From Our House to the “Big House”: Architectural Design as Visible Metaphor in the School Buildings of Philadelphia

Abstract

Philadelphia public schools have been products of the culture and values that made them. When education was embedded in the home, schools looked like houses; when education became civic, schools took on a civic character; when Philadelphia gave itself over to the forces of industry, schools were derived from industry. In the twentieth century, as schools became places of conflict, they took on the character of the architecture of reform—prisons. This article examines the evolution of the Philadelphia school from the eighteenth century to the present.