This paper is a preliminary examination of historical shifts in U.S. discourses of school architecture as they relate to curricular reforms and inventions on new pedagogical techniques. The paper begins by sketching the current parameters of discourses on school architecture and notes some of the key arguments of reform taken up by educators and educational designers. It then conceptualizes the "space" of the school as discursive. To understand how the "space" of the school represents different forms of governmentality, the paper examines the governing discourses of the common school-house to compare it to the reasoning in the 1920s. Finally, the paper speculates upon how "individualized instruction" has "come of age" in current discourses of school design. As a strategy of discursive analysis, the paper uses Michel Foucault's conceptualization of "governmentality" and related scholarship to examine discourses on school architecture to question current assumptions underlying claims about new school designs. By using "governmentality" as a field of analysis, the paper locates particular historical junctures that provide the contingent conditions and reasonings upon which the current debates about reform of school design seem reasonable and make sense. The paper states that, schematically, the historical junctures are: (1) the common school discourses of the 19th century "school-house"; (2) the emergence of the "school-plant" in the 1920s and 1930s that standardized and systematized school building; (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 all the previous plans in the "school-as-community." Contains 73 references and 15 notes. (BT)