In France, local governments are in charge of building and running school buildings. Their design of school buildings takes into account modular spatial expression, energy efficiency and costs’ rationalization. Schools’ building constitutes a very singular object of study that enables the analysis of injunctions of government policies that need, on one hand, to respond to contradictory needs such as budgetary constraint, users’ satisfaction, educational efficacy and symbolic impact, and on the other, to produce a coherent project. Thus, the school building embodies local commitment as well as normative and ideological national injunctions. The building is also the place of the educational activity, but its life time is longer than that of the injunctions, i.e. its shape remains even when educational models evolve. Our socio-historic study of the evolution of school architecture in a French metropolis points to social and spatial transformations that respond to different management, production and education logics. They translate at different scales specific political, social and educative injunctions drawing from official channels (vertical dimension) and strained cooperation between professional groups (horizontal dimension). In addition, through focusing on four specific schools that obtained a green label our research attempts to understand the different political, institutional and professional significations of the various stakeholders. It appears that sustainable development teaching has many interpretations depending on the different geographical scales and the different institutions that are implied. The different translations of these injunctions lead to the “cohabitation” of diverse practices. These practices refer, at the state level to norms and regulations, at the local government level to architectural specifications, at the school level to school project and at the class level to eco-citizen training. Sustainability is not only a particular kind of knowledge, it presupposes also a set of behaviors and social commitments, which transform the “school form” into a different form related to elements such as project-based learning, open school, etc. These evolutions lead to a redefinition of justice in school. The transformation of the learning environment and practices expands teaching modes and changes completely traditional school behaviors, such as sitting, immobility, individualism in a way that favors social inclusion of different school populations by adopting a practical approach to social problems. However, this transformation produces also practices which can clash with managerial and security logics of local governments and school principals.

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