ABSTRACT The paper examines the hypothesis, that school buildings construct the future citizens of the nation-state. We specifically ask, how such national constructions play out in multilingual nation-states. With a special focus on the development of school architecture in a variety of regions including as major cases Luxembourg and Switzerland, the paper analyses school buildings as the spaces where the act of physically going to school takes place. As a dominant of the local scenery, schools were also actively involved in the presentation of spaces, displaying concepts of the nation or its sub-units. In Switzerland, it reveals the strong importance of the cantons and communities; in Luxembourg it showed the significant role of the capital as well as the local commune and demographical policies of the country: While national coherence was emphasized and also symbolically transported for instance through uniform school buildings or model school types, we found also that the school buildings were of overall ...