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.

For 70 years, a square in the northern quarter of Warsaw has been a site of strife and conflict, memory and mourning.