In the 20th-century expansion of Swedish universities, research and education moved from department buildings—built according to the logic of one professor, one department, one building—into larger building complexes where work could be co-located yet functionally and spatially separated. At Uppsala University in Sweden, the Uppsala Biomedical Center (BMC, 1977) and the Center for Humanities and Social Sciences (Hum-C, 1976) are two examples of such larger macro-buildings intended to contribute to the economies of scale in academia. Created and planned simultaneously and in parallel to each other, the buildings followed diverging rationalities in their structures and in how the practices that took place within could be optimised. BMC was envisioned and planned as a flexible building, where walls could be moved and laboratories re-constructed depending on shifting objectives and unexpected needs. First and foremost, BMC was organized to be adaptable to research. Hum-C, on the other hand, embodied generic estimates on the ideal size for teaching. Teaching was streamlined in accordance with pedagogical ideals and contemporary studies on how it could be improved. The sizes of rooms and groups were adjusted to follow these optimal scales when moving between different forms of teaching. These buildings in many ways emerged as part of a response to a prolonged national discussion on how higher education should be organized, starting in the early 1950s. While both buildings were created to anticipate an expansion of the university as a whole, they also accentuated a separation between research and education, on one side, and between the life sciences and humanities on the other. Indeed, BMC became regarded as a factory of research while Hum-C was seen as a teaching factory. By comparing the planning and design of these two buildings, this paper studies how research and education became dis-embedded from each other in different ways at Uppsala University between 1963 and 1984.
Academic workspaces, such as faculty offices, seminar rooms, and other campus interiors remain a relatively underexplored area of research when taken as sites of knowledge production, adaptation, and circulation. Yet, understanding the significance of these environments is crucial not only for the historical insights they offer but also for informing contemporary debates surrounding campus-development initiatives at universities worldwide. This special issue brings new perspectives to the history of campus design, examining how buildings, corridors, indoor streets, and office spaces have shaped academic life and knowledge practices in Northern Europe and the United States from the early 20th century to the present. Collectively, the contributions highlight the dynamic interplay between materiality, spatiality, knowledge production, and the formation of both collective and individual academic identities—underscoring how meaning is constructed within the academic workplace.
This article explores Jacques Bertin's Graphique , an analog and visually driven method for processing data in the human and social sciences (HSS), developed at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in postwar Paris, France. Conceived as a semiological alternative to mathematical formalization, Graphique enabled researchers to analyze large datasets through perception and interaction rather than calculation. By reconstructing its rise and decline between 1947 and 1995, the article shows how Graphique embodied a human-centered vision of rationality that competed with computer-assisted multivariate statistical procedures, supported by institutional and national science policies. This case study reflects a broader shift in the history of HSS toward reproducibility, delegation, and shared infrastructures—values that marginalized Bertin's interactive and individual approach. Beyond recounting this technical competition, the article argues that the fate of Graphique reveals how choices about computing infrastructures redefined what counted as rigor and trust in the human and social sciences, while foreshadowing later developments in data visualization and human–computer interaction.
This paper uses the scientific career of Ruth Hubbard (1924–2016) to examine the gendered dimensions of space in the Harvard Biological Laboratories. Trained as a biologist and biochemist, in 1973 Hubbard was the first woman to be granted tenure in the department of biology after almost three decades of conducting research in her husband George Wald's (1906–1997) laboratory. Hubbard's change in academic status had both material and intellectual consequences. She gained ownership over her own space in the Biological Laboratories building and shifted her research from the molecular process of vision to reinterpreting her scientific career and its spatial dimensions through the lens of feminist-informed history and sociology of science. Drawing on scholarship from the spatial turn in the history of science, the history of women and gender in science, and feminist science studies, I argue that Hubbard's career reflects a distinctive form of situated spatial knowledges. Situated within the biological laboratory, her pre-tenure scientific partnership with Wald produced knowledge representative of the “molecularization” of biomedicine during World War II and the postwar period; but situated within feminist epistemology and a growing extralaboratory network of feminists, activists, and women's studies scholars, her post-tenure scholarship, a form of interdisciplinary knowledge production, addressed the gendered social and economic structures of scientific practice. Tracking Hubbard's spatial history in the Biological Laboratories illuminates both patterns common to women in science during the 20th century and the distinctive way that the design and arrangement of space structured Hubbard's scientific and personal life.
Inaugurated in 1979 as a kind of academic town with indoor, glass-roofed streets, the first construction stage of the structuralist campus Dragvoll University Centre is investigated as a spatial and organisational solution for the new University of Trondheim. Drawing from 1960s and 1970s discourses on campus architecture and campus development-internationally, nationally, and locally-this article investigates how the interacting planning processes of Dragvoll and the University of Trondheim formed the basis for a multiversity within the frameworks of the structuralist campus and reform university. In the 1960s and 1970s, key actors in Trondheim discussed both how to uphold the semi-autonomy of established academic institutions and how to build a joint campus at Dragvoll for the entire university. Important in this ambivalent discussion were the uses of the concepts of academic community and built environment. This article deals with how key actors in Trondheim used these concepts, for example when investigating solutions to the problems of alienating, mammoth institutions in modern society, but also as a way of connecting the semiautonomous institutions in a multiversity.
The use of 3-D artefacts as sources to study history is not intuitive. In the context of the historical sciences, their examination is rarely taught at universities, in contrast to the attention devoted to methods for interpreting textual and visual sources. In this contribution, we reflect on a course, developed over several years in a museum setting, aimed at initiating 3-D object-based inquiry through the study of artefacts from the physical sciences. Our experiences teaching the course have led to three insights. First, we suggest that the museum as a teaching space is uniquely positioned, through its resources, for initiation to the study of artefacts. Yet, teaching with objects is also possible outside the space of the museum. Second, guiding participants toward the methodologies of expert inquiry provides an opportunity for reflection on the mechanisms of the attribution of significance to objects, on their selection and on the potential biases that can arise within accumulated expertise or connoisseurship. Finally, for the discipline of the history of science, our experience suggests that to enter new avenues through the study of artefacts, historians need to “commune” with those who drive museum collections, with their implicit knowledge and with their hands, visible and invisible.
