Perkins+Will stacks a dense program into a school building that rivals its lofty downtown-Chicago neighbors.

A two-story, 66,580-square-foot public elementary school for 600 students.

A single-story, 47,000-square-foot private middle school with a block of classrooms and labs for each of the three grades.

Like the institution it serves, the new early-childhood learning center of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools is anything but ordinary.

A four-story, 17,000-square-foot addition to the kindergarten- to eighth-grade Erie Elementary School’s existing quarters in a former Catholic school in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Maria Montessori wrote, “Education is a natural process carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words, but by experiences in the environment.”

Built in 1914, the four-story industrial building at 1500 Barclay Street in Baltimore’s North Central Historic District was innovative for its time, with expanses of glass and a unique ventilation system designed by the architect, Otto G. Simonson, to improve working conditions.

On a sunny afternoon in Pasadena, California, an energetic sixth grader runs between the ginkgo trees in the large circular courtyard of Blair International Baccalaureate Middle School.

Like a proud parent, Denise Davis, an associate at the Communities Foundation of Texas, shows off photographs of the Kathlyn Joy Gilliam Collegiate Academy whenever she is asked about exciting developments in early-college-high-school programs.