When the Crow Island Elementary School in Winnetka, Illinois opened in 1940, it launched a revolution in the architecture of schools. Designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen, and the Chicago firm then known as Perkins, Wheeler & Will, the welcoming, low-slung, one-story brick building, with a slender, beacon-like clock tower, was hugely influential in the postwar rush to construct new schools for the incoming tide of baby boomers. The earlier 20th-century model of stately, historicist multistory school buildings, that spoke more to the aspirations of town fathers than to the comfort and teaching of children, became obsolete.

Today the design of the Crow Island school looks inevitable, but what was especially radical in its day was the way it married progressive ideas of pedagogy with architecture: rooms were scaled for children, with comparatively low 9-foot ceilings; there was pint-size furniture (much of it designed by Eero Saarinen in molded wood), L-shaped classrooms with space for a kids' workshop, and generous low windows to bring in daylight and let teachers keep an eye on children at play in the courtyards off each room.