after school

Schools are contradictory places—sites of discipline and erasure, and also of play, solidarity, and collective care. after school, co-produced by Carnegie Museum of Art and in otherwards, the imprint of Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture, brings together architects, artists, educators, students, and activists to study the states and stakes of public education.

Developed alongside the exhibition of the same name, the publication follows classrooms, corridors, itinerant sites, and cooperative experiments to examine how public education has been shaped, organized, and contested across Pittsburgh’s educational landscape.

Essays, testimonies, lesson plans, and archival materials trace histories from the city’s first public high school and New Deal–era programs to cooperative school gardens and Black-led Street Academies of the 1970s. Drawings and photographs accompany the texts, attentive to how education takes form in buildings, streets, policies, and everyday life. after school gestures toward the possibility of a school not yet here.