The Physical University

Contours of space and place in higher education

Paul Temple, Paul Temple

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317802518
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The great universities of the world are to a large extent defined in the public imagination by their physical form: when people think of a university, they usually think of a distinctive place, rather than about say the teaching or the research that might go on there. This is understandable, both because universities usually stay rooted to the same spot over the centuries; and because their physical forms may send powerful messages about the kind of places they are.

The physical form of the university, and how the spaces within it become transformed by their users into places which hold meanings for them, has become of increased interest recently from both academic and institutional management perspectives, when trying to understand more about how universities work, and how they may be made more effective. Yet, despite its seemingly obvious importance, the available literature on space and place in higher education internationally is scant when compared to that dealing with, say, teaching and learning methods, or with evaluating quality, or many other topics.

This book brings together a range of academic and professional perspectives on university spaces and places, and show how technical matters of building design, maintenance and use interact with academic considerations on the goals of the university. Space issues are located at an intellectual crossroads, where widely differing conceptual and professional perspectives meet, and need to be integrated and this important book brings together perspectives from around the world to show design and use issues are changing Higher Education..

Globally, higher education is being required to do more things – to teach more students, to be better at research, to engage more with business and communities; and many other things. These pressures are leading universities to reconsider their management processes, as well as their academic structures: an often-quoted saying is that "we make our buildings, and afterwards they make us". At a time when universities and colleges are seeking competitive advantages, ideas and analysis about space design and use is much needed and will be well-received.

Part I Space at Work

DOI: 10.4324/9781315813776-

1 Space, Place and University Effectiveness

PAUL TEMPLE

DOI: 10.4324/9781315813776-2

The University Space and Place

Universities are special places – intellectually, culturally, economically – with varied epistemic and organisational dimensions, most of which have material consequences. These material consequences may be of many kinds – some relatively temporary (furniture and interior design, say) and others permanent, effectively eternal (campus location, say). These have, in turn, continuing effects on the activities that go on within institutions: some of these effects may be intended; many, probably most, are not. But if these propositions are accepted, it remains difficult to move on to derive conclusions about higher education planning and design that can be said unambiguously to support, rather than undermine, institutional aims to do with teaching and research, the student experience, social inclusivity, community links, or other goals. Difficult, but not impossible – as many later chapters in this book will argue.

The difficulty is that it is hard to produce empirically verifiable propositions about how space affects outputs, let alone outcomes, in universities. One study of how academic collaboration and interaction in a university building was affected by spatial arrangements concluded that although ‘space clearly shapes behaviours of an organisation’, it nevertheless remains ‘inherently difficult to disentangle which behaviours stem from which influence [because] both spatial and organisational influences appear to have shaped the structures and evolu tion of academic collaboration networks’ being studied in this case (Sailer et al. 2012). But it is equally easy to present examples of spatial change where the ordinary participants – called by Bligh in his chapter here the ‘denizens’ – are very clear that physical change has had an impact: ‘There was such a sense of community [in the building from which staff had moved] and I think that’s what everybody misses’ is a comment reported in one study of physical change in an American university – and, in this case, the much-lamented former building had many material defects: ‘dank … black mould … asbestos’ (Kuntz et al. 2012). It was the social character of the building, not its objective physical qualities, that were missed. Students, equally, are reported to have reacted to changed learning spaces. Most studies are of spaces that have been changed with the aim of improving learning (sadly, from a research point of view, there will be few cases where the aim is otherwise), and usually students faithfully report that this has indeed been achieved in the ‘seriously cool’ new facilities provided (for example, Dittoe 2006). It remains open to question, though, whether the reported benefits (when these can be demonstrated, rather than simply asserted) result from change itself – the ‘Hawthorne effect’ – or because the particular physical environment does actually affect learning. If the latter, we must ask about the mechanisms linking space with learning.

We have already moved from talking about spaces to places: what people do with the space they inhabit, noting that the interaction may be two-way. I have argued that this interaction is the largely unacknowledged independent variable in understanding how universities and colleges work (Temple 2009). Space in the university is what it is as a result of the decisions and actions of designers, users, those who manage it and tend it in various ways. But there is also a sense in which space and place help to determine what the university is: as Hillier and Hanson (1984: 2) argue, ‘the ordering of space in buildings is really about the ordering of relations between people’. The creation of space is, then, a social and political project. Considering this complex set of space/life relationships, Lefebvre (1991: 26) suggests that space ‘serves as a tool of thought and of action … it is also a means of control … of power; yet … it escapes in part from those who would make use of it’. Or as a writer on the theory of place has put it, ‘the relations of architecture to social behaviour are complex and culturally embedded’ (Dovey 2008: 2). Following these ideas, it seems necessary to ask if, once space is created, or recreated, for the university, is an institution with particular characteristics likely to emerge? And, if so, which elements of the built environment bring about these characteristics?

University space and place might, in principle, affect in a number of ways the teaching and learning, the research and the other interconnected activities that go on within institutions. One possible way, well represented in the literature, is what we may call ‘message-sending’: that particular building or campus designs give out signals about, say, the importance of scholarship. Edwards (2000: 150) is an exponent of this approach, arguing that university buildings should be ‘silent teachers’ and that we may detect ‘the exacting agendas of intellectual inquiry, of scientific experiment, and refined taste … in the design of many university buildings’. A less provocative version of this approach is Chapman’s (2006: xxiii) claim that ‘the institutional story is told through the campus … The campus is an unalloyed account of what the institution is all about.’

I have suggested (Temple 2007) that claims such as these – in effect, that epistemologies or narratives are embodied in buildings – need to be treated with caution. It seems more plausible that people consider university buildings to be important because they happen to think that universities are important places – rather than the other way around. A research study arguing that ‘more distinctive perceptions of university visual attributes … resulted in a more favourable reputation of the university [among those surveyed in the study]’ (Alessandri et al. 2006) can be read from the other direction: respondents may have been positive about the university’s campus and buildings because they imagined that valuable academic work took place there. The chapter here by Hards, Vaughan and Williams somewhat similarly critiques the public art policies of universities, which seem to expect that displaying works by distinguished artists will add to the institution’s academic reputation.

Other writers have similarly noted that ‘it is not obvious … [how the] values that are related to the non-physical qualities of the institution are exchanged into the building’ (Gabrielsen and Saugstad 2007). As Chapman (2006) argues, though, some designers of university buildings do, of course, want their creations to ‘say’ something about what the university is, or does. But his ‘unalloyed account’ claim surely requires qualification: while the built form of an institution can certainly tell a story, alternative readings of the ‘text’ will, as with any historical account, be possible. Ossa-Richardson, in his chapter here, shows how changing architectural tastes have affected perceptions of what buildings ‘mean’: what may be a clear and positive message to one generation (the projection of imperial power, say) may be either unclear or negative to a later generation. Dober (1992: 5) offers a useful metaphor when he suggests that iconic university buildings ‘are cultural currency … charged with allegorical significance and perceptual connotations and meaning’ – though perhaps each visitor will set their own exchange rate for this currency. Even so, the psychological charge of the building may become intertwined with its architecture, to such an extent that they cannot be separated.

The Physical Context of University Work

Culturally significant aspects of the university built environment have now often been incorporated into thinking about the university ‘brand’. Some universities are almost defined, at least in the public mind, by their physical presence – Oxford, the Sorbonne or Stanford, for example. However, student satisfaction surveys, internationally, tend to attach relatively low importance to physical issues as contributors to the overall student experience (Temple 2007: 64), possibly a counter-intuitive finding, but one supported by a good deal of empirical evidence. There may be a threshold effect operating here: providing universities offer physical facilities that are perceived as broadly acceptable as a whole, then features more directly associated with the value of the degree and the organisation of academic work may assume greater importance in students’ minds. When asked directly about how particular sorts of space could support their learning, a recent US study did find students expressing clear preferences (Bennett 2007).

These somewhat contradictory (superficially, at least) conclusions point to the central yet variable, hard-to-define role of space in the educational process: the question of what the ‘design for learning’ may achieve (Selander 2008). A deeper level of theoretical understanding seems to be needed. I want to argue here for an understanding of space and place in the university that goes beyond suggestions that certain ideas are embodied in buildings, or that buildings help to create the brand, and instead to propose how space becomes place, and how it affects the academic work of the institution. And space and place almost always have been central features in thinking about the university. Although it seems that the very earliest universities of medieval Europe had few physical attributes, consisting simply of groups of teachers and their students, they quickly acquired a physical identity and, arguably, a sense of place. By the late twelfth century, the University of Paris was located on the left bank of the Seine near the Ile de la Cité (Cobban 1975: 77; Leff 1968), where much of it yet remains.

How might the university’s physical form be linked with academic effectiveness? One way may be through the contribution of space to the creation of a sense of community (several respondents in Kuntz et al.’s (2012) study make this point), and thus of place – in the sense of space that (in higher education settings) is intimately bound up with the ways in which we live and understand ourselves, about our ideas of what is valued and validated, as well as what we (think we) know and do (Batchelor 2006). Other writers have, somewhat similarly, suggested that a sense of place arises when ‘spatial stories’ can ‘inhabit our dreams, and produce a kind of spatial unconsciousness, and … a continuing sense of social critique’ (Amin and Thrift 2002: 48). Sennett writes of ‘narrative space’, space designed in ways that permit people to develop their own uses for it, so becoming ‘personified places’ (Sennett 1990: 190, 192). Massey (2007: 15), in a similar vein, goes on to observe that places, once created, can assume particular powers, which may be projected to affect the wider world, and there are certainly examples of how some university places have been able to set intellectual agendas, so projecting their power on to a global stage. What is hard to judge is the extent to which place, as such, rather than the people inhabiting it, is significant here.

It seems possible to make a connection between these personal ideas of place and wider understandings of institutional life and effectiveness by reference to the concept of social capital. There is theoretical and empirical work proposing that social capital effects can mean that a strong institutional community may lead to the improved effectiveness of that institution (Lesser 2000; Preston 2004; Saaranen and Tossavainen 2009). In this case, the physical form of the university may be linked to institutional effectiveness (and indeed efficiency) indirectly through its role in assisting in community formation. This physical support for community formation, and hence social capital creation, might be done in various ways. Designing a campus on a human scale is one approach, with attention to design details such as pleasant places to sit and talk, which encourage social interactions and connectivity (Chapman 2006: 180). An account of the design of Miami University, for example, tells us that, seeking this human scale, ‘it was designed to feel small’ (Kuh et al. 2005: 106), and student learning, it is argued, may be improved through the informal interactions that result. Waite, in his chapter here, offers further examples.

In a broadly similar way, it has been proposed that the original layouts of human settlements around the world can be interpreted as various attempts to manage encounters between locals and strangers safely and efficiently, and to provide appropriate amounts of public and private space (Hillier and Hanson 1984: 20). The form of many towns in medieval Europe was determined by the need to provide a workable marketplace – where townspeople and outsiders could come together – usually in the very centre of the town, with security apparently in mind (Schofield and Vince 1994: 33). University design poses some similar questions: how to manage insider/outsider interactions (between the ‘resident’ staff members and ‘visiting’ students) effectively and safely; how to maximise the possibility of beneficial encounters; how to locate facilities to make them easily accessible; and, perhaps, how to use design to convey particular messages about the kind of place that one is in – how to manage ‘the semantic field’ (Dovey 2008: 143).

We might think of these ideas as being about ‘encounter management’: using design features to bring people together in settings where mutually beneficial interactions may occur. Modern cities have rather simila...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Foreword, Sir David Watson
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part I Space at Work
• Part II Space and Place in Context
• Index