Home is where the lab is

On the outskirts of the old inner cities, just within or just outside the boulevards, there are impressive buildings. In Utrecht too. They are laboratories which were put there at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth century.

Laboratories needed for the scientific experiment

Currently, laboratories are in a peculiar state. Outsiders often associate universities with people in white coats who are researching natural phenomenons or are developing a new medicine in laboratories.

Though this is accurate since the experiment became a central part of sciences in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. And a laboratory was needed for that. But a university is more than that, of course. During the first centuries of the existence of the university, laboratories barely played a role. If there even was a laboratory at all, no special building was built for it.
 

For a real laboratory revolution, we have to be in the nineteenth century.

A simple lab on Sonnenborgh

This was also the case with one of the first laboratories the Netherlands ever had. In 1694, Johann Conrad Barchusen received permission to teach collegia chimica. The Utrecht cameraer, kind of a head of municipal works who was also in charge of the funding, received the assignment for it. 

He was requested to ‘appropriate the empty residences on the rampart, which houses the Hortus, into a laboratorium chimicum’. So a new laboratory had to be established in the Zocherpark. These classes and the simple lab on Sonnenborgh apparently became a success, because Barchusen was appointed lecturer in 1698 and professor in 1703.

Criminal law class in an anatomical theatre

For a real laboratory revolution, we have to be in the nineteenth century. The university was no longer mostly an educational institution, but also became the pre-eminent location for scientific research. But the laboratories were still in part dedicated to education and they were still established in spaces which were not constructed for them. 

For instance, the medical researchers and biologists were assigned the old Minderbroeder Monastery at the Janskerkhof, which was the meeting room for the Staten van Utrecht during the Republic. These days, our lawyers are located there. It can very well be possible that a class in criminal law is taught in what used to be the anatomical theatre.

The eternal constructing and moving

Gerrit Jan Mulder, founder of modern chemistry in the Netherlands, was still assigned a room in the Leeuwenbergh guest house on the Servaasbolwerk from the 1840s onwards, which a big memorial stone on the side wall still reminds us of. Leeuwenbergh was most important as an education laboratory, but research into the role of proteins in medicine and biology was done there too.

After that, the big constructing and moving so characteristic to university history started. It slowly but surely became clear that if you wanted to participate in modern science, you needed well-furnitured, spacious, light and custom-built buildings.

Asking the Prime Minister for funds

But as always, funds were lacking. By threatening to go elsewhere, an old trick which was often successful, professors blackmailed the university board and they received their laboratories after all. These labs needed space and should also not be in the middle of the city anymore for safety reasons. 

This is how the characteristic buildings near the boulevards came about in the decades around 1900: Donders' physiological lab on the Van Asch van Wijckskade in 1867, which currently houses a health centre. On the Bijlhouwerstraat in 1877, Buys Ballot's physics building was built. 

It is entirely possible that a class in criminal law is taught in what used to be the anatomical theatre.

Fifteen years later in 1882, the lab for health education and inorganic chemistry on the Catharijnesingel followed, which is currently a part of the court and Ernst Cohen's since demolished Van ’t Hoff laboratory for Organic Chemistry in the Sterrenbosch. Cohen had been so bold to – although the university board knew of this – go directly to Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper. Kuyper is said to have responded with “Mister, mister…,” but he eventually reached for the checkbook anyway.

Foreign funding for Utrecht laboratories

When it comes to laboratories, the 1920s were exceptional. In 1925, the Rijksveeartsenijschool became a full part of the university and it received an entire series of buildings and laboratories on the end of the Biltstraat in the process. By then, the laboratory research into contagious diseases like foot-and-mouth disease and tuberculosis among cattle had become a national interest.

On the Vondellaan, behind the Academic Hospital, something revolutionary took place. Then too, the successful professor of pharmacology Rudolf Magnus threatened to leave. However: these were financially very tight years for the Dutch government and a laboratory was therefore built with foreign private funds. 

The American Rockefeller Foundation paid for a beautiful, modern pharmacological lab, of which Magnus – who was heading towards a Nobel Prize – unfortunately did not live to see the opening in 1929. He died of a coronary during a mountain walk in Switzerland.

A lab in a residential neighbourhood

Today, it is no longer conceivable to have laboratories in residential areas. They are now clustered in the Johannapolder in Utrecht Science Park. To be honest, the laboratories being spread across the outskirts of the city was already an extraordinary situation. Everywhere in the world, we see a concentration of university offices and buildings come about in the years around 1900. People spoke of a cité universitaire or a campus.

The fact that separate laboratories have come about in the Netherlands at the time did have consequences for their users. Exactly because of the individuality and recognisability of the buildings, they often became more than a workplace: a home, even though that was often a love-hate relationship if timely maintenance was lagging again. That sense of home also came about after laboratories received different functions.

A laboratory with a story 

For instance the physics lab on the Bijlhouwerstraat, which was first used for physics research and which currently houses the Governance Department of the Faculty of LEG. There are plans to disown the building, but there is an ongoing active lobbying campaign to retain it.

It is a building with a ‘face’ and a past, tied to big names from our university history: Buys Ballot, Ornstein, even Einstein has been there. Ornstein died of misery in the war, in part because as a Jew, he was no longer allowed to enter his own lab. On the initiative of the current users of the building, a stumbling stone was recently placed at the entrance. How beautiful is it that a characteristic laboratory building connects the present and the past to each other?