Rationalization by Diverging Rationalities

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.