Architectures of schooling: School construction systems development, 1961-1969

AbstractArchitectures of Schooling: School Construction Systems Development in California, 1961-1969 Leslie McShane LodwickAfter the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958, American school administrators scrambled to use the allocated funds in service of a rapidly developing public school infrastructure. Administrators were guided by a belief stemming from national discourses and NDEA guidance that science and technology training would ensure the nation remain competitive in the global space and military races. One experimental school program extending from this period was School Construction Systems Development (SCSD)—a school-building program comprised of thirteen prefabricated schools in postwar California. This dissertation project argues that these schools are integral to histories of suburban development in California while leaving an outsized legacy to school buildings nationwide due to the immense and nationwide school-product manufacturing network developed in service of SCSD schools. Long left out of architectural, educational, and urban histories, the architecture of schooling has vital implications for understandings of urbanization, race, and labor in America. Funded in large part by the Ford Foundation through a grant managed by Stanford University's School Planning Laboratory, each of the schools operated uniquely in their respective communities while also functioning as part of the more extensive SCSD project portfolio of schools. The schools were much lauded in architectural press, national newspapers, and in local and national educational literature as solutions to the national problem of public education, while also being safe, spacious, and part of the growing suburbs.This dissertation argues that the larger SCSD project was defined by attempts to legitimize public education in the context of national anxiety about desegregation in the years following Brown v. Board of Education and to experiment with school buildings as a mechanism by which students could be folded into technocratic national frameworks in the context of the Cold War. Analysis of national media, architectural journals, women's magazines, and educational literature reveals the project's collective experimental potential to serve these national goals. Yet the individual schools comprising the larger project have been virtually unstudied, nor have the larger project goals that defined the individual schools. Thus, this dissertation also argues that these individual schools are integral to understanding shifting on-the-ground dynamics in communities across California with respect to race, class, land management, and the natural world. Through site visits, interviews with teachers and administrators, and visiting community historical and educational archives, this dissertation analyzes the school buildings as sites of learning and as vital components of their respective suburban developments. The SCSD project also significantly influenced school architecture in the United States. This influence is seen, in part, through the creation of the national network of manufacturers that developed through the SCSD bidding process. Thousands of schools built through the 1990s utilized these prefabricated architectural systems and objects. Education historians Tyack and Cuban describe the "grammar of schooling" as the idea that a shared set of accepted temporal and disciplinary conventions by which schools operate ensure their ongoing replication and come to define and organize schooling as an institution. This so-called grammar of schooling prevents the adoption of radical or truly reformatory ideas about what school could be. This project thus argues for the aesthetic, spatial, and architectural functions of these shared schooling systems as also indispensable to cultivating this grammar of schooling. The implications of this are that the network of manufacturers developed out of SCSD in response to project goals further define the look and feel of the institution of schooling itself in the United States. Often pr sented as the corrective corollary to urban education through the vast public relations campaign and wide imaging of these schools in national media, this new suburban school building was showcased as the school building that would solve the nation's educational problems and would become a widely built typology as a result.