Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design

Sommer distinguished personal space from animal territory on four grounds: personal space is portable, moving with the individual; its boundaries are invisible rather than marked; its center is always the body rather than a nest or home; and intrusion typically produces withdrawal rather than confrontation. This distinction, documented in a Japanese review of spatial behavior research, has never been contested and is considered obligatory when discussing the topic . Sommer adopted the term 'personal space' precisely to avoid the innate, animal-comparison connotations of 'territory' . The distinction allowed researchers to treat the invisible bubble around each person as a measurable psychological phenomenon rather than an instinctual territorial claim.

Sommer worked as a psychologist at a large isolated mental hospital in Western Canada under Humphry Osmond, who coined the term 'psychedelic' and studied how designed environments affect behavior . Sommer wrote that the building violated Florence Nightingale's first canon that a hospital do the sick no harm, describing cavernous, poorly lit interiors with institutional colors and inadequate ventilation . When he and Osmond sought information on architecture and behavior, they found more was known about zoo cages and chicken coops than hospital wards . This absence of behavioral data for human settings became the book's motivating problem: designers were making consequential decisions without any empirical basis for predicting their effects on inhabitants.

Sommer's 1959 article in Sociometry mapped interaction patterns as a function of table arrangement, group size, gender, and mental status, finding corner locations favored for conversation and schizophrenic individuals showing impaired social distance concepts . The editor of a major social psychology journal rejected it as irrelevant to the field—a judgment Sommer later saw as evidence of the discipline's neglect of physical context . The 1969 book synthesized this research with subsequent studies into a comprehensive treatment of spatial behavior, adding analyses of privacy, spatial invasion, small group ecology, and applied settings including classrooms, hospitals, and drinking establishments.

A 1970 PsycCRITIQUES review noted that the first part would provide a light introduction to personal space research but would not be useful to active researchers in that domain, while the last part was more like a collection of critical essays about social institutions than an expository text on design . The reviewer found much that was informative and more that was entertaining . An anthropological review judged the book's value to lie not in what it told specialists, who would already be familiar with the ideas, but in its accessibility to those outside the field . The common assessment: broad in scope, accessible in style, but not a comprehensive technical treatment.

In Personal Space, Sommer began formulating the argument that design professionals preoccupied with form alone were excluding function, reversing the horse and cart . He argued designers should adopt 'a functionalism based on user behavior as a guiding principle' . This critique crystallized in his 1974 book Tight Spaces: Hard Architecture and How to Humanize It, where he documented brutalist concrete buildings, windowless offices, and bolted-down furniture as environments designed without occupants in mind . Personal Space laid the behavioral research foundation; Tight Spaces became the polemical extension, naming the problem and proposing 'soft architecture' as the alternative .

Sommer and Hall developed their spatial behavior concepts in parallel during the 1960s, but with different emphases. Hall's proxemics, presented in The Hidden Dimension (1966), hypothesized four spatial zones—intimate, personal, social, public—each with near and far phases, grounded in cultural conditioning . Sommer's personal space focused on the portable, individual bubble and its behavioral regulation through withdrawal, with less emphasis on fixed cross-cultural zones . Sommer also rejected the territorial framing that Hall's animal-comparison language carried . The two frameworks are complementary: Hall supplied the cross-cultural zone taxonomy, Sommer supplied the empirical study of how people actually defend their space in specific settings.