The Principles of Campus Conception: A Spatial and Organizational Genealogy.What knowledge Can We Use from a Historical Study in Order to Analyse the Design Processes of a New Campus?

This chapter participates to the interest of scholars concerning the relationship between spatial structure and organisational practice. Most researches analyse this relationship through built-up spaces and few studies are focusing on design phase. The study of design processes – organisational and spatial – raises methodological challenges and interrogate how the relationship between these processes could be analysed. In order to discuss the nature of the relationship between both designs: organisational and spatial, this contribution relies on an analysis of the conception processes of a campus. The hypothesis is that a genealogical approach of the history of campus architecture could reveal some specific properties of the campus and could generate a tool – an analytical framework – in order to explore the campus design project processes.