A Place for Materials Science: University of Pennsylvania's Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter

The University of Pennsylvania's Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM) opened its doors in 1965. Constructed to house cutting-edge research on Materials Science, the LRSM building was designed to foster interdisciplinary research among physicists, chemists and metallurgical engineers. Each of the five floors of the new building included a central facility, including a high magnetic field center, an analytical chemistry research center and an electron microscopy center. While primarily funded by the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, the LRSM also was also partly sponsored by industry. The LRSM received funding from Philadelphia Electric Company, General Electric Company, and IBM, among others. In this paper, I will study how the building was designed to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, while also becoming a place of intersection among academic, private, and governmental interests. This project is a collaboration with Hyungsub Choi.