This paper explores the aesthetic of ‘place’ and the emergence of science parks in the 1980s through a study of British Telecom Labs in Martlesham Heath, rural England. Above BT Labs’ entrance is a plaque engraved with ‘Research is the Door to Tomorrow’. BT Labs inherited the plaque from its predecessor, the Post Office Research Station, which BT acquired in 1981 after Margaret Thatcher created BT to take over the British telephone system from the Post Office. The research centre was a modernist, corporate lab, designed to emulate the ‘industrial Versailles’ of Bell Labs and General Motors’ Tech Centre, but in the 1980s, amidst a Thatcherist vogue for science parks, it became ‘Adastral Park’, a ‘science campus’ whose name referenced the motto of the Royal Air Force, deliberately evoking Britain’s WWII spirit. Adastral Park, however, is not Martlesham Heath’s only distinctive feature. From 1975, with the promise of new residents from research staff, an ‘instant village’, built like an ‘unspoiled traditional village’, was built on the heath, a postmodern reaction in architecture and town planning against post-war Britain’s ‘new towns’. Martlesham Heath has multiple, contradictory expressions of temporality, and in this paper I argue that the evolution of this corporate laboratory, from modernist Post Office Research Centre to Thatcherist ‘science park’ experiment, invoked history and futurity in ways that turned ‘Martlesham Heath’ from a heathland space into a ‘place’ in its own right, with a past, present, and future.

In the 1960s and 70s, architects and designers looked to the sciences for inspiration and a systematic approach to shaping environments rich in information. This is particularly evident in an approach promoted by the Herman Miller Research Corporation (HMRC), a division of the iconic furniture manufacturer. In 1968, HMRC launched an influential open-office management concept called Action Office. Promising to adapt the workplace to a new era of “knowledge workers” and invoking concepts in management, human sciences and engineering, its developers claimed to tackle problems of information overload, declining productivity and employee satisfaction. Within a decade, the concept got implemented in hundreds of corporate, governmental and public service offices and research laboratories. Focusing on the period 1959 to 1976, this paper catalogues and analyses the firm’s efforts to study, rationalize and measure white-collar creativity and productivity, and in so doing legitimate a discursive and material re-arrangement of the office. In particular, it shows how HMRC researchers drew together concepts and methodological approaches from emerging subdisciplines such as ergonomics, proxemics, environmental psychology and psychoacoustics to develop an embodied model of information processing and recalibrate workers’ comfort, creativity, and exposure to information stimuli—on paper as much as in their social, visual and acoustic surroundings. This paper explores how their efforts to shape and validate such effects on white-collar work contributed to broader transformations in notions of information and productivity, and produced a template, both for a particular approach to corporate research and for future imaginations of the workspace.

In 1971, biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin criticized the agenda that had “dominated evolutionary thought in England and the United States” according to which natural selection is seen as an “optimizing agent”. Conversely, they proposed a different standpoint on evolution, in which body plans are “constrained by phyletic heritage, pathways of development and general architecture”. As they admitted, while this different focus on evolutionary mechanisms was “long popular in continental Europe,” it was almost entirely absent in English-language biology. Given this background, how did this “European” perspective come to form the basis for a major theoretical challenge to Adaptationist thinking? What were the sources of this perspective? In my talk, I point out that this rethinking was possible through an exchange and transfer of practices, data, technologies, and knowledge between biologically oriented students of form and architects, and engineers. Specifically, I analyze how morphological knowledge traveled from evolutionary biology into architecture and back during the 1960s. As a case study, I focus on the Stuttgart Collaborative Research Center on wide span surface structures. In this research center, architect Frei Otto and biologist Gerhard Helmcke developed a structural analysis of morphogenesis. According to this analysis, an efficient form is obtained by using as little material as possible in line with the lightweight principle. Hence, by showing how morphological knowledge traveled during the 1960s, my presentation will provide preliminary insights into a different history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century science of form.

This paper will examine the history of psychiatry through the lens of the refugee camp, which, I argue, has served as an instrument of accumulation and extraction of knowledge about refugees and their mental (ill)health. Though the voices of refugees are often absent from the psychiatric knowledge created about them, they have nonetheless contributed to and shaped subfields of psychiatric knowledge and practice, such as trauma psychiatry and transcultural psychiatry. Two very different mental health programs delivered by medical humanitarian organizations to Cambodian refugees encamped on the Thai-Cambodian border will be examined, from both the earlier and later years of a humanitarian border crisis that lasted from 1979-1993. Different psychiatric methodologies were introduced, applied, and refined in Cambodian refugee camps, contributing to the genesis of ‘new’ fields of ‘refugee mental health’ and ‘refugee trauma’. The first of these programs involved the appropriation of indigenous knowledge by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which eschewed Western psychiatric concepts completely in favour of Khmer traditional medicine. ICRC set up and administered Traditional Medicine Centres that were staffed by krou khmer, Cambodian Buddhist monks, who practiced their indigenous healing traditions within the framework and limitations set by ICRC. The second involved a landmark study by the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, which introduced and applied new Western psychiatric tools, such as the DSM-III, and diagnoses, like PTSD, in Site 2, the largest camp on the border.