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 land- scape 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 ar- cades that shade scholars from the California sun and palm trees hovering like ver- dant clouds over the court- yards – 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 ar- chitecture 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. President Gerhard Casper how much was needed to Neuman did not, however, ask for slavish historicism complete the quad. He and Hewlett pledged $77.4 mil- or a literal replication of the old quad. “That would be a lion to fund 70 percent of the new quad – the largest sin- falsehood,” says Thomas Seligman, director of the Stan- gle monetary gift in Stanford’s history. ford Art Museum. “We want our new building to res- But donations are frittered away if ineptly employed. onate with the old, but we made a clear and conscious Stanford too often has fueled campus sprawl by hiring decision not to recreate the old in some artificial way.” architects based solely on their portfolios. By the time On the contrary, he encouraged the architects to ex- the trustees saw problematic designs, it was often too plore personal variations on historical themes – to use late. David Neuman was determined to prevent such the old quad as a jumping off point. surprises by initiating formal competitions in which sev- The best example of Neuman’s progressive histori- eral carefully selected architects submitted models and cism lies in the new extension to the Center for Inte- renderings to a jury chaired by President Casper. grated Systems. The building was designed by Antoine

FOR THE FIRST TIME, COMPUTING’S DIVERSE FACULTY WILL RESIDE UNDER ONE ROOF William Gates Computer Science Building THE QUAKE-DAMAGED ART MUSEUM WILL REOPEN IN 1997 WITH A NEW WING DESIGNED BY JAMES POLSHEK Stanford Museum

Predock, an Albuquerque architect with a reputation for Stern, is politely wardrobed in an overhanging red-tile New Age structures that rise organically from the South- roof and old-fashioned casement windows recessed to west’s desert landscape. suggest the old quad’s hefty block walls. A three-story arch embedded in the rusticated limestone facade marks he CIS extension faithfully obeys Neuman’s the entrance with a ceremonial flourish. rules of scale and material, but it has a glower- Few campus buildings have been so eagerly antici- T ing, fortress-like presence unlike anything on pated. Computing’s diverse branches – artificial intelli- campus. A deep barrel-vaulted entrance and slit win- gence, robotics, computer graphics, database manage- dows pierce an austere facade clad in pinkish Delhi sand- ment, etc. – finally reside under one roof. Their stone pockmarked with fossils. Its reddish copper-tile proximity should foster cross-pollination. roof floats nine inches above the walls – just high “This building is too new yet to have its own special enough to admit light through a ribbon of glass. Think history and patina,” says recently retired Engineering of it as a provocative cross between Mesa Verde and Sil- Dean James Gibbons, “but it won’t take the students icon Valley. “Predock fine-tunes the building’s form and and faculty too long to rectify that. My prediction is materials, its details and proportions, to create a build- that, within the next 18 months, something will happen ing that fits in with the Stanford context while charting a here – there will be some place, some office, some corner, new course of its own,” wrote Alan Hess, a critic for the where people will point and say, ‘Yeah, that’s where they San Jose Mercury News. worked on the “blank” in 1996 and 1997.’ ” Predock’s CIS extension resides south of Serra Street, Stern shrewdly encouraged casual interaction by diagonally across from its companion piece, the new providing a spacious, sunlit central stairwell that five-story Gates Computer Science Building, a $38.5 mil- climbs to a top-floor terrace. Whiteboards posted in lion cutting-edge facility named for Microsoft founder gathering areas near elevators and bulletin boards Bill Gates, who donated $6 million. For all its high-tech darken daily with scrawled algorithms as passersby amenities, the Gates building, designed by Robert A. M. pause for spontaneous brainstorming. Faculty offices

54 STANFORD TODAY September/October 1996 don’t have to stand out,” Freed says. “They don’t have to stand up and scream. All they have to do is tie things together.” His fourth building, a lecture hall, is the en- semble’s sculptural front man. Its curved, gently can- tilevered panels of gray metal trimmed in copper beckon pedestrians like a Broadway marquee. “The whole fabric of the campus has become so loose,” Freed says. “The teaching facility signals that some- thing special is happening here.” Happily, the quad creates more open space than it consumes. Where the Physics Tank now stands Freed will unfurl a palm-lined walkway connecting the quads much as Leland Stanford suggested in drawings from the 1880s. The debauched east-west axis, Neuman says, will “be much more prominent, much more sacred.” The new quad breaks precedent in one key respect. While the inner quad is a desert sanctuary traversed by students rushing to classes, the new quad will be a grassy oasis, a place to linger under a dappled canopy of stone pines with soaring trunks that echo an encircling arcade. For hard-wired students increasingly accustomed to con- gregating on-line, the quad will be a outdoor parlor with shaded benches and sweet-scented locust trees. “Faculty and students want a respite from labs and class- rooms,” Neuman THE CAMPUS says. “They want to BECAME LIKE HOUSTON sit outside and en- David Neuman joy the California climate. Many of them came here for open onto central laboratories that invite participation. that very reason.” Within three months, the robots outside Jean-Claude No one can pre- Latombe’s door acquired from various tenants the abil- dict how Stanford’s ity to track moving targets. future inhabitants “Demonstrations used to seem confidential,” says will regard today’s Latombe. “Now people come out of their offices to additions. Every make suggestions.” generation reacts The CIS extension and Gates anchor the north side of against what pre- what will be a new quad consolidating the scattered sci- ceded it. But what- ence and engineering facilities. “It has been a 10-year ever future critics dream of ours to draw electrical engineering and com- may say, the cam- puter science – the hardware and the software – together pus is now growing in an environment surrounded by such things as the bio- with greater fidelity to the founder’s vision. After logical sciences and medicine,” Gibbons says. decades of haphazard development, the campus land- The winning entry for the new quad came from scape is once again an extension of its architecture. James Ingo Freed, I. M. Pei’s longtime partner. After As they pass among flower beds and arches, sunlit decades of anonymous service, Freed emerged from Pei’s tiles and shaded arcades, students will see that the small- shadow with recent works like the new main library in est details help to express the whole. As a place restored, San Francisco and the U.S. Holocaust Museum on the Stanford can be an example to those who would look be- Mall in Washington, D.C., one of the most ardently yond the ubiquitous influence of cars and other small- lauded public buildings of recent times. scale conveniences. The Stanford of the 21st century Freed won Stanford’s most sought-after job largely might not be perfect, but it does suggest that all the glo- because he struck a balance between current needs and ries of 19th-century landscape design can live again. And remembered grandeur. Under his scheme, three modest that is an exciting prospect. ST buildings with similar pitched roofs and subdued fa- cades house electrical engineering, advanced materials MICHAEL CANNELL is an author living in New York City. His first research and statistics. Freed considers them less im- book, I.M. Pei: Mandarin of Modernism, a biography of portant than the space they enclose. “The buildings the noted architect, was published last fall by Crown.

September/October 1996 STANFORD TODAY 55