spring (London: Palgrave Mac­millan, 2013) 88–124. 84  Gregory Bistoen, Stijn Vanheule, and Stef Craps, “Badiou’s Theory of the Event and the Politics of Trauma Recovery,” Theory & Psychology 24, no. 6 (2014): 830–51. 85  On the notion of the “red decade,” lasting from 1966 to 1976 in a largely French context, see Alain Badiou, preface to Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005), xxxiv; for West Germany (with a slightly different periodization), see Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt: unsere kleine deutsche Kultur­revolution, 1967–1977 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001). 86  See, for example, the collaborative research project “Radical Pedagogies” (2012–2015) on the history of alternative forms of architectural education, especially in the 1960s and 1970s (School of Architecture, Princeton University, headed by Beatriz Colomina), https://radical-pedagogies .com (accessed October 26, 2020); “Radical Pedagogies at the 7th Warsaw Under Construction Festival,” in “Learning,” special issue, Volume 45, no. 3 (2015); Nina Gribat, Philipp Misselwitz, and Matthias Görlich, eds., Vergessene Schulen: Architekturlehre zwischen Reform und Revolte um 1968 (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2017); Caroline Maniaque, ed., Les années 68 et la formation des architectes (Rouen: Point de vues, 2018); Caroline Maniaque, Éléonore Marantz, and Jean-Louis Violeau, Mai 68. L’architecture aussi! (Paris: Les Éditions B2, 2018); Anne Debarre, Caroline Maniaque, Eléonore Marantz, and Jean-Louis Violeau, eds., Architecture 68—Panorama inter­ national des renouveaux pédagogiques (Geneva: MētisPresses, 2020). 87  In November 1967, a workshop discussion on school construction was held at the Protestant Academy in Berlin, entitled “Pedagogy in concrete?” (see Günther Kühne, “Bildung in Beton?” Bauwelt 48, no. 23 [June 5, 1967]: 605: “It

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remained open whether the question referred to the ossification of pedagogy or of architecture.”).

Press, 2011), 188; “Lessons from Nanterre,” Log 13–14 (Autumn 2008): 59–67.

88  See Richard Hoppe-Sailer, Cornelia Jöchner, and Frank Schmitz, eds., Ruhr-Universität Bochum: Architekturvision der Nachkriegs­ moderne (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2015); Peter Chadwick, This Brutal World (London: Phaidon, 2016); Christopher Beanland, Concrete Concept: Brutalist Buildings around the World (London: Francis Lincoln, 2016); Oliver Elser, Philip Kurz, and Peter Cachola Schmal, eds., SOS Brutalism: A Global Survey (Zurich: Park Books, 2017) and the exhibition of the same name at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, November 9, 2017 to April 2, 2018; or the exhibition “Brutal modern: Bauen und Leben in den 60er und 70ern,” Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum, October 13, 2018 to July 7, 2019.

94 Lefebvre, Explosion, 109.

89  See, for example, Stefan Muthesius, The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Anne-Marie Châtelet and Marc Le Cœur, eds., “L’Architecture scolaire, essai d’historiographie internationale,” special issue, Histoire de l’éducation 102 (May 2004); Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, School (London: Reaktion, 2008); Catherine Compain-Gajac, ed., Les campus universitaires: Architecture et urbanisme, histoire et sociologie, état des lieux et perspectives (Perpignan: Presses universitaires de Perpignan, 2014); Jonathan Coulson, Paul Roberts, and Isabelle Taylor, University Planning and Architecture: The Search for Perfection (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015); Kate Darian-Smith and Julie Willis, eds., Designing Schools: Space, Place, and Pedagogy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Instituto Superior Técnico, Departamento de Engenharia Civil, Arquitectura e Georrecursos, ed., Educational Architecture: Edu­cation, Heritage, Challenges (Lisbon: Instituto Superior Técnico, 2019), http:// asap-ehc.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/conference/ebook /ebook.pdf (accessed October 26, 2020). 90  See Henri Lefebvre, “Les institutions de la société post-technologique,” Espaces et sociétés 5 (April 1972): 3–20, here 5. 91  See Tom McDonough, “Invisible Cities: Henri Lefebvre’s Explosion,” Artforum 46, no. 9 (May 2008): 314–21, 404. 92  Henri Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Revolution, trans. Alfred Ehrenfeld (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 124. 93  See Łukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

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95  Ibid., 106. 96  See the instructive chapter by Ben Mercer, “‘An Asylum for Delinquents’: The Space of Revolt at Nanterre,” in Student Revolt in 1968: France, Italy, and West Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 230–53. 97  See ibid., 270–76. 98  With regard to the United Kingdom, see Julia McNeal and Margaret Rogers, eds., The Multi-Racial School: A Professional Perspective (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). 99  See Francis Blanchard, “The Education of Migrant Workers—Where Do We Stand? A World-Wide Overview of Migratory Movements,” Prospects: Quarterly Review of Education 4, no. 3 (Autumn 1974): 348–56. 100  The overseas studies of these foreign students have been increasingly researched in recent years. See, for example, Rayk Einax, “Im Dienste außenpolitischer Interessen: Ausländische Studierende in der DDR am Beispiel Jenas,” Die Hochschule: Journal für Wissenschaft und Bildung 17, no. 1 (2008): 162–83; Constantin Katsakioris, “Les promotions de la décolonisation: Les pre­miers étudiants africains en URSS et leurs désillusions, 1960–1965,” in Étudier à l’Est: Expériences de diplômés africains, ed. Monique de Saint Martin, Scarfò Grazia Ghellab, and Kamal Mellakh (Paris: Karthala, 2015); Sara Pugach, “African Students and the Politics of Race and Gender in the German Democratic Republic, 1957–1990,” in Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World, ed. Quinn Slobodian (New York: Berg­ hahn, 2015), 131–56; Constantin Katsakioris, “The Lumumba University in Moscow: Higher Education for a Soviet-Third World Alliance, 1960–91,” Journal of Global History 14, no. 2 (2019): 281–300; and Eric Burton, “Navigating Global Socialism: Tanzanian Students in and Beyond East Germany,” Cold War History 19, no. 1 (2019): 63–83. 101  Eric Burton, “Decolonization, the Cold War, and Africans’ Routes to Higher Education Overseas, 1957–65,” Journal of Global History 15, no. 1 (2020): 186. 102  See Almut Zwengel, ed., Die “Gastarbeiter” der DDR: Politischer Kontext und Lebenswelt (Berlin: LIT, 2011). 103  See Brian Van Wyck, “Guest Workers in the School? Turkish Teachers and the Production

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of Migrant Knowledge in West German Schools, 1971–1989,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 43, no. 3 (July–September 2017): 466–91.

through their performative research project Kein schöner Archiv. See http://keinschoenerarchiv.xyz (accessed October 26, 2020).

104  Hildegard Feidel-Mertz and Wilman Grossmann, eds., “Gettos in unseren Schulen?,” special issue, Material- und Nachrichtendienst in der Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft 137 (August 1974): 16–17.

111  See Heiner Boehncke and Jürgen Humbug, eds., Wer verändert die Schule? Schulkämpfe in Italien (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1973); Benito Incatasciato, Dalla scuola al quartiere: Il movimento di “scuola e quartiere” a Firenze, 1968–1973 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1975); Giulia Malavasi, “Senza registro: L’esperienza di Scuola e quartiere a Firenze (1966–1976),” Zapruder 27 (January– April 2012): 26–43.

105  For a bibliography on guest workers and immigration in the FRG until 1987, see LutzRainer Reuter and Martin Dodenhoft, Arbeits­ migration und gesellschaftliche Entwicklung: Eine Literaturanalyse zur Lebens- und Bildungssituation von Migranten und zu den gesellschaftlichen, politischen und rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen der Ausländerpolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1988), 73–129. A resourceful contribution to the historiography of migrant children and parents during the decades of the Gastarbeiter regime in West Germany is the interdisciplinary, participatory archival project “Remise” at Grundschule Nürtingen in Berlin-Kreuzberg (2017–), https://www.dieremise .org/ (accessed October 26, 2020). 106  Betrifft: Erziehung 6, no. 6 (June 1973). 107  For the history of the term, see Waltraud Harth-Peter, “Art: ‘Pädagogische Provinz,’” in Klinkhardt Lexikon Erziehungswissenschaft, ed. Klaus-Peter Horn et al. (Bad Heilbrunn: Julius Klinkhardt, 2012), 479–80; and Martin Jörg Schäfer, Das Theater der Erziehung: Goethes “pädagogische Provinz” und die Vorgeschichten der Theatralisierung von Bildung (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016). 108  On educational gerrymandering, see, for example, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, “Educational Gerrymandering? Race and Attendance Boundaries in a Demographically Changing Suburb,” Harvard Educational Review 83, no. 4 (2013): 580–612; Salvatore Saporito and David Van Riper, “Do Irregularly Shaped School Attendance Zones Contribute to Racial Segregation or Integration?,” Social Currents 3, no. 1 (2016): 64–83. 109  Aladin El-Mafaalani and Sebastian Kurtenbach, “Das Raumparadoxon der Bildungspolitik: Warum Bildungsinvestitionen sozialräumlicher Segregation nicht entgegenwirken,” Theorie und Praxis der Sozialen Arbeit 65, no. 5 (2014): 344–51; see also Christine Baur, Schule, Stadtteil, Bildungschancen: Wie ethnische und soziale Segregation Schüler/-innen mit Migrationshintergrund benachteiligt (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012). 110  Currently, Nuray Demir and Michael Annoff are researching such intangible episodes in the histories of migration and education

112  See Jeannette Windheuser, “Geteilter Protest und die Frage der Befreiung: Geschlecht in Heimkampagne und Kinderladenbewegung,” in Zu­gänge zur Kinderladenbewegung, ed. Karin Bock et al. (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2020), 375–87. 113  See Andrea Hajek, “A Room of One’s Own: Feminist Intersections between Space, Women’s Writing, and Radical Bookselling in Milan (1968– 1986),” Italian Studies 73, no. 1 (2018): 81–97. 114  See Annamaria Lona, “Le 150 ore ‘per sole donne,’” Venetica 31 (2015): 91–107; Paola Giaculli, “Die ‘Hundertfünfzig Stunden’—eine einzigartige italienische Besonderheit,” Politische Berichte, no. 5 (2018): 22–23, http://www .linkekritik.de/fileadmin/pb1805/pb1805-22 -KBlatt-Ciaculli-Gehring-Italien-1973-Bildung .html (accessed October 26, 2020); Anna Frisone, “‘Wandering Thoughts’; The Writing Experience of Working-Class Housewives in 1970s Milan,” Gender & History 30, no.1 (March 2018): 177–95; see also Adriana Monti’s 1983 film Scuola senza fine (School without end), shot between 1979 and 1981 with a group of women in Milan, most of whom were housewives who had completed a 150-hour secondary-school diploma in 1976 and subsequently started a self-­organized study group. 115 Matrix, Making Space: Women and the ManMade Environment (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 7. 116  See Hartman, “Desegregation as Cold War Experience: The Perplexities of Race in the Blackboard Jungle,” in Education and the Cold War, 157–73. 117  See Raymond Wolters, Race and Education 1954–2007 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008). 118  An important document on the relationship between desegregation, school organization, and architecture are the Papers Prepared for National Conference on Equal Educational Opportunity in America’s Cities, Washington, D.C., November, 16–18, 1967 (Washington, DC: Commission

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on Civil Rights, 1967). On education parks, see David Lewis, “The New Role of Education Parks in the Changing Structure of Metropolitan Areas,” in ibid., 519–94. 119  See Jia Wang and Joan Herman, “Magnet Schools: History, Description, and Effects,” in The Wiley Handbook of School Choice, ed. Robert A. Fox and Nina K. Buchanan (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 159. For an instructive introduction into the history of magnet schools, see Nicholas Kryczka, “Building a Constituency for Racial Integration: Chicago’s Magnet Schools and the Prehistory of School Choice,” History of Education Quarterly 59, no. 1 (February 2019): 1–34; about setbacks to the aim of desegregation by way of magnet schools, see Kimberly C. West, “A Desegregation Tool that Backfired: Magnet Schools and Classroom Segregation,” Yale Law Review 103 (June 1994): 2567–92. 120  The issue was revived, for example, during the 2019 Democratic presidential debates by Kamala Harris, when she called for a return to busing and criticized Joe Biden’s earlier anti-­ busing stance. See Ed Kilgore, “Kamala Harris’s Call for a Return to Busing Is Bold and Politically Risky,” New York Magazine, July 1, 2019, https:// nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/kamala-harriss -call-to-bring-back-busing-is-bold-and-risky.html (accessed October 26, 2020). 121  Nathan Glazer, “Is Busing Necessary?” Commentary 53, no. 3 (1972): 39–52, quoted in Tomeka Davis, “Glazer Was Wrong on Busing, but Americans Did Not Listen When He Changed His Mind,” City & Community 18, no. 2 (June 2019): 439. 122  See Dorothy Christiansen, “Busing Bibliography,” Urban Review 6, no. 1 (September 1972): 35–38; Nicolaus Mills, ed., Busing U.S.A. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1979); Davison M. Douglas, ed., School Busing: Constitutional and Political Developments (New York: Garland, 1994); Gregory S. Jacobs, Getting around Brown: Desegregation, Development, and the Columbus Public Schools (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998); and Matthew F. Delmont, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). 123  See Meyer Weinberg, Race and Place: A Legal History of the Neighborhood School (Washington, DC: US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education, 1967). 124  Kehinde Andrews, “The Problem of Political Blackness: Lessons from the Black Supplementary School Movement,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39, no. 11 (2016): 2060–78.

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125  See Chris Tree, “Storefront Schools,” Urban Review 2, no. 4 (February 1968): 16–18, 28–29; William C. Nelsen, “The Storefront School: A Vehicle for Change,” Journal of Negro Education 40, no. 3 (Summer 1971): 248–54; Barry M. Goldenberg, “‘There’s a Lot to Know, and We’ll Learn It Together’ Emancipatory Teaching and Learning at Harlem Preparatory School, 1967– 1974,” in Radical Educators Rearticulating Edu­ cation and Social Change: Teacher Agency and Resistance, Early 20th Century to the Present, ed. Jennifer Gale de Saxe and Tina Y. Gourd (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 39–63. 126  See Robert P. Robinson, “Until the Revo­ lution: Analyzing the Politics, Pedagogy, and Curriculum of the Oakland Community School,” Espacio, Tiempo y Educación 7, no. 1 (2020): 181–203. 127  Makeba Lavan and Conor Tomás Reed, introduction to “Realizing the Dream of a Black University” & Other Writings, by Toni Cade Bambara, ed. Makeba Lavan and Conor Tomás Reed, series 7, no. 1, pt. 1, Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative (New York: Center for the Humanities, Graduate Center, CUNY, 2017), 9. Thanks to Louis Massiah for introducing me to Bambara’s work as an educator. 128  See Conor Tomás Reed, “Diving Into SEEK: Adrienne Rich and Social Movements at the City College of New York, 1968–1974,” in Jayne Cortez, Adrienne Rich, and the Feminist Superhero: Voice, Vision, Politics, and Performance in U.S. Contemporary Women’s Poetics, ed. Laura Hinton (New York: Lexington Books, 2016), 102. 129  bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 24. 130  See Cyril G. Sargent, John B. Ward, and Allan R. Talbot, “The Concept of the Education Park,” in The Schoolhouse in the City, 186–99; “Edu­cation Parks: Panaceas with Problems,” Progressive Architecture (April 1968): 174–87. 131  See Ingeborg Altstaedt, Lernbehinderte. Kritische Entwicklungsgeschichte eines Notstandes: Sonderpädagogik in Deutschland und Schweden (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1977). 132  See Selwyn Goldsmith, Designing for the Disabled: A Manual of Technical Information (London: Royal Institute of British Architects, 1963). On Goldsmith, his later concept of “Universal Design,” and the politics of disability design and architecture, see, for example, Aimi Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Jos Boys, ed., Disability, Space,

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Architecture: A Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Elizabeth Guffey, Designing Disability: Symbols, Space, and Society (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).

142  Helmut Trauzettel, “Abschlußbericht: UIA Seminar Flexibilität der Bildungsbauten,” 1974, 8, Helmut Trauzettel Papers, TU Dresden, Univer­ sitätsarchiv.

133  See Lee W. Anderson, Congress and the Classroom: From the Cold War to “No Child Left Behind“ (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 89–100; Christine Ashby et al., “Enclaves of Privilege: Access and Oppor­ tunity for Students with Disabilities in Urban K-8 Schools,” History of Education Quarterly 60, no. 3 (August 2020): 407–29.

143  See Paola Cagliari, Marina Castagnetti, and Claudia Giudici, eds., Loris Malaguzzi and the Schools of Reggio Emilia: A Selection of His Writings and Speeches, 1945–1993 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Nicola S. Barbieri, “Loris Malaguzzi: la sua vita e la sua filosofia dell’educazione come nuclei fondativi del ‘Reggio Approach,’” in Pedagogia dell’infanzia: Atti del 55º Convegno di Scholé, ed. Luciano Pazzaglia (Bre­ scia: Editore La Scuola, 2017), 165–78.

134  Manfred Scholz, Bauten für behinderte Kinder: Schulen, Heime, Rehabilitationszentren (Munich: Callwey, 1974), 7. 135  See Gregor Harbusch, “Experimentelle Räume: Ludwig Leos Entwurf für die Laborschule Bielefeld,” 94–99; Monika Mattes, “‘Leistungs­ schule’, ‘Lernfabrik’, ‘Kuschelecke’? Gesamt­ schulen als Orte der pädagogischen Wissensproduktion,” 84–89; and Urs Walter, “MSZ Berlin: Zwischen Raum, Politik und Asbest,” 100–105, in Bildungsschock. For a helpful study of the spatial history of comprehensive schools in West Germany, see Daniel Blömer, Topographie der Gesamtschule: Zum Zusammenhang von Pädagogik und Raum (Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt, 2011). 136 Scholz, Bauten für behinderte Kinder, 120. 137  Ibid. See also, Entwürfe für eine Gesamtschule, vol. 5, Sonderschule integriert: Berliner Situation in Zahlen und Analysen. Raumprogramme und Entwürfe für Schulen mit Lernbehinderten und Körperbehinderten (Berlin: Technische Universität Berlin, 1971). 138  On the connection between educational architectures and the discourse of accessibility, see Daniel Neugebauer, “Barrieren aus Beton: Dekonstruktion von Behinderung durch inklusive Gestaltung,” in Bildungsschock, 116–21. 139 See Schools without Walls: A Report from Educational Facilities Laboratories, prepared by Margaret Farmer and Ruth Weinstock (New York: Educational Facilities Laboratories, 1968). 140  Carlo Testa, New Educational Facilities. Nouveaux équipements pédagogiques. Neue Erziehungsräume (Zurich: Verlag für Architektur Artemis, 1975), 35. 141  Helmut Trauzettel, “Internationaler Schulbau: Zur Flexibilität von Bildungsbauten. Pro­blemerörterungen zum UIA-Seminar,” Deutsche Architektur 23, no. 5 (May 1974): 293–94.

144  See Mechthild Schumpp, “Bauformen im Bewußtsein von Kindern,” Bauwelt 58, no. 50 (December 11, 1967): 1319–32; see also Mechthild Schumpp, Stadtbau-Utopien und Gesellschaft: Der Bedeutungswandel utopischer Stadtmodelle unter sozialem Aspekt (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1972). 145  See Hans Mayrhofer and Wolfgang Zacharias, Ästhetische Erziehung: Lernorte für aktive Wahrnehmung und soziale Kreativität (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1976); Hans Mayrhofer and Wolfgang Zacharias, Projektbuch ästhetisches Lernen (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1977); and Karlheinz Burk and Dieter Haarmann, eds., Wieviele Ecken hat unsere Schule? I: Schulraumgestaltung: Das Klassen­ zimmer als Lernort und Erfahrungsraum (Frankfurt am Main: Arbeitskreis Grundschule e.V., 1979). The project “Spielclub Oranienstraße 25 – a playable model city, plus exhibition” was exhibited in 2019–2020 at the neue Gesellschaft für bildende kunst (nGbk) in Berlin, presenting an important example of such pedagogical spatial practice from the early 1970s. 146  Colin Ward, The Child in the City (London: Architectural Press, 1978), back-cover blurb from Times Literary Supplement. On Colin Ward see, for example, Catherine Burke, “‘We Make the Road by Walking’: Colin Ward und Bildungs­ konzepte der 1960er und 1970er Jahre,” trans. Bert Rebhandl, in Bildungsschock, 72–77; Catherine Burke and Ken Jones, eds., Education, Childhood, and Anarchism: Talking Colin Ward (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). 147  George Dennison, The Lives of Children: The Story of the First Street School (New York: Random House, 1969), 7. 148  See Gerd Grüneisl, Hans Mayrhofer, and Wolfgang Zacharias, Umwelt als Lernraum: Organisation von Spiel- und Lernsituationen, Projekte ästhetischer Erziehung (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1973); Gary Coates, ed.,

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Alternative Learning Environments (Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, 1974). 149  On the deconfinement of playgrounds, see Mark Terkessidis, “Spielplätze on the Run,” in Bildungsschock, 78–83; Mariana Mogilevich, The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Gabriela Burkhalter, ed., The Playground Project (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2016). 150  Guenther Ekkehard Weidle in Herbert R. Kohl, Antiautoritärer Unterricht in der Schule von heute: Erfahrungsbericht und praktische Anleitung (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1971), 13–14n2. 151  See the exhibition “The University Is Now on Air,” curated by Joaquim Moreno, and the accompanying publication Joaquim Moreno, ed., The University Is Now on Air: Broadcasting Modern Architecture (Heijningen: Jap Sam, 2018). 152  See Charles E. Silberman, Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education (New York: Random House, 1970), 349–56; Henry S. Resnik, Turning on the System: War in the Philadelphia Public Schools (New York: Pantheon, 1970); John Bremer and Michael von Moschzisker, The School without Walls: Phila­ delphia’s Parkway Program (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971); Donald William Cox, The City as a Schoolhouse: The Story of the Parkway Program (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1972). 153  See Richard Saul Wurman et al., “The City as a Classroom,” in “International Design Conference in Aspen: The Invisible City,” special issue, Design Quarterly 86/87 (1972): 45–48; on the Aspen Conference of 1972 and other urban edu­ cation programs in North America, see Isabelle Doucet, “Learning in the ‘Real’ World: Encounters with Radical Architectures (1960s–1970s),” Journal of Educational Administration and History 49, no. 1 (2017): 7–21. 154  Edgar L. Morphet and Charles O. Ryan, eds., Designing Education for the Future, vol. 1, Prospective Changes in Society by 1980, vol. 2, Implications for Education of Prospective Changes in Society, and vol. 3, Planning and Effecting Needed Changes in Education (New York: Citation Press, 1966–1967). 155  See Daniel D. Sage and Richard B. Chobot, “The Scenario as Approach to Studying the Future,” in Futurism in Education: Methodologies, ed. Stephen P. Hencley and James R. Yates (Berkeley: McCutchan, 1974), 161–78.

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156  Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 186. 157  See Robert G. Scanlon, “Policy and Planning for the Future,” in The Future of Education: Perspectives on Tomorrow’s Schooling, ed. Louis Rubin (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1975), 87. 158  See Hildegard Hamm-Brücher, Aufbruch ins Jahr 2000 oder Erziehung im technischen Zeitalter: Ein bildungspolitischer Report aus 11 Ländern (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1967), 148. See also her Schule zwischen Establishment und APO (Hanover: Schroedel, 1969); Unfähig zur Reform? Kritik und Initiativen zur Bildungspolitik (Munich: Piper, 1972); with Friedrich Edding, Reform der Reform: Ansätze zum bildungspolitischen Umdenken (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1973). 159  Willy Brandt, Government Policy Statement to the German Bundestag in Bonn (October 28, 1969), https://www.willy-brandt-biografie.de /wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Regierungs erklaerung_Willy_Brandt_1969.pdf (accessed October 26, 2020). 160  Hildegard Hamm-Brücher, Bildungsbericht ’70: Die bildungspolitische Konzeption der Bundesregierung (Bonn: Heger, 1970), 129. 161  See Frank Engster and Oliver Schlaudt, “Alfred Sohn-Rethel: Real Abstraction and the Unity of Commodity-Form and Thought Form,” in The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, vol. 1, ed. Beverley Best, Werner Bonefeld, and Chris O’Kane (London: Sage, 2018), 284–301. 162  See Robert E. Lane, “The Decline of Politics and Ideology in a Knowledgeable Society,” American Sociological Review 31, no. 5 (October 1966): 649–62. 163  See, for example, Theodore W. Schultz, “Capital Formation by Education,” Journal of Political Economy 68, no. 6 (December 1960): 571–83; Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964); Jacob Mincer, Schooling, Experience, and Earnings (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1974). On the historical analysis of the biopolitical dimensions of the concept of human capital, see Ulrich Bröckling, “Menschenökonomie, Humankapital: Eine Kritik der biopolitischen Ökonomie,” Mittelweg 36 12, no. 1 (February/March 2003): 3–22. 164  “That Population Explosion” was the headline of Time on January 11, 1960. The martial

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(and always racialized, Malthusian) metaphors were to stay in the lexicon of demographic development (in 1960 the world population had allegedly broken through the 3 billion mark); the title of Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich’s bestseller The Population Bomb from 1968 is only one example of this language. See also David Lam, “How the World Survived the Population Bomb: Lessons From 50 Years of Extraordinary Demographic History,” Demography 48, no. 4 (November 2011): 1231–62. 165  Bildungsökonomie (education economics) and “investments” based on educational economics became decisive factors in the planning of the postwar decades, also and especially in relation to the construction of schools and universities. For an insightful take on the newly emerging figure of the Bildungsökonom (education economist), see Michael Geiss, “Der Bildungsökonom,” in Das Personal der Postmoderne: Inventur einer Epoche, ed. Alban Frei and Hannes Mangold (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), 33–49. Two titles of the period also serve as examples: Friedrich Edding, Ökonomie des Bildungswesens: Lehren und Lernen als Haushalt und als Investition (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1963) and Paul Woodring, Investment in Innovation: An Historical Appraisal of the Fund for the Advancement of Education (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970). The literature on the economics of architectures of education is vast; two exemplary publications include: The Cost of a Schoolhouse (New York: Educational Facilities Laboratories, 1960) and Guide to Alternatives for Financing School Buildings (New York: Educational Facilities Labora­ tories, 1971). 166  On the geographical-spatial planning of education in the context of late 1960s West Germany, see, for example, Robert Geipel, Bildungsplanung und Raumordnung: Studien zur Standortplanung von Bildungseinrichtungen und zu räumlichen Aspekten des Bildungsverhaltens in Hessen (Frankfurt am Main: Diesterweg, 1968). On educational planning more generally, see, from the same year, Werner Loch, “Organisation und Experiment im Bildungswesen,” Bildung und Erziehung 21 (1968): 125–37. 167  Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 281. 168  Stuart Hall, “The Neo-Liberal Revolution,” Cultural Studies 25, no. 6 (2011): 705–28. 169  Margaret Thatcher (interviewed by Douglas Keay), Woman’s Own (September 23, 1987), tran-

script at Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https:// www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689 (accessed October 26, 2020). 170  Anatolij Aleksejevič Zvorykin, Cultural Policy in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Paris: UNESCO, 1970), 16. 171  See Alfred B. Evans, “Developed Socialism in Soviet Ideology,” Soviet Studies 29, no. 3 (July 1977): 420. 172  For on early yet valuable overview of post-Stalinist educational policies, see Mervyn Matthews, Education in the Soviet Union: Policies and Institutions since Stalin (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982). On science cities like Akadem­ gorodok in Siberia, see, for example, Ksenia Tatarchenko, “Calculating a Showcase: Mikhail Lavrentiev, the Politics of Expertise, and the International Life of the Siberian Science-City,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 46, no. 5 (2016): 592–632; Kevin Limonier, L’archipel des savants: Histoire des anciennes villes des élite du compléxe scientifique soviétique (Paris: Les éditions B2, 2018); and the recent, still unpublished research by design historian Tom Cubbin on the science city as a “model for imagining creative communities in the USSR after 1968,” https://gup .ub.gu.se/publication/258486 (accessed October 26, 2020). 173  See, for example, Mikk Titma and Ellu Saar, “Regional Differences in Soviet Secondary Edu­ cation,” European Sociological Review 11, no. 1 (May 1995): 37–58. 174  See Oskar Anweiler, Friedrich Kuebart, and Klaus Meyer, eds., Die sowjetische Bildungspolitik von 1958 bis 1973: Dokumente und Texte (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1976); Rita L. Wells and Douglas N. Goetz, Adult Education in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, 1987). 175  See the instructive report by GDR architect Werner Queck, “Einige Probleme des Hochschulbaus in der Sowjetunion,” Deutsche Architektur 20, no. 4 (April 1971): 244–49. An important reference for the entanglements of urban and educational planning in the Soviet Union and abroad is the work of Elke Beyer: see note 67 and her PhD thesis “Die Produktion sozialistischer Urbanität: Stadtzentrumsplanungen in der Sowjet­ union in den 1960er Jahren” (PhD diss., ETH Zurich, 2017), https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b -000181742 (accessed October 26, 2020). 176  See, for example, Klaus Kammerer and Kay Puhan-Schulz, “Schulbauprojekte in der Sowjet­ union,” Bauwelt 61, no. 21 (May 25, 1970): 836–41; Hans-Joachim Aminde et al., Bildungs­

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planung, Stadtplanung, Hochschulplanung in der UdSSR: Eine Reisebericht, ed. Hans Jürgen Dietrich (Stuttgart: Zentralarchiv für Hochschulbau and Institut für Hochschulbau, 1973).

185  See Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972). In 1977 the American National Alliance for Safe Schools (NASS) was founded.

177  Mao Zedong quoted in Fumio Kabayashi, “The Great Cultural Revolution and the Educational Reform: The Image of Socialist Man,” Developing Economies 9, no. 4 (December 1971): 494.

186  See, for example, the thematic issue “From Education to Incarceration: Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline,” Counterpoints 453 (2014).

178 Ibid. 179  Peter J. Seybolt, Revolutionary Education in China: Documents and Commentary (White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1973), 404. 180  Ronald F. Price, “‘Community and School,’ and Education in the People’s Republic of China,” Comparative Education 12, no. 2 (1976): 167. 181  “Open-Door Schooling Is Good,” China Reconstructs 25, no. 7 (July 1976): 7. 182  For another example of such absence of references to actual buildings or spaces, see Party Branch, China May 7 Middle School, “Continue in the Direction of Running Schools with Open Doors: A Talk about Our School’s Plan for Revolution in Education in the Next Few Years,” Chinese Education 8, no. 4 (1975): 93–103. 183  Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 5. 184  See Evan Calder Williams, “Flexible Käfige: Über Sicherheit und Gegensicherheit in der Bildungsarchitektur,” trans. Clemens Krümmel, in Bildungsschock, 186–93. In the mid-1970s, architecture journals reported on “bunker schools,” new architectural designs, including subterranean classrooms, allegedly protected against vandalism and unrest, see “Three Underground Schools,” Progressive Architecture (October 1975): 30, 34.

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187  See Amber N. Wiley, “The Dunbar High School Dilemma: Architecture, Power, and African American Cultural Heritage,” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 20, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 95–128; and “Schools and Prisons,” Aggregate 2 (March 2015), http://we-aggregate.org/piece/schools-and-pris ons (accessed October 26, 2020). 188  See Gary Orfield, “The Politics of Resegregation,” Saturday Review (September 20, 1969): 58–60, 77–79. 189  Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 5. On the free school movement see, for example, Bonnie Barrett Stretch, “The Rise of the ‘Free School,’” Saturday Review (June 20, 1979): 76–79, 90–93; Jonathan Kozol, Free Schools (New York: Bantam, 1972); W. Kenneth Richmond, The Free School (London: Methuen, 1973); Berit Brink, “Between Imagination and Reality: Tracing the Legacy of Childhood as a Utopian Space in the Free Schooling and Unschooling Movements,” Strenæ. Recherches sur les livres et objets culturels de l’enfance 13 (2018), https:// journals.openedition.org/strenae/1795 (accessed October 26, 2020). 190  See Mildred Friedman, “Context for Learning,” Design Quarterly 90/91 (1974): 9–10. 191  Pierre Merlin, L’université assassinée: Vincennes: 1968–1980 (Paris: Ramsay, 1980).

Politics of Learning, Politics of Space

School’s In/Out: OSZ Wedding, Berlin, or Learning from a Resilient Learning Environment

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Pysall, Jensen, Stahrenberg & Partner, OSZ Wedding, West Berlin, Germany, ca. 1977

The Siren Call of Participation Lingering in the dispersed and forgotten archives of the post-Sputnik-crisis age is evidence of myriad attempts at progressive, at times “progressivist” education. In the global 1960s and 1970s, children and youth were subjected to educational experimentation on an unprecedented scale, with architecture and urban planning as central forces of expansion. Many facilities from the period, however, have fallen victim to the neoconservative politics that gained traction in the mid-1970s. Among the built environments that have survived the havoc is the former OSW or OSZ, the Oberschulzentrum Wedding, a senior high school or sixth form center in Berlin’s Brunnenviertel, a neighborhood in the district of Wedding. A relic of past urban restructuring and educational reform, the OSZ, planned and built throughout the 1970s, has become a spatially demanding, slowly deteriorating monument of administrative procrastination amid conflicting interests, communal needs, and a blatant lack of community facilities and affordable rents that has left Brunnenviertel’s multicultural population with a dearth of public and private amenities. Since 2012, ps wedding, a grassroots initiative founded by architects and urban planners Oliver Clemens, Sabine Horlitz, and Bernhard Hummel, has engaged in rescuing the former OSZ Wedding building from demolition. Proposing its adaptation as an envelope for affordable housing and community services, ps wedding argues for the transformation of the impressive, orange-clad late modernist compound into a multipurpose center of community services, cultural

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ps wedding, study for an integrated education campus on the site of OSZ Wedding, Berlin, Germany, 2019

facilities, and housing.1 Designed and realized by Pysall, Jensen, Stahrenberg & Partner, a Braunschweig-based office specializing in administrative and educational buildings, the large, three-story spaceship structure originally plugged into a then-newly erected residential area.2 At the time of its inauguration in 1976, the comprehensive (Gesamtschule) OSZ Wedding had already been administratively redesignated to become a more traditionally organized grammar school. Closed since 2011 (students and teachers have moved to a building from the early twentieth century, due to an alleged decrease in student numbers), only the sports hall remained in use by 2017, at which point water damage brought the district’s administration to discontinue the building’s operation. The interest in the fate of this particular architecture and in the development of plans for its future uses is wide ranging, involving the immediate neighborhood, local politicians, architecture scholars, neighborhood organizations, edu­cators, and housing activists. ps wedding’s original proposal from around 2013 was always meant to be developed in dialogue with various community orga­nizations suchas the Quartiersmanagement (Neighborhood Management) and is closely related to similar, subsequently launched projects and initiatives in Berlin such as Stadt von Unten (City from Below) or Initiative Haus der Statistik (House of

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Statistics Initiative).3 All respond to the rampant privatization of state-owned land by the municipal government in the decades following 1989, the abolishment of social-housing schemes, and the massive rise in rents and real estate prices since the mid 2000s driven by global monetary politics and financialization. The struggle over the former OSZ Wedding and ps wedding’s proposal to repurpose the historical architecture takes place in the context of this larger fight against neoliberal rule. In the wake of rising rents and skyrocketing real estate prices following the 2008 financial crisis, people in Berlin started to organize around gentrification, eviction, housing for refugees, lack of public amenities, dilapidating schools, and more. The city’s legacy of tenant struggles and the self-organization of community services provides the backdrop for groups that today insist on “reclaiming” the city and taking up issues of ownership of public goods such as land and housing.4 Regular protests and informational events organized by Bündnis #Mietenwahnsinn (Rent Madness Alliance) or urbanize!, a week-long “festival for urban explorations” in October 2018, have voiced citizens’ concerns and proposed alternative concepts of urban commoning and housing politics.5 Not least responding to these manifestations of dissent, over the course of 2019, issues such as rent control and expropriation have been taken up by factions of Berlin’s governing coalition of Social Democrats (SPD), the Green Party (Bündis90/Die Grünen), and the Left Party (Die Linke) in a late, palliative measure to resolve the imminent housing crisis.6 The 2016 coalition agreement of the current Berlin government features magnanimous notions such as com­ munity and sustainability. Titled Berlin gemeinsam gestalten (Developing Berlin communally), the agreement’s text celebrates the “sensation of participation and self-efficacy” as “key experiences of democracy.”7 However, these phrases fail actual attempts at citizen participation on the ground. By the time stakeholders, activists, and academics met for the event “Alte Schule/ Neue Schule” (Old School/New School) on August 8, 2019, at the former OSZ Wedding school building, interactions with the authorities had become devastatingly frustrating.8 When ps wedding started to campaign for the conservation and repurposing of the complex in 2012, prospects seemed moderately promising. Their original proposal aimed at a transformation and extension of the existing building into a neighborhood center, including the creation of nearly 330 housing units (at least a third of which would be social housing), meeting places, offices, a public forum, and a public library. A core intention was to reactivate elements of the building’s original design and function, in particular the accessibility of some of the school’s facilities, such as the library and auditorium, for the neighboring residential area and its inhabitants. Turning the disused monument of a foregone era of public experiments in education into a Bildungslandschaft (learning landscape) would further an expanded understanding of education that bridges

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Pysall, Jensen, Stahrenberg & Partner, revised competition design for OSZ Wedding (floor plans, diagram, and drawing of southside view), 1975

formal and informal ways of acquiring knowledge and producing culture.9 An innovative funding scheme was even devised, combining direct credit from private individuals and bank loans with contributions from the not-for-profit Mietshäuser Syndikat (Tenement Syndicate) and Degewo, a public, state-owned housing company.10 A series of roundtable discussions was initiated in 2019 by individuals and organizations from the civic realm, representatives of political parties, and ps wedding to develop the project together. However, neighborhood and municipal politicians in charge of the former school’s premises had begun to candidly question, often

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via local media, the preservation project’s legitimacy. After numerous preparatory meetings, at the first session of the roundtable on June 12, 2019, two politicians in charge of urban development in the borough, one a social democrat and the other a conservative, flatly rejected ps wedding’s new design and utilization concept for the OSZ Wedding building and its land.11 Disillusionment further increased when shortly after the meeting in August 2019, the borough’s parliament decided to rededicate the former OSZ premises and convert it back into a monofunctional school, thus overruling every plan proposed by ps wedding and other local stakeholders that would have developed a multimodal and participatory solution. Somewhat unexpectedly, on September 12, 2019, Berliner Morgenpost reported that the local monuments office was going to consider listing the OSZ Wedding building, and on November 1, 2019, it officially received monument status.12 Regardless of the fact that the building’s heritage status prescribed that it not be used in the future, the borough’s government insisted on its reactivation as a school. Instead of following ps wedding’s latest proposal of a community campus, which included a capacious additional building for an integrated secondary school, the (SPD) politician in charge of urban development—who has long been a promoter of the building’s demolition—now takes recourse to the much-­ discussed lack of school buildings in Berlin (due to allegedly unexpected demographic developments) in order to scrap the initiative’s years-long popular engagement.

Cold War, Urban Renewal, and Education The fate, or rather the future, of the OSZ Wedding building is inextricably bound to the futures past from when it was conceived and realized. It is the resonance of this particular genealogy that is at the heart of ps wedding’s commitment to saving and developing the building. The architectural optimism it embodies, and the educational experimentation of the 1970s it represents (even in its monumental rather than functional condition today, in 2019), is fundamentally tied to the wider, not-so-recent history of Germany. In March 18, 1963, Willy Brandt, the freshly reelected Social Democrat mayor of West Berlin (and future chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany), announced the most ambitious plan of urban renewal in the history of postwar Germany. About fifty-six thousand apartments were slated for demolition. The so-called Flächensanierung (area rehabilitation), a massive program of new construction and drastic modernization, was considered to be without any alternative. In his 1963 speech, Brandt framed Berlin as Germany’s “spiritual capital” and its architecture as a political medium whose messages were to reach

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domestic and foreign audiences: “We want to construct on the scale of a capital [hauptstädtisch], for our political objective shall and must be recognized in our buildings.”13 Two years before, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had erected the Berlin Wall, its unilateral “anti-fascist protective barrier.” Wedding was in the immediate vicinity of the Wall. Before World War II, the industrial and working-class district was a vibrant place of commerce and culture, connected via traversal streets to Alexanderplatz and other central locations within the city. After the Wall was built, the southern parts of Wedding became the testing ground for grand-scale modernization. Brandt made very clear that the renewal should “make dis­appear the stench of second-classness in order for a functioning cityscape to yield an image of a functioning society.”14 In the 1960s and 1970s, the social and economic fabric of Wedding virtually eroded for the sake of its rebirth as a model political settlement in plain sight of the East German border troops.15 This urban renewal happened at a time when the city’s system of education was being subjected to substantial reform. During the first years of demolition and construction, Carl-Heinz Evers, an influential and progressive senator of education in the Social Democrats’ Berlin government, pushed through his vision of the comprehensive school (Gesamtschule): a type of school that should enable student-centered education in an open, integrative, unstreamed educational environment, akin to what had been introduced in the United Kingdom and in Scandinavian countries since the mid-1950s. Like Brandt, Evers was convinced of the special role of Berlin as a model of advanced culture in the geopolitical setup of the Cold War.16 Looking for guidance in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries such as the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, Evers and his fellow West German educational planners decided, around 1964, to elevate the country’s level of education. They sought to increase the amount of higher degrees, form every student to the maximum of their capa­ bilities, provide more differentiated models of teaching and learning, and reinforce the permeability between all existing school types, “by way of a horizontally rather than vertically structured organization of schools.”17 Such an opened-up and horizontal orientation was clearly driven by economic reasoning: OECD policies identified education with capital and labor as the “third factor of production,” which determined a political-economical directive according to which the increment of educational spending must surpass the increment of the gross national product.

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As a consequence of the reforms in the West German educational system, as well as the demographic affordances of rising numbers of students, in the early 1970s West Berlin authorities planned and constructed a considerable number of new schools, particularly secondary schools according to new curricular concepts. In September 1970, the Berlin Senate voted for a “special program of upper school construction” to respond to a pressing lack of space for twenty thousand secondary-school students that was expected to peak around 1974–1975.18 Serialized Mittelstufenzentren (middle school centers, MSZ) and Ober­stufenzentren (voca­ tional colleges, OSZ) were to provide the kind of integrated and diffe­rentiated types of schools promoted and demanded by the educational establishment. Between 1972 and 1974 alone, thirteen standardized MSZs were built in Berlin by the Planungsgruppe Bildungszentren (PBZ), which involved numerous architects from different generations and backgrounds, and Degewo, the public-housing company still in operation today.19 Every single one of these massive, high-tech buildings has been demolished since. Often, the decision for demolition was based on the fact that asbestos had been used for fireproofing. From the outset, however, these schools were received with hostility, ranging from criticism of their window­ less classrooms, to their noisy air conditioning, to their alleged factory-like qualities.20 In parallel with and subsequent to the construction of MSZs, thirty-two OSZs were planned (and about half of them built) in West Berlin from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s.21 This made for a colossal program of new school architecture for secondary and vocational education, fully in line with the increased demands of both an educational politics guided by notions such as “equal opportunity” (dear to the Social Democrats in power) and arguments derived from educational economics about the need to avoid wasting the population’s “educational potential” (Bildungsreserven).22 Arguably, the pre-1989 history of educational planning and architecture in Berlin exemplifies the early stages of the arduous restructuring of the Fordist city of industrial production into the post-Fordist “creative” city. It is in view of this highly contradictory mix of reformist departure and hectic planning, of good intentions and practical constraints, of the constant readaptation of the school system and its spatial programming following developments in educational science, pedagogy, urbanism, and architecture, that the past and current fate of the OSZ Wedding building needs to be considered.

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Pysall, Jensen, Stahrenberg & Partner, OSZ Wedding (main hall), 1974–1976

Verflechtung, Then and Now In 1978, Hans-Joachim Pysall, Uwe Jensen, and Peter Otto Stahrenberg published in Bauwelt a short commentary and a couple of photos of their recently inaugurated building. This Erläuterungsbericht (explanatory report) was introduced by the journal’s editors with a critical remark on the fact that the educational center had originally been planned as an upper secondary school (grades eleven to thirteen) but, against the original briefing, was going to be used as a wholesale secondary school (grades seven to thirteen). “No wonder,” the editors wrote, “that the built spatial program doesn’t serve the needs of the users. What’s more, the urban fabric on which the original planning was based has been destroyed by radical wipe-out renewal [Kahlschlagsanierung].”23 The building, a large yet decidedly horizontal rectangular box, spans two smaller parallel streets: the largely residential Swinemünder Straße to the northeast and the slightly busier yet still smallish Putbusser Straße to the southwest. The box was supplemented by a separate sports hall and field to the south, and by a public library that latched into the structural frame on the ground floor on Swinemünder Straße, gesturing toward the main box’s surroundings. It is the epitome of functionalist industrial design, faithful to Wedding’s industrial past. However, as much as it invites school-as-factory readings, OSZ Wedding also alludes to the colorful and rounded windows designs of late modernist icons such as James Stirling’s Olivetti Training Centre in Haslemere (1972) or, only a couple of miles away, Meinhard von Gerkan and Volkwin Marg’s Berlin-Tegel Airport (1974).

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Former OSZ Wedding, 2019

In their 1978 commentary, the architects pointed to the changed urban situation by noting that the neighborhood’s renewal had turned Swinemünder Straße, where the entrance to the integrated public library was, into a pedestrian road, while Putbusser Straße remained a street frequented by cars, and could thus be used for supply purposes. They also emphasized how their design paid close attention to the demand for a multifunctional purposing of the forum and classrooms for adult education, thus fostering contacts with the neighborhood. A key term in the German urbanist-educational debates of the time was “intertwining” or “interweaving” (Verflechtung), in particular with regard to the entanglement of educational and public realms. The architects also used this term in their statement when writing about the ground floor of the building, with the forum and the central “school street” (Schulstraße) meant to encourage traffic from inside and outside. Many of the phrases deployed in the article can also be found in the competition’s brief from 1970. The brief further maintained that, “with regard to the social structure of the renewal area, the initiators [the borough’s parliament and office as well as Berlin’s Senate for Education] aim at contributing to the development of the educational sector and school architecture in Berlin. The planning of the building should account for the changes in society toward increased openness and cooperation.”24 A certain post-1968 political urge can be read into these sentences—the expectation that a building such as OSZ Wedding was meant to embody the kind of socio-spatial utopia of an enlightened, democratic, and participatory late modernist welfare regime and help to overcome the lamentable state of nonsensical planning and renewal.

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The special context of political and urban debate in which the 1971 competition unfolded, along with the subsequent process of multiple revisions to the original design, is even more palpable in light of the criticism it received in a 1971 Bauwelt article. The article was authored by Planungsgenossenschaft 1, a group of architects and planners formed by protagonists of the now-legendary student-driven collective Aktion 507, whose 1967 manifesto and 1968 exhibition at the Technical University targeted top-down urban-planning projects. 25 In line with the thenrecent contestations of Berlin’s renewal programs, the authors criticized the separation of middle and upper secondary schools in Berlin’s school planning of the 1970s for supposedly contradicting pedagogical insights into the advantages of a truly comprehensive model with regard to upward social mobility. They also lamented the fact that the size and the location of the plot within a residential area had not been determined in favor of opening up education to the school’s surroundings, which would have thus turned it into an actual educational center. Moreover, they contested the lack of infrastructural provisions in the projects submitted to the competition and proposed their own design to foster “communication” and “interaction.”26 To what extent this criticism subsequently informed the revisions made to the scheme is hard to know. At any rate, Pysall, Jensen, and Stahrenberg were certainly no pamphleteering architects, but rather professional and business-savvy representatives of the discipline, ready to accommodate changing demands and circumstances. They were a successful office at the time, winning countless competitions, and in the 1970s building no less than thirteen schools, most of which were voluminous educational centers in northern Germany.27 OSZ Wedding, as finally built, turned out to be a close sibling of their even bigger comprehensive school in Braunschweig (Integrierte Gesamtschule Braunschweig-West, 1972–1975), which featured the same yellow-orange lacquered light metal sandwich panels with punched windows, only this time with rounded corners throughout and fixed window panes due to the air conditioning necessitated by its inner-city location.

From Conservation to Communality Although the building has been officially closed to the public since 2011 and its exterior has assumed a rather shabby look in its time of neglect, a visit in April 2019 revealed an astonishingly intact interior. Most of the furniture, lecture hall facilities, laboratory equipment, and other fixtures and fittings are in near-original condition. No significant vandalism has taken place, as if the architecture’s vibe has inspired respectfulness throughout the years. Great attention to details of furnishing and furbishing, of coloring and lighting, as well as the implemen­

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Former OSZ Wedding, 2019

tation of a (costly) sprinkler system that made it possible to reduce the use of asbestos, makes imaginable all kinds of future uses. The most promising and forward-looking vision for OSZ Wedding is the one proposed and continuously developed by ps wedding, in conversation with various constituencies and stakeholders, since 2012. Theirs is a work of political, architectural, and urban archaeology, an excavation of the in-built prospects and promises of the discourse surrounding the 1970–1971 competition and of the realized school. Almost single-handedly, through relentless conceptualizing and lobbying, ps wedding has saved the building from being demolished and the land from being sold on the booming Berlin real estate market. OSZ Wedding’s eventual heritage listing would not have been conceivable without ps wedding’s commitment. More important than its goal of conserving a historical building of architectural value, however, is the project’s gambit of a different conception of urban communality altogether, one that seeks to think both the city at large and the immediate neighborhood beyond the pressures of the real estate market. At the core of ps wedding’s proposal are various concepts and legal instruments such as Erbbaurecht (heritable building rights) that would make it possible to take property off the market and thus secure availability and usability for the community. Moreover, the project’s plea is for an understanding of education that transgresses the confines of formalized training and formation. A return to a monofunctional use of the building as a school would be a missed chance for creating a pilot community center in a historical environment that bespeaks future and alternative

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ways of organizing civic life.28 Besides garnering international interest, pursuing ps wedding’s plan would also send a strong message to civil society that the government’s call to participation may be indeed more than empty rhetoric.

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This essay was published in a previous form as part of Positions, an independent initiative of e-flux Architecture. Thanks to Nick Axel, Elke Beyer, Ludger Blanke, Anke Hagemeister, Syelle Hase, Nikolaus Hirsch, ps wedding, Justus Pysall, Marleen Schröder, Urs Walter, Agnes Wegner. For the previous version, see Tom Holert, “School’s On/Off,” e-flux Architecture, January 25, 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/positions /312700/school-s-on-off/ (accessed October 26, 2020). 1  See ps wedding’s resourceful website (in German), https://www.pswedding.de (accessed October 26, 2020); see also Doris Kleilein, “Wohnen im Versuchsobjekt,” Bauwelt 106, nos. 17–18 (2015): 8–9. 2  The design that won the 1971 competition was initially developed by Hans-Joachim Pysall and his former colleague Eike Rollenhagen. 3  Stadt von Unten–selbstverwaltet und kommunal, https://stadtvonunten.de, is a Modellprojekt (model project) initiated to save Dragonerareal, a complex of buildings in Kreuzberg, from privatization. Initiative Haus der Statistik, https:// hausderstatistik.org is a project to rescue a former administrative building at Alexanderplatz from demolition and thus to provide a self-determined structure for housing, accommodation for refugees, social services, office work, and cultural production. 4  See, for example, Philipp Mattern, ed., Mieterkämpfe: Vom Kaiserreich bis heute – das Beispiel Berlin (Berlin: Bertz-Fischer, 2018); and the writings of sociologist and housing activist Andrej Holm, such as Mietenwahnsinn: Warum Wohnen immer teurer wird und wer davon profitiert (Munich: Knaur, 2014) or (as editor) Reclaim Berlin: Soziale Kämpfe in der neoliberalen Stadt (Berlin: Assoziation A, 2014). 5  See Bündnis #Mietenwahnsinn, https://mieten wahnsinn.info; Urbanize! Internationales Festival für urbane Erkundungen, https://berlin.urbanize.at 6  For the international context of these measures see, for example, Mike Phillips and Miriam Hall, “At the Breaking Point: Inside the Global Clamor for Rent Control,” Bisnow, August 4, 2019, https://www.bisnow.com/national/news/multi family/rent-control-london-new-york-berlin -housing-crisis-100184 (accessed October 26, 2020). 7  My translation from “Das Erleben von Partizi­ pation und Selbstwirksamkeit sind Schlüsselerfah­ rungen in einer Demokratie,” in Berlin gemeinsam gestalten: Solidarisch. Nachhaltig. Weltoffen. Koalitionsvereinbarung 2016–2012 (Berlin,

December 11, 2016), https://www.berlin.de/rbm skzl/regierender-buergermeister/senat/koalitions vereinbarung (accessed October 26, 2020). 8  See “Alte Schule/Neue Schule: Das ehemalige Diesterweg-Gymnasium im Brunnenviertel: Vom Experimentalbau der 1970er zum offenen Bildungscampus?,” http://habitat-unit.de/en /events/diskussion-diesterweg (accessed October 26, 2020). 9  On the concept of “Bildungslandschaft” see, for example, Angela Million et al., Gebaute Bildungslandschaften: Verflechtungen zwischen Pädagogik und Stadtplanung (Berlin: Jovis, 2017). 10  See the respective websites of Miethäuser Syndikat, https://www.syndikat.org/en, and Degewo, https://www.degewo.de. 11  See ps wedding, “Tischvorlage. Vorbereitungstreffen Runder Tisch” (Room document, round table preparatory meeting), https://pswedding.de /media/psw_konzept_campus_2019-05-23.pdf (accessed October 26, 2020). On the preparatory meetings see also Andrei Schnell, “Ex-Diesterweg: Runder Tisch soll vermitteln,” Weddingweiser, May 6, 2019, https://weddingweiser.de/ex-diester weg-redebedarf-trotz-schulbedarf/#more-48053 (accessed October 26, 2020). 12  See Dirk Jericho, “Denkmalschutz für oranges Ufo? Abrissstopp für das leerstehende Diesterweg-Gymnasium möglich,” Berliner Morgenpost, September 12, 2019, https://www.berliner-woche .de/gesundbrunnen/c-politik/abrissstopp-fuer -das-­leerstehende-diesterweg-gymnasium -moeglich_a232120 (accessed October 26, 2020). On November 1 2019, the Berlin Senate released a press statement confirming the decision of the Berlin Monument Authority (Landesdenkmalamt Berlin), https://www.berlin.de/sen/kulteu/aktu elles/pressemitteilungen/2019/pressemittei­ lung.860506.php (accessed October 26, 2020). Since then, ps wedding and TU Berlin have been awarded a €120,000 grant by the “Keeping it Modern” architectural heritage program of the Getty Foundation for research on the history, present, and future of the OSZ Wedding. See “Keeping it Modern: 2020 Grants Awarded,” Getty Foundation, https://www.getty.edu/found ation/initiatives/current/keeping_it_modern /grants_awarded_2020.html (accessed October 26, 2020). 13  “Bauen ist eine kulturelle Aufgabe. Wir wollen hauptstädtisch bauen, denn unser politisches Ziel soll und muss auch in unseren Bauten erkennbar sein.” Willy Brandt, Government Policy Statement (March 18, 1963), quoted in Heinrich Suhr, “Stadterneuerung in West-Berlin am Beispiel

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Ackerstraße Nord,” in Stadtentwicklung im doppelten Berlin: Zeitgenossenschaften und Erinner­ungsorte, ed. Günter Schlusche, Verena Pfeiffer-Kloss, Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper, and Axel Klausmeier (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2014), 98; my trans­lation. 14  “Wir haben uns vorgenommen, den Wedding so zu erneuern, dass das Odium der Zweitklassigkeit verschwindet, dass ein intaktes Stadtbild Abbild einer intakten Gesellschaft wird.” Ibid. 15  Reading the policy paper of the young urbanist Gerhard Fehl, who in 1964, under the influence of Kevin Lynch’s 1960 The Image of the City and early systems theory, had penned a “Stadtbild-­ Untersuchung,” a nuanced investigation into the urban fabric of Wedding that informed the process in its later stages, the historical dismissal of the renewal as an act of authoritarian tabula rasa planning may require some qualification. See Gerhard Fehl, “Eine Stadtbild-Untersuchung” (1964), StadtBauwelt, no. 18 (1968): 1344–46; see also Bernward Reul, “‘Zu allen Zeiten war es so, dass die Architektur ein Spiegelbild der Gesellschaftsordnung darstellte.’ Gustav Heinemann, 1974,” Kultur Mitte, https://www.kultur-mitte.de/ magazin/%E2%80%9Ezu-allen-zeiten-war-es so-dass-die-architektur-ein-spiegelbild-der-gesell schaftsordnung (accessed October 26, 2020). 16  In 1964, Evers wrote: “Berlin will only fulfill its cultural task if it continues to develop its charisma and integrative forces which are rooted in its tradition as the nation’s capital, since our viability and our share in the responsibility for the whole depends on it.” Carl-Heinz Evers, “Vorwort,” in Wege zur Schule von morgen: Entwicklungen und Versuche in der Berliner Schule (Berlin: Senator für Schulwesen, 1965), 6; my translation. 17  Ibid., 10. 18  See Eckhard Seidel et al., “Berliner Wettbewerb für Mittelstufenzentren,” Bauwelt 62, no. 45 (November 8, 1971): 1821–28. 19  See Günther Kühne, “Dreizehn auf einen Streich,” Bauwelt 66, no. 44 (November 21, 1975): 1216; Klaus-Rüdiger Pankrath, “Mittelstufenzentren: Bildungszentren in Berlin,” ibid., 1217–24; Eckhard Seidel, “Bildungszentren in Berlin: Das Sonderprogramm Oberschulbau,” ibid., 1231. 20  See Manfred Scholz, “Schulen nach 1945,” in Berlin und seine Bauten, vol. 5, book C, Schulen, ed. Architekten- und Ingenieur-Verein zu Berlin (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1991), 257–64. 21  See ibid., 264–75.

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22  On terms such as “Chancengleichheit” and “Bildungsreserven” and their discursive role in the West German debates on educational politics of the 1960s and 1970s, see, for example, Ludwig von Friedeburg, Bildungsreform in Deutschland: Geschichte und gesellschaftlicher Widerspruch (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989), 334–477. 23  “Oberstufen-Schulzentrum in Berlin-Wedding,” Bauwelt, no. 35 (1978): 1265-66. The text was a reprint of a text featured in a richly illustrated brochure that Pysall, Jensen, Stahrenberg & Partner self-published at the time of the completion of the construction entitled OSW Oberstufen-­Schulzentrum Wedding. 24  “Im Hinblick auf die Sozialstruktur des Sanierungsgebietes möchten die Initiatoren einen Beitrag zur Entwicklung des Berliner Schulwesens und Schulbaus leisten. Der Wandel unserer Gesellschaft zu größerer Offenheit und Kooperationsbereitschaft sollte bei der Planung des Hauses berücksichtigt werden.” Oberstufen-­ Schulzentrum Wedding, file no. 147/1, sheet 11, Wettbewerbsarchiv Senatsverwaltung für Stadt­ entwick­lung, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; my trans­lation. 25  Planungsgenossenschaft 1, “Oberschulkon­ zepte in der Diskussion: Zum Wettbewerb Oberstufen-Schulzentrum in Berlin-Wedding,” Bauwelt 62, no. 9 (1971): 374–77. Alexander Davidson in his otherwise very instructive (unpublished) article “Der Lernort: Pysall, Jensen, and Stahrenberg’s Putbusser Str 12 and the New Schools of West Berlin, 1968–1978” (2016) claims that the Planungsgenossenschaft 1 drafted the original brief and program for the competition, which, however, wasn’t the case, as they clearly distance themselves from this brief in the Bauwelt article. On the 1968 Aktion 507 manifesto and exhibition see Nina Gribat, Philipp Misselwitz, and Matthias Görlich, eds,. Vergessene Schulen: Architektur­lehre zwischen Reform und Revolte um 1968 (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2017); see also “Diagnose 1968–2018,” http://habitat-unit.de /files/diag nose_1968-2018_intro_1.pdf (accessed October 26, 2020). 26  “Oberstufen-Schulzentrum in BerlinWedding,” 1265. 27  All their buildings were in Germany, with one exception, the German School in Barcelona (1973–1976), and ranged from the Französisches Gym­nasium in West Berlin (1971–1974) to a school and sport center in Westerland on the isle of Sylt (1974–1982). See Pysall, Jensen, Stahrenberg & Partner: Bauten und Projekte

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1970–1982 (Braunschweig: Pysall, Jensen, Stahrenberg & Partner, 1982). 28  This would, first and foremost, be the result of a political move of the governing Social Democrats, who may face defeat in the upcoming Berlin House of Representatives elections in 2021;

it would be an attempt to improve their standing through a much-debated “school-building offensive” (Schulbauoffensive). See “Die Schulbau­ offensive des Senats,” https://www.berlin.de /sen/finanzen/haushalt/schulbauoffensive/artikel .613867.php (accessed October 26, 2020).

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Educationalize and Fail: The 1967 Rice Design Fete and the Blind Spots of Transgressive Planning

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In April and May 1968, both Progressive Architecture (P/A, from the United States) and Architectural Design (AD, from the United Kingdom) focused on matters regarding education and architecture. “The School Scene: Change and More Change” was P/A’s cover claim, whereas AD asked: “What about Learning?” The cover illustrations of both magazines suggested a technological overhaul of the traditional classroom, with images of computers cut and pasted into a print of a Victorian classroom in P/A, and a small television set worn like a wristwatch in AD.

Progressive Architecture (April 1968),

Architectural Design (May 1968), cover montage by Cedric Price

Instructional and communication technologies were featured in both magazines’ reports and case studies of spatial programs for a rapidly shifting landscape of knowledge production and acquisition, from the intersecting fields of building and learning, of educational and urban planning. However, the notion of technology that appeared to be most sought-after was technology in the sense of environment, consumerism, and mobility.

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Cedric Price guest edited the AD issue on education (and contributed the cover montage). In his editorial essay, Price made clear how he wanted the change in the school scene to be understood. He attacked “education,” once an institution of emancipatory potential, as having degraded into “little more than a method of distorting the individual’s mental and behavioral life span to enable him to benefit from existing social and economic patterning.”1 In the final paragraphs of his rant, Price admonished architects to respond appropriately to a situation that required a radical break with the established forms and structures of learning and education. Acknowledging the fact that learning could no longer be contained in four-wall units and limited to a particular period in an individual’s life, Price claimed that education needed to be “re-thought.” This reconsideration was supposed to attend to the conditions of a social and economic reality informed by technological change and marked by the spatial and temporal ubiquity of learning. For Price, the key would be the reformulation of the architects’ and planners’ roles, since their ideas of spatial flexibility, for example, didn’t adequately respond to the particular time management and privacy needs of a contemporary teenage student. Thus, the architect’s task would be to provide an “individually operable space.”2 Regarding the transformation of the educational realm, the editors of P/A put a similar emphasis on expanding and changing the attitudes of plan­ners and architects. Introducing their thematic focus, they first offer economic and demo­ graphic data about the annual $52 billion budgeted for education by the US government, the almost seventy million students between the ages of five and twenty-four, and the approximately two million teachers needed to educate them. The coupling of econometric and demographic data indicated a new role to be played by the educational sector in terms of the political economy at large. The systems of elementary and secondary education, the editors venture, are “taking on the attributes and responsibilities of civic leaders, sociological catalysts, and seminal agents for urban rejuvenation, as well as their traditional responsibilities for formal education.”3

Educationalizing the Social? Like Price, the P/A editors asked for a “new thinking” as well as a redefinition of participation and interdisciplinary cooperation. Rather than programming separate schools in suburban areas, the magazine’s editors argued, “the school must be worked into the community fabric, and must become a contributory member of the community, both to help and ameliorate its ills and to enrich

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it through involvement with its life and culture.”4 Repeatedly stressing the need for “involvement” was a way of saying that there was an alarming dearth of integration to be addressed by educational planning, or, using a more poignant terminology, that the social and political fact of segregation was education’s main object. “There is a feeling,” the editorial further tries to explain, “that education is being asked to purify all our national problems of racial injustice, violence, poverty, and hatred; to act as a sort of filter through which these impurities might be removed in the process of educating our children and involving their elders in the process.”5 In 1968, education became the vessel into which revolutionary hope was placed, conceiving that it could take on a central role in social and economic change and become the therapeutic medium to cure the nation’s disease. In the United States, the civil rights movement and militant Black activism made inevitable the acknowledgment of the imminent social and political crisis of the city caused by racialized urban politics, suburbanization, white flight, and so-called ghetto­ ization. Thus, before, during, and after the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the issues of race, class, and urban renewal were granted high priority on the agendas of public authorities and academic research in education, sociology, urban studies, and the like. In response to the crisis of the city, education was considered the key remedying force, and with it the places and spaces of learning. If analyses of neoliberal governmentality often refer to a depoliticizing “educationalization” of social problems, the governmental turn to education in the 1960s certainly preceded this contemporary tendency.6 The physical, but also the technological and social, environment of education became the object of far-reaching conceptual and planning activity informed by a reformist social and urban politics aimed at pacifying inner-city unrest. At times, it even sought to heal the wounds of anti-Black violence inflicted by municipal governments, their housing politics, and misguided educational policies. AD and Price seemed concerned primarily with the reconfiguration of the spatia­ lity of learning in the interest of individualized and, ultimately, “uncommitted” spaces of calm and potential self-education. P/A was more openly looking for models of civic participation and the socially and economically generative role of education. However, the approaches certainly shared an interest in “nonpedagogical, nonadministrative educational programming,” as well as in the future roles of architects and planners in it.7

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Abandoning the Schoolhouse In line with such gestures of radical breaks with notions and structures of education, both magazines featured articles on the 1967 Rice Design Fete, a twelve-day workshop or “charette” organized at the School of Architecture at Rice University in Houston, Texas.8 Previous iterations of the Design Fete had been devoted to community colleges, fall-out shelters, and mental-health centers. The fourth edition was entitled “New Schools for New Towns.” The outcomes of this particular event are exemplary of a somewhat split consciousness: self-proclaimed progressive design and educational endeavors that address the demands of social change, while at the same time disavow the political and social conflicts dominating the discussion of the period. The event was cosponsored by the Educational Facilities Laboratories, a New York-based consultancy agency for school building and educational economies funded by the Ford Foundation and long-time proponent of modular, prefab open-plan architecture and of the SCSD (School Construction Systems Development) system of flexible construction.9 The School of Architecture at Rice, headed by William Cannady, invited Charles Colbert, Niklaus Morgenthaler, Cedric Price, Robert Venturi (together with his partner Denise Scott Brown, albeit she was not mentioned in the accompanying publication), and Thomas Vreeland, as well as Paul Kennon, the associate director of the School of Architecture, to team up with students from various universities to develop a project on the basis of different programs drawn up for the workshop by professional educators for new towns and their education systems. The programmatic brief of the Design Fete as a whole was drafted by Albert Canfield and John Tirrell, two educational consultants who had recently been employed by Oakland Community College, outside of Detroit.10 Canfield and Tirrell were cited extensively in P/A and published their article “Goodbye to the Classroom” in the May 1968 AD issue. They advocated the technologically enhanced programming of small learning steps, the constancy of learning “as a continuing element in life.” They also argued for the “maximum utiliza­tion of all community facilities” and for the facilitation of “home study through portable packages,” thus “spreading communication among the community, so that it becomes an integral part of community living and the personal growth of the citizen.”11 In their AD article, Canfield and Tirrell were convinced that due to an increasing “effectiveness of self-instructional materials,” the need for teachers and tutors would decrease.12 Moreover, they proposed a “node for cultural/recreational activities in each of the neighborhoods” as well as “in industrial, business and commercial establishments.” For them, education was moving from the school

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building into the domestic sphere, the workplace, and new leisure architectures: “cultural/recreation centers will enhance and combine many of the cultural/ educational/recreation activities formerly associated with separate institutions, such as the sports ground, art gallery, library, museum, elementary and secondary schools, university and factory.”13 These attempts to think differently about education sought to overcome its institutional paralysis and dependence on spatial conditions such as the schoolhouse, to become more geographically dispersed and temporally extended. However, Canfield and Tirrell’s proposals remained within a planner’s mindset. And while they were informed by a technological optimism that may have been critical of the established forms and designs of schooling, they happily went along with larger economic and urban trends. As for the selection of “new towns” as its theme, the booklet published about the Rice Design Fete claims: “A new town presents an unmatched opportunity to explore new educational approaches and new ways of housing education without the constraints of continuity.”14 The blank-slate approach of unfettered planning and design in brand-new urban environments was intended to be trans­ ferable into existing cities. The program had no strings attached, and thus aimed to bolster the creative energy of the participants. Among the leading assumptions of the Design Fete was the increasing influence of technology on the learning experience, namely on instructional media and electronic teaching assistance. Other concerns were the necessity to “involve” (or “intermix”) the educational realm and the community and, last but not least, the importance of mobility in contemporary urban reality, for example, the need to find ways of making the time spent in trains and automobiles educational.

High-Rise Schools Unsurprisingly, the results of each of the working groups happened to be quite different. Charles Colbert, an architect from New Orleans, and his group proposed for the new town—a self-contained 150,000-resident satellite city— educational towers constructed of steel pipe that would be developed by a steel company associated with a new steel mill outside of Houston. The “Towers’ school facilities would be available 24 hrs a day, serving students at high-school level and above, including adult education.”15 “Plans show the proposed school facilities; the floors above these would house corporate offices.”16 Although Canfield and Tirrell, the two educational consult-

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ants in charge of the program, were advocating the collapse of boundaries between institutions such as museums, libraries, and parks and the educational activities of the community, Colbert’s educational towers were deemed to be bringing corporate offices and schools too closely together. What’s more, even though the concentration of high-school-level education in the community center seemed to respond to Canfield and Tirrell’s notion of the “community node,” it also wildly contradicted the ideas of decentralized, dispersed education. The Colbert group addressed this in almost satirical fashion, with its prototype of a “shoulder carrel”: a super-individualized learning device incorporating instructional media of all kinds, from television and tapes to computer connection, two-way radio, telephone, slide projector, and screen. The individualized space of study has always been a particular task for designers of library and workplace furniture. Around 1967, it was already possible to conceive of a mobile-learner interface with limitless access to audiovisual and textual archives, a sturdy precursor of what today has become everyone’s handheld wireless device. Yet freeing the individual from any larger architectural structure and entitling them to become this architecture resembles the nightmarish opposite of any community-centered notion of involvement via education. Houston-based architect Paul Kennon and his team came up with an educational plan structurally similar to Colbert’s proposal, yet different in its architectural references. Rather than designing towers, Kennon drew on the horizontal model of the suburban shopping mall. Responding to a brief by Dorothy M. Knoell, a programmer at the State University of New York and author of the 1966 book Toward Educational Opportunity for All, for a new town thirty miles east of Los Angeles, Kennon’s Educational Concourse was a university campus based on a notion of the university as a “generator of community services.”17 Here, the multifunctional megastructure of the new town is designed as an urban strip with the educational hub as a kind of central machinery. “Computerized carrel cars” would allow for speedy commuting for constant learners. “The carrel car is in reality a flexible space,” the commentary in P/A elaborates, “[a space] that can be attached to homes as study rooms, serve as a mobile study, docked at the school or drawn up in a protective semicircle like covered wagons to ward off the arrows of ignorance.”18 In diagrams, the Kennon group visualized the “intermix” and the type of “movement” that would characterize an ongoing and total engagement with this educational-consumerist environment.

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Paul Kennon, urban megastructure with an educational hub, designs made during the 1967 Rice Design Fete, Houston, Texas, United States

Dispersed Education The group of Thomas Vreeland, who cofounded the Conference of Architects for the Study of the Environment (CASE) in 1964 (together with Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, Michael Graves, Richard Meier, John Hejduk, Stanford Anderson, Hank Millon, and Colin Rowe), was advised by educators Cyril Sargent and Judith Ruchkin to come up with a proposal for the subtle, minimally invasive makeover of an existing multiethnic, but deteriorating, community adjacent to downtown Houston. The program called for an “experimental approach”

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that manipulated urban space but refrained from razing the neighborhood’s buildings, and for other ways of creating a blank slate from which to build anew. Starting from the assumption that all participants are “learners, with no age barriers” who tend to be “dispersed,” the rehabilitation of the community was designed to be facilitated by the “restructuring of learners’ time,” attentive to “varied learning rhythms,” and flexible to the potential displacement of learning facilities, even “overnight,” if necessary.19 The project was strongly informed by the educators’ ideas about a “linear community school” that would be equipped with cybernetic devices to retrieve and feedback data from an electronic database. The purpose of such a “linear” school would be “to foster development of personal qualities of independence, creativity, imagination as well as sympathy, reliability, and responsibility. In the community school the learner […] becomes free to search, to investigate.”20 Vreeland and his group abstained from the kind of architectural-design and urban-planning approach that Kennon and Colbert had opted for, although they share a certain technological optimism. Vreeland rather went for micro-inter­ ventions into the existing environment of the neighborhood and for an inversion of the spatiality of the traditional school model. A Volkswagen bus would carry educational content and instructional technology to the “learners” in the city, rather than transporting the students to faraway schools.

Thomas Vreeland, VW bus as mobile teaching station, photo montage created during the 1967 Rice Design Fete, Houston, Texas, United States, published in Progressive Architecture (April 1968)

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Through the image of the Volkswagen bus as mobile educational unit, Vreeland also inserted implicit commentary on the heated debates around the pros and cons of school busing in relation to segregation. Among the proposed measures to desegregate the system were large, centralized, and integrated school campus structures, so-called education parks. Such school centers were to be linked with more distant communities mostly by busing. Reminiscent of key events in the civil rights movement of the 1950s, the controversy around busing garnered considerable attention in the 1960s and 1970s. In the process, the image of the bus and of students being transported from inner cities to new suburban education hubs to benefit from integrated schools developed into an icon of educational politics across racial and political divides.21 For Vreeland, the “portability” of educational hardware was a key methodology to disseminate the school into the community and facilitate educational activity from the point of view of the “learners” and their interests and needs. But it wasn’t only about turning around common ideas of the student and of schooling, doing away with compulsory learning, grading, and other forms of educational control. Vreeland’s team’s project aimed for urban regeneration rather than renewal. Their network approach was meant to be “capable of functioning as a major regenerative force in the life of the community, a force capable of effectuating gradual social, economic, and cultural changes.” At the same time, their project was expected to be productive in scientific terms. Designed as “all-pervasive,” the network was “to touch the community unobtrusively at as many points as possible […]. It works by feeding information about the community for scientific analysis. It forms a sensitive communications network.”22 A typology or taxonomy of educational facilities became a tool with which to visualize and systematize the project’s logic and economy, from the individual hand-carried unit (a battery-powered, transistorized radio receiver) to portable conference rooms, mobile teaching units such as the Volkswagen bus, prefab learning centers of different sizes and functionality, and the “central computer bank, [a] monitoring and programming center.”23 The miniaturizing and modularizing of education by way of technological devices, prefab building systems, the portability and mobility of spatial units, and centralized databases was a telling attempt at imagining the new town as an essentially nomadic, DIY trailer park environment, deliberately neglecting the symbolism of institutional representation. Immersed in self-organized, autonomous, interest-driven educational activity, this envisioned community is a piece of systems aesthetics, if not a fantasy of alternative cyberneticism. Although (or because) Vreeland’s project was the only one in the Fete about a multiethnic part of the city, it transcended all troubling divides of race, class, and gender, generalizing the identity of the “learner” above everything else.

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Total Learning Environment Cedric Price had been invited to Houston with the knowledge of his outstanding portfolio of peculiar projects of designs for new types of educational environments. Potteries Thinkbelt, for instance, was a large-scale project to convert an existing industrial site and its infrastructure in North Staffordshire into a vast educational network for twenty thousand students, whom he imagined to be hired as wage earners rather than paying tuition fees or receiving grants. Price brought some elements from Potteries Thinkbelt to the Rice Design Fete, where he developed them further. What Vreeland called the “components” of the educa­ tional experience, Price named “parts.” For the project that he proposed on the basis of John Tirrell and Albert Canfield’s program, Price also came up with a list, or taxonomy—a “kit of parts.”24 Using acronyms and little symbols, the kit of parts contained all sorts of technological devices from “telephone headsets” to slide and film projectors, and assorted items of outdoor and indoor furniture and architecture, including “electronic display panels,” a “portable canopy,” and “bleacher seating.” In his urban-­ scale taxonomy, Price listed “(TB) The Town Brain: Central production and servicing for Educational Facilities (EF),” “(IESC) Industrial/Educational Showcase: Displays to explain industry to the public,” “(AL) Auto Link: Education facilities […] made available to private cars with radio, two-way telephones, and charts,” “(RTS) Rapid Transit Servicing: Education facilities in buses, trains, etc., including informational panels,” and more.25 His project for a “Total Learning Environment with a Kit of Parts” targeted the potential of manipulating and modifying the urban environment to generate educational situations and place knowledge hubs (or “nodes”) at unexpected sites. A “part” of the educational landscape could thus be a wrecked car suspended upside down below an elevated expressway, or a boat mounted on the roof of a strip mall. Public parks were to be turned into educational arenas, stressing the equivalence of sport event and schooling; industrial or infrastructural buildings repurposed as screens on which industry would educate the public about what it does while hidden from view; and and car interiors or bus seats transformed into multimedia learning carrels. The new town selected for this project was a residential satellite city of medium density thirty miles southwest of Chicago, “located on a major radial freeway with a highly educated population of 200,000”—a population “predominantly professional, semiprofessional, and skilled.”26 In the article Price published in the May 1968 issue of AD, the Rice project and its brief had been reformulated, while some elements remained. He abandoned the idea of the “finite town” immediately, and declared obsolete the concept of a settlement built for long-term

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usage. Instead, he was convinced of the inevitable fragmentation of infrastructural “servicing” and “increased individual mobility and personal independence,” and sought to explore the effects on how urban societies are organized.27 Price didn’t entirely refrain from designing new architectural spaces, as is demonstrated by the “LC” or “Life Conditioner”: a simple, box-like structure to contain maximally flexible learning units and to be placed alongside the freeway. Price explains the typological background as: “Two forms, box and tent.” “Box contains intensive teaching learning facilities and controlled medium-sized volumes food drink and CESC [Commercial/Educational Show-Case]. Tent—workshops, labora­tories, experimental buildings, etc. Boxes likely to be less frequent in Phase III because of growth of HSS [Home Study Station], while tents likely to increase.”28 These presumably cheap, makeshift, highly flexible, and ephemeral structures were meant to be constantly assembled, disassembled, and discarded once they no longer fit into an evolved educational way of thinking. For Price, the “built environment” was rapidly becoming less and less “socially relevant,” as it, for him, is based on ideas of economic growth unaware of the entropic nature of contemporary societies of communication. “Fortunately,” Price maintained, “it is unlikely that education, now entering a period of mammoth expansion in scope and content, will wait around for such stultifying recognition.”29 The “Educational Facilities” (EF) diagrammed in a 1967 drawing, however, show how much organization and geometric order seemed necessary to form the fragmented and de-differentiated urbanscape of learning. They also provided the kind of intelligibility or readability aspired to by the community of planners and educators. Canfield and Tirrell had been following Price’s prior work from a distance and were about to adapt his notion of “thinkbelt” for their own planning of community colleges in the Detroit area. Their collaboration in the Fete proved inspiring. “[The] value of this programme [referring to Canfield and Tirrell’s conceptual launchpad] at such a time,” Price wrote, “is that it has enabled me to show that the built environment together with its integral artifactual kit of parts can help to increase the rate of fruitful fragmentation of educational servicing. […] However the acceptance of educational servicing as continuous, essential feed to the total lifespan, does demand an acceptance of the fact that education together with other essential services must be made available in means and methods comparable with other forms of invisible servicing.”30 This rhetoric of educational spaces and technologies becoming invisible or indistinguishable ran against any notion of architecture as built—a potentially monumental statement. Rather, Price’s somewhat passive-aggressive decentering and devaluating of more traditional

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Cedric Price, designs for “educational facilities,” produced during the 1967 Rice Design Fete, Houston, Texas, United States, and published in a brochure documenting the outcomes of the charette

ideas of shelter and brick-and-mortar containers privilege a decidedly environmental approach. This outlook suggested a wholesale activation of everything toward a new educational functionality, one that is always already constituent of urban infrastructure, from the micro to the macro scale.

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Like most of his colleagues, Price didn’t speak much about what exactly he thought could be taught and learned in this fragmented, entropic, splintered environment saturated with educational offers and incentives. The curriculum, it could be argued, is in the training of a different attitude, an attitude directed toward an arguably post-institutional reality of learning. But this reality, albeit non-differentiated, remained as patterned a life-world as the techno-spatial environment it presupposed.

Learning Strip In many respects, interpreting the new town as a space of learning, understanding urban education as educationalizing the urban, and making the presence of the school in the expanded field of the city unavoidable anticipated the proverbial notion of “learning from.” In the mid-1960s, Denise Scott Brown began studying strips and popular architecture in Los Angeles and Las Vegas with students at University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, Los Angeles. In parallel, Robert Venturi was teaching a studio on strips at Yale University. In 1967, Venturi developed a project at the Design Fete based on his knowledge of Scott Brown’s studies, which displayed a similar interest in the semiotics and semantics of the commercial street and the futility of “good design.” One year later, Steven Izenour, Venturi, and Scott Brown began their Las Vegas studio. Social planners Carol Lubin and Ronald W. Haase envisioned a self-contained 150,000-resident “new town” halfway between Washington, DC and Baltimore for the group that formed around Venturi at Rice, and called for an educational system built from libraries as their “backbone.”31 Responding to the brief, Venturi and his collaborators equipped neighborhoods of five hundred families with twenty-four-hour Learning Resource Centers, one for small children, one for young mothers, and another for retired persons. These facilities “could be enlarged by the use of both mobile visiting units and closed-circuit television. Special plug-in areas for bookmobiles, artmobiles, scientific exhibitions, and healthmobiles to visit and service the neighborhood would be provided.”32 Besides the basic Learning Resource Centers, larger units such as Town Learning Centers, Senior Learning Centers, and City Learning Centers were to be distributed throughout the new town grid. The Venturi group also proposed smaller learning units in the form of “Service Stations.” The architecture of these and the Town Learning Centers were to be simple, skeletal, and placed on the “educational strip” so as to be reachable by car and bus. Fully in compliance with the main-street model of the common US settlement and the suburban town modeled after it, an “intermix” of educational,

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Robert Venturi, drawings and a model of Learning Resource Centers and Town Learning Centers, based on Denise Scott Brown’s research on strips conducted at the University of Pennsylvania, produced during the 1967 Rice Design Fete, Houston, Texas, United States

commercial, and mobility systems was conceived, with the educational strip as the generator of the new town: “A commercial educational strip arrangement for a new town provides a constantly diverting route for the pedestrian and the motorist. Rather than denying the existence of and the necessity for the freeway and the attendant jumble of buildings and automobiles, [the project] mingles education facilities directly with those for commerce—along a town-bisecting freeway—and creates a varied smorgasbord of attractions to compete for the attention of the pedestrian and motorist learner.”33

Educationalizing the Crisis Further archival research is necessary to ascertain how the proposals from the “New Schools for New Towns” Rice Design Fete were received in circles of planners, educators, and architects. However, already in 1967, blending education into the consumerist environment of the capitalist city, embracing the suspiciously commercial as well as the neo-vernacular of the pop age, and suspending any culturally inherited divisions between high and low, learning and working, education and consumerism, in favor of a model of the citizen as constant, lifelong learner

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could be seen as an enervating, even obnoxious stance by critics of the culture of capitalist order. On the other hand, the rebuttal of traditional, and particularly Marxist modes of critique and criticality as performed by Venturi and others could be read as an early expression of postmodernist avant-gardism. It could also be read as a sign of the refusal to be aligned with more openly political movements and organizations, instead leaning toward an academic, political, administrative, and managerial class that was increasingly concerned with issues of racism, segregation, and integration. In 1967, Alvin Toffler, a journalist about to assume celebrity status for the 1970 futurologist bestseller Future Shock (written with Heidi Toffler), edited a collec­ tion of talks that had been delivered in a 1966 conference titled “Schoolhouse in the City.” The anthology focused on the perceived urban “crisis” caused by the continuing racializing of space, real estate speculation and the megabusiness of renewal that had led to the deterioration and ghettoization of down­ town and urban residential areas, and the production of suburban sprawl for a white population deserting the city. In many respects, the programs and the results of the Rice Design Fete in 1967 were a reaction to the kind of discus­ sions documented in this volume. The texts in Toffler’s anthology were driven by the alarming facts and statistics evidencing urban decay and ongoing segregation. The book tried hard to provide analysis as well as educational and design proposals to solve the crisis. The prominent Black civil rights leader Bayard Rustin addressed the “‘boxed-in’ feeling,” “the sense of no place to go, the lack of outlet” in the African American “ghetto” communities, as well as the reasons “why schools have become a primary target of the ghetto activist.”34 “Unless there is a master plan to cover housing, jobs, and health,” Rustin argued, “every plan for the schools will fall on its face. No piecemeal strategy can work.”35 Accordingly, educator Robert J. Havighurst emphasized how “this crisis requires the active participation of schools and making and implementing policy for social urban renewal. This big-city crisis is reflected in feelings of uncertainty and anxiety on the part of parents and citizens.”36 Community schools, Havighurst repor­ted, had made attempts to respond to the crisis by involving various con­stituencies in decision making about school policy and practice to foster links to the community. Education is embodied in built environments and in the various groups and clients it hosts, employs, and trains, from students and caretakers to teachers, administrators, municipal governments, urban developers, architects, and educators. By the

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1960s, drawing on education as a palliative, order- and equality-inspiring institution had become a default mode of crisis management on a national and local scale. The programming of space and behavior through architecture, design, and technology was meant to remedy the obvious lack of political tools with which to organize public debate and negotiation—that is, tools of democratic governance. Prior to the publication of the Toffler anthology, Educational Facilities Labora­ tories together with the United States Commission on Civil Rights, published a small report on the school-city problem, showing a selection of architectural designs for large-scale community schools and education parks.37 These and many more designs produced in this age of rapid educational expansion formed the backdrop for the 1967 Rice Design Fete explorations. It was from there that the architects and their associated teams of educators and designers tried to make sense of the agreed-upon task of educationalizing the city through reprogramming

United States Commission on Civil Rights, Education Parks: Appraisals of Plans to Improve Educational Quality and Desegregate the Schools, 1967

urban space. To “involve” themselves with the social crisis pro­duced by anti-Black urban and educational politics would have been too much of a distraction from their core professional agenda. These designers and educational professionals were largely addressing their potential clients, among whom could be counted, next

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to the education and urban authorities, community stakeholders. They however refused to adopt the more radical and outspoken stances of the civil rights movement and leftist thinking of the time. It is therefore remarkable how their lack of interest in (or insight into) the stratified and segregated social realities of US cities constituted a common attitude across all projects at the 1967 Rice Design Fete (with the slight exception of the Vreeland group’s proposal). As “progressive” as their designs may have appeared in the eyes of the architectural and educational community and their potential clients, the absence of critical political engagement utterly failed the scale and the urgency of the problems at hand. The self-critical transgression of traditional architectural languages and the enga­ gement with educational theory and practice at the 1967 Rice Design Fete showed what an assembly of white, male, Western architects was capable of in terms of progressive thinking and doing at the time and in an academic setting. The blind spots of the Design Fete’s results are conspicuous, considering the ubiquity of anti-Black violence, epistemic and otherwise, in the public sphere and mass media of the United States in the 1960s. Some determination must have been required to turn away from these realities, particularly when asked to conceive design solutions for “new towns,” themselves epitomes of white flight and racial divide. One may wonder if the task of designing educational facilities muted such concerns. Presumably benevolent, the very envisioning of future learning environments might have lured the participants of the Rice charette into a fallacious post-urban-crisis, if not post-race state of mind. Why didn’t anyone feel the need to refer to the traumatizing experiences and memories of school and academia? Maybe recalling one’s own individual suffering in the institutional spaces of education could have instilled some empathy, if not solidarity, with those being schooled beyond the color line. This said, so many of the results from the Design Fete appear utterly contemporary and adventurous compared to the majority of contemporary educational buildings that still have yet to transcend rather traditional conceptions of the spatial conditions of learning. As “digital” as today’s classrooms have become, the compulsory presence, often for the entire day (in non-pandemic times), in a built environment known as school, is testament to a key threshold still to be surpassed. The 1967 projects therefore still prove inspirational, particularly in light of their blind spots.

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This contribution derives from a presentation given at Nottingham Contemporary on November 8, 2019, and was later published as part of Architectures of Education, a collaboration between Nottingham Contemporary, Kingston University, and e-flux Architecture, and a crosspublication with The Contemporary Journal. For the previously published version, see Tom Holert, “Educationalize and Fail,” e-flux Architecture, March 14, 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/architec ture/education/322663/educationalize-and-fail (accessed October 27, 2020). A special thanks to Denise Scott Brown, who generously shared her memories of the summer of 1967. 1  Cedric Price, “Learning,” Architectural Design 38, no. 5 (May 1968): 207. 2  Ibid., 241. 3  “The School Scene: Change and More Change,” Progressive Architecture 44, no. 4 (April 1968): 130.

especially for her reconstruction of the context of Price’s contribution to the Rice Design Fete and the role that Canfield and Tirrell played in it. 11  “New Schools in New Towns: The Future,” Progressive Architecture 44, no. 4 (April 1968): 198-213, here 225. 12  John E. Tirrell and Albert A. Canfield, “Goodbye to the Classroom,” Architectural Design 38, no. 5 (May 1968): 223–225, here 225. 13 Ibid. 14  Educational Facilities Laboratories, “Foreword,” in New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady (Houston: Rice University School of Architecture, 1967), 5. 15  “New Schools in New Towns: The Future,” 201. 16 Ibid. 17  Ibid., 205.

4 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

19  Ibid., 211–12.

6  See Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe, eds., Educational Research: The Educationalization of Social Problems (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008).

20  Ibid., 212.

7  “The School Scene: Change and More Change,” 130. 8  A charette is a kind of marathon or “all-nighter” drawing session common in architectural schools, but also, at the time, a popular form of organizing community participation in the planning process. On the charette format, see Daniel Willis, “Are Charrettes Old School?,” Harvard Design Magazine 33 (Fall/Winter 2010). 9  On Educational Facilities Laboratories, see Judy Marks, A History of Educational Facilities Laboratories (EFL) (Washington, DC: National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities, 2009), https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED508011.pdf (accessed October 27, 2020); and Amy F. Ogata, “Educational Facilities Laboratories: Debating and Designing the Postwar American School­ house,” in Designing Schools. Space, Place, and Pedagogy, eds. Kate Darian-Smith and Julie Willis (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 55–67. On the SCSD, see Joshua D. Lee, Flexibility and Design: Learning from the School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) Project (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). 10  See Kathy Velikov, “Tuning Up the City: Cedric Price’s Detroit Think Grid,” Journal of Architectural Education 69, no. 1 (2015): 40–52, here 41–42. I am indebted to Velikov’s research,

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21  See Miriam Wasserman, “Busing as a ‘Cover Issue’—a Radical View,” Urban Review 6, no. 1 (September–October 1972): 6–11; George W. Gaston Jr., “Busing: Excuse or Challenge?,” The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas 46, no. 7 (1972): 434– 39; Nicolaus Mills, ed., Busing U.S.A (New York: Teachers College Press, 1979). 22  “New Schools in New Towns: The Future,” 212. 23  New Schools for New Towns, 19. 24  Ibid., 24. Price also discussed this in “New Schools in New Towns: The Future,” 208. 25  New Schools for New Towns, 24. 26  “Total Learning Environment with a Kit of Parts,” Progressive Architecture (April 1968): 208. As Kathy Velikov has pointed out, the Rice Design Fete provided Price with the right kind of environment, which allowed him to further develop ideas from the Potteries Thinkbelt project, emphasizing automotive movement and processes of urban decay as facts to be acknow­ ledged in designing a pervasive and expansive notion of urban education or, rather, educational urbanism. Velikov, “Tuning Up the City,” 41–43. 27  Cedric Price, “ATOM. Design for New Learning in a New Town,” Architectural Design 38, no. 5 (May 1968): 232–235, here 233.

Politics of Learning, Politics of Space

28 Ibid.

34  Bayard Rustin, “The Mind of the Black Militant,” in The Schoolhouse in the City, ed. Alvin Toffler (New York: Praeger, 1968), 29, 31.

29  Ibid., 232. 30 Ibid. 31  New Schools for New Towns, 44; while Denise Scott Brown didn’t partake in the charette, she served as a member of the jury that met at Rice in August. 32  “New Schools in New Towns: The Future,”: 207. 33  New Schools for New Towns, 54.

35  Ibid., 34. 36  Robert J. Havighurst, “Differing Needs for Social Renewal,” in The Schoolhouse in the City, 54. 37  For an instructive study on the education parks of the 1960s see Patrick R. Potyondy, “Reimagining Urban Education Civil Rights, Educational Parks, and the Limits of Reform,” Counterpoints 461 (2014): 27–54.

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Spaces of the Learning Self: Interiority and Instructional Design, ca. 1969

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Self-Directed Exit Education They called me a “snob,” which, obviously, left me overjoyed. I was inventing culture for myself, and at the same time inventing a character and a personality. —Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims

Returning to Reims is a 2009 autosociographic account of class flight and prole­ tarian self-hatred by French philosopher Didier Eribon. In the memoir, the author of books on Michel Foucault and la question gay emphasizes the role of selfdirected subjectivization. Eribon considers such modes of autarky to be strategies of exiting the Althusserian theater of ideological interpellation. They stand for a particular way of organizing one’s own intellectual formation in order to emancipate oneself from the confines of class origin. As a high school student from a proletarian background growing up in a French provincial town in the late 1960s, Eribon discovered the mobilizing pleasures of modern literature through a friend from a bourgeois family. Reading as such, but especially reading according to a literary canon constructed in seeming autonomy, proved to be essential for him in escaping the social context that he experienced as constraining and repressive. Around the same time, he designed an education (a “culture”) for himself, started fashioning a political subjectivity as a member of a Trotskyist group, and began acknowledging his sexual desire as a gay man. This education required seceding from the homophobic and anti-intellectual milieu of his family, and was, to a large extent, autodidactic—cruising, taking a test-drive along various avenues of subjectivization, both intellectual and sexual. In retrospect, equipped with a sociological sensorium shaped by the study of Pierre Bourdieu, Annie Ernaux, Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, and others, Eribon recognizes how much his autodidacticism and aspiration to become an academic intellectual owed to the naivete ignorance of someone whose “educational choices […] bear the mark of the deprived social circumstances from which [he] came.”1 On the other hand, the choices he made to liberate himself from the strongholds of class and to distance himself from his origins—­socially, geographically, and psychologically—were constitutive of the person he aimed to become. Though it caused feelings of guilt at the moment of his father’s death, Eribon acknowledges the extent to which his emancipation was based on selfhatred and a shameful denial of class, as well as a gradual insight into the reality of social stratification. He observes how his futile attempt to inhabit the selfconception and attitudes of those claiming to own the privileges of middle-class/ bourgeois culture separated knowledge from his own social praxis and experience. Yet, however suspiciously he revisits his younger self, there is a peculiar pride tangible in Eribon’s renditions of such self-directed learning.

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Returning to Reims may be considered a typical narrative of self-design, or, as Spinozist philosopher Chantal Jaquet calls it, the quintessential story of “classpassing” and “non-reproduction.”2 These modes of constructing a self may testify to the plasticity of social existence, but are, for Jaquet, too often bound to the “illusion of the self-made man,” driven by guilt and shame in a solitary quest for self-invention.3 And while Eribon does not deny the soli­ darity and collectivity of the various milieus he dwelled in to become who he did, he nonetheless considers his trajectory in terms of building a singular self.

Architecturality of the Self One of the crucial political fantasies surrounding 1968 was to leave the confines of milieu behind, paired with the ability to move swiftly across the social spectrum. Vital interest in matters of class was displayed by members of the bourgeoisie, students, and artists. Searching for a political subject outside of themselves they turned to the working classes, while simultaneously rehearsing a variety of other escapist methodologies, from hallucinogenic drugs and drop-out communities to the science fiction of hyper-personalized mobility. In one of her rare, brilliant interventions in the pages of Architectural Design in the late 1960s, architect and artist Ruth Lakofski (Denise Scott Brown’s sister) speculated about how “one’s life’s work becomes one’s own physical vision of oneself perfecting it, choosing the perfect skin, hair, body, eyes, soul and spirit to feel magical—narcissus watching him/herself reflected in the water and gradually, gently changing all the time.”4 Lakofski’s comments were partly instigated

Emil Antonucci, cover of the exhibition catalog for “Body Covering,” held at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York, United States, 1968

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by the catalog of the 1968 exhibition “Body Covering” at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York that featured, among other things, survival gear, such as an individual inflatable life-raft garment made for NASA, and a one-piece air-ventilated protective suit. Her column reflected upon “the use of cyborg clocking into homeostatic systems” and addressed the whole gamut of life- and performance-enhancing technologies imaginable in 1968 that were capable of propelling humans into a posthuman process of coming “into our own again as anything at all.”5 Attuned to the context of AD, Lakofski invoked Archigram member Mike Webb’s mid-1960s Cushicle project when writing about homes to be carried “around with us.”6 Webb’s customized two-part mobile enclosure synthesized mechanical and biological systems.7 It was to provide a cybernetic environment designed to anti­ cipate the nutritional, metabolistic, and affective needs of the dwelling person, lending them sustainable autonomy in the face of the increasing physical and communicative demands of a near future of (post)humanity. The narcissistic monadism of such self-containment (or, arguably, containment of the self) made Lakofski think of “the addict with his paper bag,” an association she elaborated upon almost twenty years later in another essay, entitled “Soul Box.” In the later essay, Lakofski reflected on “people who have managed to make themselves into containers of their own souls.”8 She went on: “A bag lady (vagrant) carries with her in her endless journeying through the streets, night and day, her myriad paper bags, each containing a fragment of a soul. A poet, painter, writer, musician, or indeed carpenter, boat-builder or person with a hobby, must have a place to work relentlessly to develop and house the developing soul, without which she or he feels and is dead. Studios and workshops, ‘A room of one’s own,’ are spirit houses, containers of the exploring soul.”9 Clearly sympathizing with the model of the apparently chaotic though in fact meticulously organized mobile architecture of the “bag lady,” Lakofski connects the psychic life of the searching individual—the “developing” and “exploring” soul—with issues of housing and dwelling. Emphasizing the inherent spatiality and three-dimensionality of the dweller’s immaterial activities, she points to the intricate relation between self and architecture, if not to a veritable architecturality of the self. To conceive the individual’s inner workings in topological or spatial terms has a long tradition; just think of the theaters of memory or the intersection of the dreaming self and the place where it dwells, from psychoanalysis to surrealism and on to various lineages of the horror genre.10 As Anthony Vidler aptly puts it, architecture “manifests itself in that most ambiguous of all elements—space— within which psychic projection and introjection move freely and without fixed

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boundaries. It is thereby a site for all the spatial terrors and phobias that have haunted the medicine of the mind since the late nineteenth century.”11 The linkages between architecture and subjectivity operate at the heart of numerous projects that promise the enhancement of the subject’s capacities of learning and cognition. Probably one of the most comprehensive investigations into the “spatial terrors and phobias” and their connection to architectures of learning was undertaken by the artist Mike Kelley. His Educational Complex (1995), “a large architectural model made up of individual models of every school [Kelley] ever attended, plus the house in which [he] grew up,”12 not only explored the repressed memories and traumas of education by reconstructing past, autobiographically charged places of learning, shame, lust, and fear, but also forcibly underscored the inseparability of physical architecture(s) and subjectivization. By the same token, Educational Complex renders the rift between the psychic, often entirely imaginary or dreamlike reality of learning environments and their manifest physical outside. Howard Singerman compares this “non-correspondence between exterior elevation and interior life” to the antagonism between “the clarity and transparency of modern educational architecture, and of the reasoned pedagogy it at once figures and informs” and “a distinctly antimodernist, even gothic, darkness” found in the rituals of education and the cultural resistance of those supposed to be educated.13

Autonomy of Learning, or the Global Classroom As if to free the individual not only from the constraints of class but also from the obsolete structures of an outworn educational system, designers and architects of the late 1960s increasingly focused on models of personalized learning environments that were to foster autonomy and mobility. Chris Abel, for instance, an architect and urban planner who advised on the architecture of schools for the Greater London Council, proposed designs for “mobile learning stations” in 1967, while still studying at the Architectural Association. Conceived to be largely independent from their surroundings, these stations were to be equipped with different filing systems, display panels, work surfaces, technological aids and media.14 The individual student could learn either on their own by immersing themselves in a tailor-made, controlled, and programmed environment, or by connecting with other stations to generate variable learning groups. Contrary to what it might seem, however, Abel and his colleague Chris Dawson’s deliberations were less about an Archigram-type space capsule of technologically supported indepen­ dence; rather they sought a “new system,” which would “emerge from a change in the organization of educational and community provision.”15

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Chris Abel, Mobile Learning Station, 1967

They envisaged a “coordinated network” and “interdisciplinary resources of a radical nature” of which the “mobile learning stations” were to be only one part. In a February 1969 article on the “university environment,” Berkeley, California-­ based ecological designer and architect Sim Van der Ryn presented ideas concerning such a coordinated network, though from a somewhat different angle than the London planners. Criticizing the frenetic postwar production of modernist campus planning and buildings in the United States, Van der Ryn accused planning of operating like a “closed system in which the users do no really parti­cipate.”16 Drawing on environmental psychologist Robert Sommer’s 1969 classic Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design, he emphasized the extent to which architecture shapes the individual’s learning and social intercourse, as well as how physical forms and administrative arrangements account for significant changes in patterns of human activity. Van der Ryn recommended that instead of being controlled by standardized institutional architecture, people should be encouraged

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to change their environments, taking benefit from the flexibility that comes, for instance, with new plastic building materials.17 Rather than constructing every­ thing anew and forcing students and faculty to move into “bright shiny new quarters,” negatively modifying their behavior, a “sense of community” should be provided by creating “‘waste space’ that serves as neutral turf for people to come together.”18 However, according to Van der Ryn, evidence suggests that “open inquiry and independent scholarship, the development of individual student capacities on their own terms, and the production of measurable material benefits for society are increasingly divergent activities. They do not and perhaps cannot co-exist in the same psychic and physical space.”19 Referring to exceptions such as the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, the Free University in Palo Alto, Fresno, and Mountain View, and SUNY College at Old Westbury, Van der Ryn underlines that “there is a limit above which a spatial concentration of educational resources is self-defeating, dehumanizing and wasteful.”20 “Spatial diffusion” is therefore key, given the “extended mobility of most students, and the non-spatial orientation of learning media such as computers and tele­ vision.”21 The future of university education is, accordingly, media-based, “self-­programmed instruction,” and “the place for individual learning will be the home, or a personal study station.” Van der Ryn was an early, though arguably unintentional, proponent of the “Californian Ideology,”22 a believer in the potential benefits of networked learning and the emancipatory effects of technological progress. His anthropology is based less on organizational theory than on a philosophical outlook on the challenge of radical freedom; freedom both from religious norms and capitalist economy’s demands of productivity. The “future learning environment,”as a space of “genuine social innovation, or exploration of self,” will be “grounded in each man’s belief in his own interior potential, the new ‘soul.’”23 Tellingly, Van der Ryn brought discourse on the design of future learning environments together with musings about the inner life of the learning subject whose “new soul” is the resource to be cultivated and looked after. However, the “soul box”of the learner in a spatially “diffused” educational geography should be considered in terms other than the physical campus building, the mobile study, or even Kelley’s Educational Complex. In the 2015 UNESCO-sponsored policy paper entitled “The Futures of Learning,” notions such as “active learner,” “metacognitive development,” and “parti­ cipatory learning” abound. The most important notions, however, seem to be the “personalization” and “customization” of learning, or even “learner-designed learning.” As if copy-pasted from Van der Ryn’s 1969 tract, the advice reads as follows: “With personalized learning, individuals approach problems in their own way, grasp ideas at their own pace, and respond differently to multiple forms

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of feedback.”24 Neuroscience research is cited to the effect that instead of pre­ paring “lessons” (so old school), the task of a instructor should be “designing project-based forms of learning.” This proposition rests on the assumption that learners improve better on “core subject matter” and benefit from emphasis on “depth over breadth” when learning in a personalized environment.25 “Instructional design” is presumed to become the central agency of such infinitely customized collaborative pedagogy. The key instructional designer, however, is going to be the learner herself, equipped with networked handheld devices: “Future learning processes will inevitably take place in environments in which learners select their own modes of learning and bring personal technologies into education,” thereby dissolving not only any difference between formal and informal learning, but also between inner and outer, psychic and physical spatialities of learning.26 This exit from systems and architectures of both education and class and entrance into mobile learning capsules, however they may be defined, has been a political project and designer’s dream since at least the 1960s. Yet considering Didier Eribon’s self-critical account of class flight into self-organized learning, Ruth Lakofski’s appreciation of the bag lady’s mode of spatializing her “exploring soul,”or Sim Van der Ryn’s proposals for an education revolution based on radical individualism, the vista of “pedagogy 2.0” and lifelong personalization (read: commodification) of education as is promoted today is truly disheartening. That said, the self still waits to be designed. Improved enclosures for enhanced learning experiences will be proposed, with no end in sight. The paradox of programmed autodidacticism and the responsibilization of the neoliberal subject to watchfully manage their own lifelong learning curriculum will stimulate the knowledge industry of instructional design schemes. It might thus be convenient to recall what Ivan Illich, author of the influential 1971 Deschooling Society, self-critically wrote when he called for “the reversal of those trends that make of education a pressing need rather than a gift of gratuitous leisure.” Drug-like addiction to education, Illich bemoaned, would make “the world into a universal classroom, a global schoolhouse.”27 Something surely to be avoided, at all costs.

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An earlier version of this essay first appeared online in the context of Superhumanity, a project by e-flux Architecture at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, produced in cooperation with the Istanbul Design Biennial, Turkey; the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, South Korea; the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand; and the Ernst Schering Foundation, Germany. See Tom Holert, “Spaces of the Learning Self,” e-flux Architecture, October 14, 2016, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/super ­humanity/68717/spaces-of-the-learning-self (accessed October 27, 2020). It was subsequently included in Superhumanity: Design of the Self (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), ed. Nick Axel, Beatriz Colomina, Nikolaus Hirsch, Anton Vidokle, and Mark Wigley. 1  Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims, trans. Michael Lucey (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2013), 175. 2  Chantal Jaquet, Les Transclasses ou la nonreproduction (Paris: Puf, 2014); my translation. 3  Chantal Jaquet, “Le self-made man est une illusion,” interview by Antoine Louvard, Marianne, June 8, 2014, https://www.marianne.net/societe /le-self-made-man-est-une-illusion-0 (accessed October 27, 2020); my translation. 4  Ruth Lakofski, “Come Back Narcissus—I Love You/Me,” Architectural Design 39, no. 6 (June 1969): 293. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7  The Cushicle consisted “of a chassis with appliances and personalized apparatuses and an inflatable envelope. The chassis is structured like a spine and would include a heating system. The helmet would contain the radio and mini-TV. Food and water modules could be added to the chassis as attachments. The two skins would be envelopes for the rider, covered with viewing screens. The two could be used independently or simultaneously.” “The Cushicle and Suitaloon,” Architecture without Architecture (blog), https://architecturewithoutarchitecture.blogspot .com/p/cushicle-and-suitaloon-were-conceptual .html (accessed October 27, 2020). 8  Ruth Lakofski, “Gedanken über die Seelen-­ Kiste/Reflexions on the Soul Box,” Daidalos: Architektur–Kunst–Kultur 28 (June 15, 1988): 92–103.

11  Anthony Vidler, “Fantasy, the Uncanny and Surrealist Theories of Architecture,” Papers of Surrealism 1 (Winter 2003): 1–12, here 3, https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal /files/63517385/surrealism_issue_1.pdf (accessed October 27, 2020). 12  Mike Kelley, “Educational Complex,” in Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008, ed. Anne Pontégnie (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2009), 21. 13  Howard Singerman, “The Educational Complex: Mike Kelley’s Cultural Studies,” October 126 (Fall 2008): 48. 14  Chris Abel, “Mobile Learning Stations,” Architectural Design 33, no. 3 (March 1969): 151. 15 Ibid. 16  Sim Van der Ryn, “The University Environment,” Daily Californian (February 18, 1969), reprinted in Architectural Design 33, no. 11 (November 1969): 618–20. 17  Ibid., 619. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20  Ibid., 620. 21 Ibid. 22  See, for example, Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke, eds., The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014). 23  Van der Ryn, “The University Environment,” 620. 24  Cynthia Luna Scott, “The Futures of Learning 3: What Kind of Pedagogies for the 21st Century?” UNESCO Education Research and Foresight: Working Papers 15 (December 2015): 1–21, here 4, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark :/48223/pf0000234807_eng (accessed October 27, 2020). 25 Ibid. 26  Ibid., 9. 27  Ivan Illich, “Foreword” (1995), in Everywhere All the Time: A New Deschooling Reader, ed. Matt Hern (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008), iv. See also Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jon Igelmo Zaldívar, “Ivan Illich’s Late Critique of Deschooling Society,” Educational Theory 62, no. 5 (2012): 573–92.

9  Ibid., 93. 10  See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1966).

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Politics of Learning, Politics of Space

Image Credits Front cover Published in Educational Facilities Laboratories, Five Open Plan Schools: A Report (New York: Educational Facilities Laboratories, 1973), 14. Photo: George Zimbel. Back cover Interior of former OSZ Wedding, Berlin, April 2019; photo: Ludger Blanke. P. 9  Published in Baumeister 2 (1973): 180. Courtesy of argus fotokunst. Photo: Uwe Rau. P. 13  Published in Thomas Schmid and Carlo Testa, Bauen mit Systemen/Systems Building: Construction Modulaires (Zurich: Verlag für Architektur Artemis, 1969), 111. © Testa. P. 15 left  Published in Samih Farsoun, “Student Protests and the Coming Crisis in Lebanon,” MERIP Reports 19 (August 1973): 3–14. P. 15 right University Archives Photograph Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. P. 20  Published in Leviathan 1, no. 3 (1969). P. 21 above­  © ps wedding, Berlin. mauritius images/picture alliance. P. 21 below  © Rue de Archives, AGIP. P. 25  Courtesy of Penguin/Random House UK. P. 30  Published in Richard Marshall, “The Mobile Teaching Package in Africa,” Prospects 2, no. 1 (1972): 82. © UNESCO. Drawing: Perry Bussat and Kamal El Jack. P. 31  Knut Andreasson. P. 32  Published in the Chicago Sun, September 21, 1980. P. 34  Photo: Guy Gérin-Lajoie. P. 36  © Société d’Histoire de Nanterre. P. 40  © Beltz Verlagsgruppe. P. 43  Published in Chicago Tribune, November 7, 1979. P. 48  Published in Domus 539 (1974): 9. Photo: Yvel Hyppolite. Courtesy of the Estate of Yvel Hyppolite. P. 49  Published in Manfred Scholz, Bauten für behinderte Kinder: Schulen – Heime – Rehabilitationszentren (Munich: Callwey, 1974), 124.

P. 50  Published in Educational Facilities Laboratories, SCSD: The Project and the Schools. A Report from Educational Facilities Laboratories (New York: Educational Facilities Laboratories, 1967). © Rondal Partridge Archive. Courtesy of William E. Blurock & Associates (currently tBP/ Architecture). Photo: Rondal Partridge. P. 54  Published in John Bremer and Michael von Moschzisker, The School without Walls: Philadelphia’s Parkway Program (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971). Photo: Carlton Read. Courtesy of Centage. P. 59  Published in Bauwelt 61, no. 21 (May 25, 1970): 840. P. 61  Published in China Reconstructs (July 1976): 7. P. 63  Courtesy of Walker Art Center Archives. P. 64  © ullstein bild – Roger-Viollet. P. 81  Photo: Pysall, Jensen, Stahrenberg & Partner. © Justus Pysall. P. 82  ps wedding, Berlin. P. 84  Courtesy of Pysall, Jensen, Stahrenberg & Partner. © Justus Pysall. P. 88  Photo: Pysall, Jensen, Stahrenberg & Partner. © Justus Pysall. P. 89  Photo: Ludger Blanke. P. 91  Photo: Ludger Blanke. P. 103  Published in William Cannady, New Schools for New Towns (Houston, TX: School of Architecture, Rice University, 1970), 40. Courtesy of William Cannady and Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University. P. 104  Published in Progressive Architecture (April 1968): 198–99. P. 109  Published in William Cannady, New Schools for New Towns (Houston, TX: School of Architecture, Rice University), 1970, 26. Courtesy of William Cannady and Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University. P. 110  Published in William Cannady, New Schools for New Towns (Houston, TX: School of Architecture, Rice University, 1970), 54–55. Courtesy of Denise Scott Brown, William Cannady, and Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice Uni­versity. P. 118  Courtesy of the American Craft Council Library & Archives. P. 121  Courtesy of Chris Abel.

Tom Holert

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Tom Holert curated “Education Shock: Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2018–2021), and edited the accompanying reader Bildungsschock. Lernen, Politik und Architektur in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren (De Gruyter, 2020). He is also the author of, among others, Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (Sternberg Press, 2020).

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