ABSTRACT
Sports development was inextricably linked with community development in school-building programmes in the USA from the late 1930s, which, in turn, had a positive influence on schoolbuilding in the post-World War II regeneration of the UK. In this regeneration, system-built schools became one of the first nonindustrial types of building to express all the character and virtues of steel. This was recognised internationally when the post-war British schools were considered by many architects to be on a par with the beautiful but austere works of Mies van der Rohe and his architectural school at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
