Stanford Today September/October 1996

n May 14, 1887, Leland Stanford O laid the corner- stone at his Palo Alto estate for a university built in his son’s memory. Pulleys low- ered the waist-high block into place, and an encircling throng of workers and dig- nitaries watched him trowel the mortar that sealed it. His wife, Jane, stood nearby in a black Victorian dress. Stanford had devoted his life to building the Cen- tral Pacific Railroad. When his 15-year-old son died of typhoid fever during a Eu- ropean tour, he shifted his energies to the design of Le- land Stanford Junior Uni- versity. In collaboration with the preeminent landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted, he built a lowslung compound of courtyards in imitation of the rustic local missions. It was the genesis of a distinct Stanford style char- acterized by terra cotta roofs, carved sandstone arcades that shade scholars from the California sun and palm trees hovering like ver- dant clouds over the courtyards – a composition Olm- sted called “gloria in excelsis.” More than a century later, campus officials are trying to restore the spirit of the original plan. Like other universities that suffered decades of unchecked devel- opment, Stanford is search- ing its institutional soul for the appropriate way to graft new architecture onto old. Provosts and deans every- where face the same dilemma: Should they freeze their architectural heritage The Green Library 48 STANFORD TODAY September/October 1996 Recapturing the Pride of Place AMID A BILLION-DOLLAR BUILDING BOOM, THE STRUGGLE TO DISTILL AN ARCHITECTURAL VISION By Michael Cannell photographs by richard barnes under glass, like a campus version of Williamsburg, Vir- ginia? Or solicit the best current design ideas? There are no easy answers. Harvard provoked an uproar early this year by slicing the Freshman Union, with its oaken dining hall designed in 1902 by McKim Mead & White, into a warren of offices in part because some faculty members considered it too elitist. For David Neuman, Stanford’s resident architect, the graceful solution is to add discreet contemporary architecture that helps to restore Stanford’s original plan. It is a strategy not based on aesthetics alone, but rooted in a belief that the 19th-century plan best serves 21st- century scholarship by enhancing its sense of place. “A disorderly campus affects everyone, if only sub- liminally,” says Neuman. “Without order, you’ve lost the physical opportunity for chance encounters and the collegial atmosphere that encourages collaboration and creativity. You’ve lost the sense of the university as a Hoover Tower shows how departments, like warring whole moving in a coherent way.” fiefdoms, were all too free to build self-serving monu- ments that upstage their neighbors. “Inevitably, as uni- he conventional 19th-century design – the one versities expand and balkanize, the plan grows less uni- initially proposed by Olmsted – would have fied,” says art history Professor Paul Turner, author of a T been a picturesque, park-like campus in the study on the history of American campus planning. leafy style of Yale or Princeton. Stanford demurred. He The violation of Stanford’s vision continued in the invoked the formal Beaux-Arts layout he had seen in years following the Second World War, when an upstart Paris, its geometric arrangement of enclosed courtyards generation of modern architects rejected Beaux-Arts and broad vistas extending by suggestion to the horizon. planning as the tired remains of a bygone era. Isolated The genius of Stanford’s plan lay in its expandability. buildings – and groups of buildings – sprang up without Stanford was a builder by bent, and he expected linked any relation to the main quad, or to one another. Their courtyards to proliferate outward over the years in strict red-tile roofs paid superficial deference to old Stanford observance of the east-west axis established by the main but, like most modern buildings, they claimed the right quadrangle – not unlike his railroad’s lateral advance to stand in splendid isolation. across the Western landscape. The final blow came in 1988, when the business The first person to muddle his orderly pattern of school’s annex, Littlefield Center, intruded on the grassy manicured paths and arcades was his wife, Jane, who vi- loop at the campus end of Palm Drive – Stanford’s ver- olated its spirit almost immediately after his death in sion of the Champs Élysées. It was one violation too 1893 by adding four detached, freestanding buildings many, and the trustees began looking for a resident ar- along Palm Drive. (The library and gymnasium col- chitect capable of restoring order. THE SEISMICALLY STRENGTHENED LIBRARY WILL OFFER CUTTING-EDGE EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY Green Library lapsed in the 1906 In 1989, they hired Neuman, who, at 43, had proven earthquake; the chem- himself a commanding planner. In the mid-80s, he trans- istry building and mu- formed a drab UC-Irvine campus by launching a con- seum still stand.) The struction spree designed by some of postmodernism’s new main library in- most flamboyant practitioners, including Frank Gehry flicted further damage and Robert Venturi. Like them or not, Neuman showed in 1919 by obstructing considerable political skill handling the superstars of ar- the east-west axis – chitecture while navigating the minefields of academia. Stanford’s organizing Although he came of age with postmodernism – a spine. What’s more, movement that treated pediments and porticos as play- it injected a whiff of things plundered from history’s attic – Neuman has New England colle- launched a thoughtful campaign to update Stanford giate Gothic into the without degrading its pride of place. Surrounded by Romanesque surround- models and renderings in his Serra Street office, Neuman ings. Even venerable periodically covers his blue eyes with his palms as he ANTOINE PREDOCK’S CIS EXTENSION IS THE BOLDEST NEW BUILDING ON CAMPUS Center for Integrated Systems BILL LEDDY’S ENGINEERING BUILDING FEATURES A NEW SPIN ON THE TRADITIONAL CAMPUS GATEWAY Thornton Center for Engineering Management discusses the need to re- member of the trustees’ land and buildings committee. dress the design misde- “We’re more sophisticated now, in part because David meanors of recent cam- Neuman brought us along. We have a sense of responsi- pus history. bility. We know we’re building for the ages.” “There came the no- tion that every building tanford’s architectural degradation was a prod- has the right to set its uct of its academic success. There seemed to be own course,” he says. S no time for the niceties of architecture as Stan- “The campus became ford grew into a big-league research institute with de- like Houston.” partments Leland Stanford never could have dreamed of. Neuman arrived in Thirty years ago, at the dawn of the digital age, applied time to lead a $1 billion mathematics spawned an onrushing confederacy of com- campaign that will re- puter and engineering fields accommodated in a disper- shape much of the cam- sion of hastily erected quarters. The “temporary” bar- pus. This year and next racks endured for decades. are the busiest of a con- When Jean-Claude Latombe, director of the robot- struction boom that ics lab, arrived in 1987, he was assigned an office in started after the Loma Cedar Hall, one of many motley one-story workplaces Prieta earthquake in he likens to vacation bungalows. “They were very 1989 and will include a science and engineering quad, a friendly, but they didn’t give you any sense of working new art museum wing, a renovated library, two new within a university,” Latombe says. The isolation inhib- graduate dorms and extensive seismic strengthening. ited teamwork.“The bungalows discouraged contact “Not long ago we looked like a down-at-the-heels, among students working on complementary prob- bedraggled place,” says Ruth Halperin, an outgoing lems,” Latombe says. 52 STANFORD TODAY September/October 1996 Just a year earlier, By all accounts, Casper was more than an attending Silicon Valley pioneer functionary. In one early meeting, Casper asked Neuman Bill Hewlett had revived to have the county transit agency remove a bus shelter Leland Stanford’s long- from the head of the oval so that idling buses would no deferred expectation of longer obstruct the view up Palm Drive. “He has a Euro- a second quad aligned pean sensitivity to the importance of architecture,” says with the first by donat- James Polshek, architect of the new museum wing. ing $40 million in- In the past, top-tier architects have been reluctant to honor of the univesity’s work at Stanford because of the constraints of history. If centennial to help re- Neuman succeeds in restoring the university’s early fla- unite the sciences in vor, it will be because he shrewdly recruited people like their own courtyard. Polshek, Antoine Predock, Robert A. M. Stern and Work on four science James Ingo Freed – architects adept at gracefully weav- buildings already had ing contemporary designs into their surroundings. started when the 1989 Nonetheless, Neuman did set down basic rules. By Loma Prieta earthquake outlawing glass facades, Neuman discouraged bombas- closed some 50 campus tic departures from the campus style. Nor would he buildings and delayed new construction. permit the postmodern practice of replicating old Fortunately, Hewlett’s partner, David Packard, res- forms in unsuitably large sizes. Instead, he mandated cued the plan from what would have been 20 years of stone veneers with distinct windows and pronounced arduous incremental fundraising. After seeing the decay- rooflines to give off patterns of light and shade. “We ing electrical engineering labs during the 1993 dedica- want buildings that are of Stanford, not just at Stan- tion of the Green Earth Sciences building, Packard asked ford,” he says.

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