Professor's Personal Space

This article examines how psychologist Robert Sommer's research on spatial behavior at the University of California intersected with the dramatic expansion of American higher education. It demonstrates how Sommer turned the expanding campus into a site both for studying human spatial behavior and for critiquing institutional architecture. Drawing on Sommer's publications and UC Davis archival materials, I argue that while his work contributed to the rise of environmental psychology and influenced corporate office design, it paradoxically had a limited impact on academic architecture. The case of the faculty office illustrates how, despite criticism that the zoning of office buildings hampered the academic community, universities continued to separate private offices from other academic spaces throughout the 1970s. This persistence reflects how thoroughly spatial privacy had become embedded in academic culture and was perpetuated by architecture, even as Sommer's ideas about space and social interaction helped to justify a reorganization of corporate workplaces. The article contributes to our understanding of how scientific knowledge production shaped and was shaped by postwar campus architecture, while historicizing scholarly privacy as a value that has been continuously negotiated against other spatial needs and organizational priorities.