This paper is a preliminary examination of homologous shifts in U.S. discourses of school architecture and "planning" as they relate to curricular reforms and inventions of new pedagogical techniques. The strategy of discursive analysis uses Michel Foucault's conceptualization of "governmentality" to examine discourses on the design and building of schools. The purpose is to question underlying assumptions about "space" and historical reasonings about a place called school. Particular historical junctures in discourses of school architecture provide the contingent conditions and reasonings on which the current debates about reform of school design seem reasonable and make sense. Schematically, they are: (1) the common school discourses of the "school house" during the 19th century; (2) the emergence of the "school-plant," which introduced city "planning" discourses into the discourses of school design during the 1920s and 1930s; (3) the "open-plan" in the 1950s that followed as a critique of the "school-plant"; and (4) the enfolding and redeployment of elements of the "school-house,""classroom school-plant," and the "open plan" in the "school-as-community." (Contains 88 references and 14 endnotes.) (Author/SLD)