Building Citizens: School Architecture and Its Societal Programme - Comparative Visions From 19th and 20th Century Switzerland and Luxembourg

Abstract

The paper examines the hypothesis, that school buildings construct the future citizens of the nation-state. We specifically ask, how such national constructions play out in multilingual nation-states. With a special focus on the development of school architecture in a variety of regions including as major cases Luxembourg and Switzerland, the paper analyses school buildings as the spaces where the act of physically going to school takes place. As a dominant of the local scenery, schools were also actively involved in the presentation of spaces, displaying concepts of the nation or its sub-units. In Switzerland, it reveals the strong importance of the cantons and communities; in Luxembourg it showed the significant role of the capital as well as the local commune and demographical policies of the country: While national coherence was emphasized and also symbolically transported for instance through uniform school buildings or model school types, we found also that the school buildings were of overall importance for the profile finding of regions and communes and became powerful agents of societal planning in anchoring citizens to specific regions and shaping the core of the village. In both cases, the article demonstrates the significant contribution of school buildings to the manifold ways of unifying citizens and differentiating them according to societal needs.

Analysis of Damage Level and Cost Estimation of the Samudrajaya 04 Bekasi State Elementary School Building

“…A comfortable school building can unite residents and differentiate them according to community needs (Helfenberger & Schreiber, 2019). Student discomfort can come from poorly maintained and outdated school facilities (Nicholson, 2012).…”