Description In 1927 the Decroly-school was transferred from a small building in the city centre to a bourgeois villa, which is located in a (former) suburb of Brussels. From its very beginning as a school the villa needed some alternations to fulfil its function as a school building (e.g. classrooms, canteen), and an enlargement to meet the increasing number of pupils was also necessary. In this paper we will focus on three major building phases (1930, 1961, 1982) after the acquisition of this property in 1927. The architecture of the school cannot be treated as detached from social production and construction of the space. The social production of space includes as outlined by Low all those factors – social, economic, ideological, and technological [and so on] – the intended goal of which is the physical creation of the material setting (Low, 1996, 861). The social construction of space is the actual transformation of space by attaching meaning(s) to it, e.g. forming a house into a school building, through people’s social exchanges, memories, daily use of the material setting, etc. Research questions The central hypothesis is that one can distinguish different layers of meaning ‘in’ and ‘about’ the school building. If so, the idea of ‘reading a school building as a text’ needs an adjustment. In our opinion, the building must then be treated as different texts. This leads us to the following questions: Which layers can we distinguish? Which relations can we detect among these layers? What are the ‘built-in meanings’ at the time? How and why did the site actually change over time? How were these transformations described/experienced by its occupants (the Decrolyens) at the time? Which factors (material, financial, conditional, organizational, educational etc.) influenced these transformation processes?

The hermeneutic reading of the building is merely possible if one goes back to both the meaningful behaviour and situation in which the material setting was created or adapted. This implies that we will use different sources from which we can derive the meanings that were attached to the building, and on the basis of which we will be able to acquire knowledge on contextual factors that influenced the building process. In our analysis we will use the contemporary school site, a series of pictures of the buildings, building plans, and different written documents such as minutes of the school board.

We expect to find different layers of meaning – i.e. intentions, expectations, dreams, experiences, etc. – in the school building as well as different factors, which change over time and influence each other. We also suppose to find some tensions between expectations, design, and realization, as can be illustrated with this quote by Lucie Libois (1934), principal of the school at the time: “S’il existe des bâtiments nouveaux sans méthodes nouvelles, il existe aussi des méthodes nouvelles sans bâtiments nouveaux; telle est l’Ecole Decroly” (quoted in Guillaume et al., [22]).