Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–37
[Morrisroe Professor of Physics], who was chair of the division, “We ought to get that. It’s
sitting in the middle of your empire. We should own it.” And he got it. He said, “One condition
is you have to move into it.”
And that brings in another story. I brought the whole group over from the top floor of
Kellogg to look at it. We looked downstairs. The downstairs sort of had offices and doors and
stuff. Everybody hated it—it looked like a rabbit warren down there and hopelessly messy.
Upstairs it didn’t look like it does now. It had been used for storage. Some of the windows
were boarded up. It had a couple of offices. And everybody loved it. The group was very
enthusiastic about it. And I was enthusiastic about it. I didn’t quite know why. I went back to
Ed Stone and said, “We want the upstairs.” He said, “Really?” I said, “Yes, if you’ll remodel
it.” He said, “Oh yeah, we can do that.” I drew up this present design, which was the big open
space in the center and lots of little offices around it. The group voted that even with these tiny
100-square-foot offices, they would be willing to be three to an office as long as they didn’t have
to give up the open space. I thought, “Yeah, they’re right. But why is it that we have this
emotional attachment to the little offices around the central space?”
ASPATURIAN: The communal space.
TOMBRELLO: Yes. In those days the Leakey Foundation had its headquarters on campus, and
they used to put out a quarterly report. I picked one up one day, and the first article was on
hunter-gatherer societies. It said all these groups are pretty different, except for one thing: They
always build their villages the same way. There’s a central open space with a fire pit for
communal activities and around it are the huts, where people will retire for privacy. I thought,
“Well, we haven’t gotten very far from Africa. We are reacting to exactly the same things. The
offices can be small, but people keep their doors open, because they don’t want to miss out on
something that might happen in the central space.” This has been an absolutely fabulous design,
which we stumbled into. You see a lot of the infrastructure out there [outside Tombrello’s Sloan
office]. You see we’ve got coffee out there. We’ve got books out there. We’ve got some files
and the refrigerator out there. It really worked.
OK, now we’re about to move into this place. Some of my grants are slipping, and I have
too many grad students. In the meantime, I’ve been consulting at Schlumberger.
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