Thoughts on Morris, The Matter Factory: A History of the Chemistry Laboratory…

Synopsis of key historical developments (roughly chappters in Morris)

In the alchemical beginning… primacy of the furnace and long apothecary counters. Living quarters (master lives above the shop, available to put out fires and run experiments late at night) and a private laboratory for use by the head professor (do your own work, don’t reveal how you are making the gold) as vestiges that remain through most of the 19th century.
Lavosier/Paris 1780s… the move to pneumatic chemistry favors tables (no need for furnaces) which changes laboratory design. Vestiges still seen in the layout of physical chemistry laboratories as distinct from other chemistry labs (e.g., optics tables), but otherwise this does not get preserved in later laboratory architecture evolutions because they are overwhelmed by organic chemistry.
Michael Faraday/London 1820s…the rise of the lecture hall demonstration, the laboratory as a semi-public space (or prep-room serving that public space)
Liebig / Giessen 1840s… the rise of the teaching laboratory as a space for practical technical education, moving away from the individualized apprenticeships of the past. The ability to pack students in an orderly way leads to the first iteration of modern lab bench, glassware racks, and shelving. Standardization of experiments and focus on group analysis results in producing H2S, which motivates wider adoption of fume cupboards (with variants like outdoor lab spaces that persist in some isolated locales, but ultimately do not become the modern standard)
Bunsen / Heidelberg 1850s… municipal gas enables the Bunsen burner, which in turn facilitates flame-tests and spectroscopy. Municipal running water will enable widespread adoption of Büchner funnerl (Bunsen had invented something like this) and Liebig condenser. Same with central steam as a heat source. Electric lighting/heating comes later but plays a similar role.
Wilhelm Hofman / Berlin 1860s… essentially “modern” bench and rack organization for lab spaces. Rise of specialized rooms for instrumentation or dangerous/stinky processes becomes a standard part of laboratory architecture.
Chemical museums….a legacy to historic ties to mining and metallurgy, fades out of
(interlude about industrial labs, government laboratories…divide between chemical practice and chemical research spaces)
Bill Johnson / Stanford 1960s…. quintessential modern 20th century laboratory building architecture…heavy dependence on high-tech instrumentation (NMR, IR, etc. but also fruitful collaboration with industry to develop that instrumentation). Tensions between small laboratories for 5 researchers and Djerassi’s ‘quasi-socialist enterprise presided over by a benevolent dictator’ (p. 300) of open lab spaces (one could have also commented on Melvin Calvin’s roundhouse at Berkeley). Rise of the professor as manager (no private lab, office might not even be near the lab). Growing importance of the basement as a space for sensitive instrumentation.
Graham Richards / Oxford 2000s… chemical hygeine as an overiding factor in laboratory design, distinction between “office” and “lab” space for the researchers, not just professors (chemists can no longer just hang in the lab all day cooking their tea on the bunsen burner), but also the new class of computational resarchers. Glass fishbowl visibility architecture, professor offices continue to move farther from the lab as they embrace administrative roles

Themes

Laboratory buildings as prestige spaces (for national prestige, local prestige, means of attracting students/faculty). Whereas in the past this was framed as elegant architecture, the modern version of this is essentially just about research capabilities and technology (and external facing in terms of publications), rather than the physical external facing as architecture, per se.
The decline of the Professor-practioner and rise of the Professor-manager, as evidenced by the end of “private” laboratory spaces and the disconnection of faculty offices and laboratory spaces. (As an undergraduate, my professors had fume hoods inside their private offices, in addition to having a second door that went into the lab. This would never fly in the age of EH&S (how would you drink coffee!), not to mention the modern idea of the non-performing bureaucratic PI. )
Infrastructure and research innovation are tightly coupled. Once you have water, gas, steam, electricity, this enabled new innovations (e.g., Bunsen burner), which in turn, drive new innovations (flame spectroscopy), and demand new infrastructure/spaces (e.g., darkrooms for developing spectroscopic film records)
Instrumentation often demands specialized spaces. Initially this is because they are considered highly sensitive, have special infrastructure needs, or high cost demands that they be shared. Sometimes technology democratizes this into private spaces (e.g. UV/vis spectroscopy)
Fundamental divide between materials/inorganic chemistry (furnace centered) and biological/organic chemistry (lab bench centered) and physical chemists (table-top centered) in lab space design.

Speculations towards the future

Data and (artificial) intelligence are the utilities of the future lab. Mirroring the importance of creating infrastructure for matter and energy flows (water/gas/electric), the new trend is flow of data out of experiments and the flow of intelligence into experiments. This transition can happen very quickly, as most labs are already wired for ethernet (or Wifi), so the physical infrastructure is already in place. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter if you have specialized server spaces in the basement or “municipalize” this to the Cloud or remote datacenters to provide intelligence infrastructure.
Training laboratories drive laboratory architecture changes. Really, this is two ideas: First, “everyone” went to Leibig and Bunsen’s laboratories and so this spread certain practices as those individuals moved to new institutions. Second, the nature of “training” practices (e.g., group analysis) shaped the spaces in which chemistry was to be practiced. Training program (like at the U of Toronto Acceleration Consortium) can thus have a disproportionate impact in shaping laboratory architecture.