CONFIGURING ACADEMIA. Academic entities and spatial identities

Academia has a long tradition of structuring itself around academic subjects, often epitomized through architectural manifestations such as individual buildings and whole campi. These materializations serve as sites of research and education, but also serve to describe the university as whole as well as its institutional parts, their definitions and their interrelations. This description goes deeper than simple definition of specific buildings for specific activities or subjects, but rather describes the idea of academic structures and relations between different people in the campi. This paper makes a comparative study of one of the more successful research universities in Stockholm, studying the use of spatial configuration and programming when the main campus was established in the first decade after the second world war, and how it was used in the following large-scale expansion beginning in the 1960s. It shows how, for both pragmatic and ideological reasons, radical shifts in the relation between buildings and academic subjects, as well as academic individuals and the units central to these descriptions, have taken place in the years in-between, and scrutinizes some of the effects coming with such a change. Proceedings: Eighth International Space Syntax Symposium. Santiago, PUC, 2012. PAPER REF # 8147