The course Housing Studies, aimed at master's students in architecture, articulates a critical pedagogy that interrogates the non-neutrality of the architectural discipline in shaping social relations and modes of life. Focusing on the analysis of twentieth-century collective housing projects, the course combines archival research and curatorial practice as tools for critical design. Through the engagement with historical documents and the construction of a collective exhibition, students reinterpret the past from an intersectional perspective that renders visible bodies and communities traditionally excluded from dominant narratives. This approach enables them to question spatial norms that reproduce inequalities of class, gender, race, age, or mobility, and to formulate new projective narratives. By interweaving historical analysis, graphic representation, and cultural production, the final exhibition becomes an act of design that dissolves the boundaries between classroom, archive, and society, fostering ethically engaged forms of architectural knowledge and practice.

This article focuses on the schools developed by Mary and David Medd within the Ministry of Education in Great Britain, 1949–1976. Their main contribution to the field of Educational Architecture was the definition of a design strategy known as Built-in variety, where the self-contained classrooms (empty-box-school) disappeared in favour of a variety of dissimilar places. Indeed, the Medds sustained a very innovative view from which primary educational architecture was profoundly reconceptualised, getting closer to a home than to an institution. Actually, the paper argues that it was precisely this driving principle – school as a home – that was responsible for the dismantlement of the traditional school types. This article proposes a close look into the design process as an object of study in its own right, in search for the underlying principles of the Medds' primary school designs. The acknowledgement of some features of the English house has been a good means of coming to understand the Medds’ strategy and its domestic aura, for the schools’ spatial hierarchy recalls the internal spatial structure of Arts and Crafts houses of the late nineteenth century.

The innovative school design strategies of Mary and David Medd, broke away from the idea of classrooms and incorporated the concept of Centres in architectural discourse.