The Columbus school incorporates sculpture and other art into nearly every corner of its year-ancient building with the hope that it will inspire students in that working-class Hispanic American neighborhood to learn. It is one of a growing number of newly built or renovated public schools across the nation that look more equal cultural centers than the austere, utilitarian houses of learning of the past, showing museum-worthy pieces commissioned from artists alongside more traditional finger paintings and statues of school mascots.

Columbus even drew up a curriculum guide this fall for using this untraditional architecture in class lessons.

“Considering art isn’t just an aesthetical; it’s a learning resource,” said Abie Benitez, principal of the Columbus academy. “We’ve made a framework for everybody to find a connection to the art in the building — and to the building itself.”

New Haven has emerged at the forefront of a movement to build schools that are aesthetically pleasing as well as functional, and to turn plain brick-and-mortar walls into show-and-tell lessons. Fourteen of the 31 public schools built or renovated here in the past decade have merged art and architecture with education in some fashion.

“New Haven prides itself on art and thoughts, so it’s a excellent environment for developing this kind of program,” said Tom Roger, director of the city’s school construction program, a project with a cost of more than $1 billion. In Greater New York, where schools house one of the largest public art collections in the world, nearly half of the 23 new buildings that opened this fall incorporated artwork in their design and construction, city officials said. For example, the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Astoria, Queens, has a glass facade etched with the names of hundreds of performers and hallways that show video clips of student activities.
Across the nation, Los Angeles just opened among the most expensive high schools ever built: a $232 million complex of silvery geometric shapes for a school of visual and performing arts.

“None of our schools are cookie-cutter designs,” said Shannon Haber, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles school district. “Ours use vibrant colors, the designs are complex, and we don’t use as is architect from each one.”

Educators and architects say that these new schools challenge long-accepted notions going back to the 1950s of school buildings as no-frills projects designed to fulfill safety specifications and to be completed as quickly and cheaply as possible, particularly in quick-growing cities and suburbs.

“People thought about schools as warehouses for kids,” Mr. Roger said. “It’s a box, so why does it need to be a nice place?”

But Mr. Roger and others say that thinking started to change as health and environmental concerns over indoor air quality and lighting led to higher standards for school buildings. Newer cost-efficient technology also allowed architects to customize schools in a way not possible before. And now art has become an integral part of many new and existing schools, supported with donations from parents and local government grants.

Washington State, for instance, has spent $509,744 to make and install artwork in 14 public schools in the past two years. Maine, which has a similar program, gave Dirigo Elementary School in Peru $44,400 worth of sculptures and paintings in the past year for its library, cafeteria and hallways. “We’re always trying to connect our teaching to real life, and how excellent is this?” said Kathy Richard, the principal.

In the Boston suburb of Needham, parents raised $75,000 to pay for three giant hanging sculptures — a DNA spiral, a metal cylinder inscribed with mathematical representations of infinity and a shooting comet — that were installed last year in the lobby of the senior high school, and helped get a new course on public art expanded to the curriculum.

Here in New Haven, the new Columbus school replaced a building from the early 1970s that resembled a concrete bunker and whose sole piece of art — a mural in the cafeteria — was hard to see because of poor lighting. The artwork in the $31.4 million building cost $182,495.