Within the history of education, questions about spatiality and the materiality of schooling have paralleled a flourishing interest in the design of school buildings and architecture. This has opened up fruitful conversations among architectural and educational scholars as well as practitioners in their respective fields: how might the relationship be understood between innovations in school design and the everyday as well as the signal experiences of education? Does pedagogy lead design, or does design enable pedagogy? Beyond such simplistic accounts, how else might this multi-layered, iterative relationship be investigated? And what does all this look like in specific settings, times and contexts, moving from the general to the specific, from the abstract to the enacted? What are the parallel and colliding histories of architectural and educational innovation, and how does looking at both together help to see things afresh, to open up new ways of thinking about the history of architecture, and about the history of education? The four articles in this 'special section' emerge from an interdisciplinary study grappling with such questions. Collectively they variously explore interactions between school architecture, design and spaces and the changing educational and socio-cultural contexts and aspirations of schooling, focusing on the grammar and style of buildings, as well as educators' understandings of the promise and effects of school sites and design.