Testfall der Moderne

With this book, architectural historian Kerstin Renz opens an exciting chapter of German post-war history. In the young Federal Republic, building schools was both an urgent necessity and a political issue. If individual reformers had their way, the Neue Schule was to become the New School, whose light architecture in the countryside was to stand for peace, democracy, and a new, supranational understanding of society. In the debate about the ideal school, experience and experiment, practiced building practice and willingness to reform were often irreconcilably opposed. The author uses numerous school architectures of the 1950s to show how differently the concept of “school building reform” was interpreted and how discourse and the transfer of ideas influenced building practice.