From the outside, Building 30 and Building 160 on Stanford’s Main Quad look pretty much the same. Both structures—among the last of the 28 Quad buildings to be seismically strengthened—have 19th-century sandstone exteriors and those classic black front doors. Step inside, though, and the similarities end. The first building mirrors Stanford as it was at the University’s opening, in 1891. The second offers a peek into the future.
The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake rendered Building 30 uninhabitable. Fortunately, the interior had been left relatively intact throughout the University’s first century—unusual for a Quad building. When architects first saw its high ceilings and tongue-in-groove wainscoting, they knew they had a preservationist’s dream on their hands. “We were very lucky,” says associate University architect Ruth Todd.
Peeling back layers of paint from the walls, interior designers were able to document and then re-create the same soft green ambience that greeted students more than a hundred years ago. They matched new light fixtures to those in old photos and combed antique stores for heavy oak chairs to furnish the conference room.
Today, Building 30 houses the Stanford Language Center, which promotes teaching and research in foreign languages. While the research facilities and classrooms are modern, the administrative wing still has “all the quirks of the 19th century,” notes director and German studies professor Elizabeth Bernhardt. “The windows rattle, the ceilings are high and there’s an echo—but we love it.”
Unlike Building 30, Building 160 was ripe for innovation. Located at the front of the Outer Quad near Lane (History) Corner, it started out as Stanford’s second library, once-grand space that boasted a two-story reading room with a domed skylight, stained-glass windows and marble wainscoting throughout. When the Law School inherited it in the late 1940s, however, the building was unceremoniously gutted and stuffed with two additional floors. Much of the original stonework was buried in concrete or carted away. “It was just a mess,” Todd laments.
In 1999, as then-tenant political science was graduating to newly renovated digs in Encina Hall, Stanford received $15 million from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation and the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation. The prominent Swedish banking and industrial family asked that part of the money support projects exploring the use of technology in education. The rest was earmarked for a state-of-the-art facility to serve as a prototype learning environment for the 21st century.
One look at the Wallenberg Global Learning Center, and it’s not hard to see why students have dubbed it Valhalla, after the great hall in Norse mythology. The 50,000-square-foot space—now the Quad’s fifth-largest classroom building—includes sleek Scandinavian furniture, a two-story learning theater with digital projectors and surround sound, media rooms where students can edit film projects, 15 badly needed seminar rooms, and four larger classrooms chock-full of gadgetry. Computerized blackboards can display movies or capture whatever is written or drawn on them. Plasma screens at the desks allow three students with laptops to collaborate on writing projects at once. Videoconferencing equipment recently enabled Stanford historian Tim Lenoir to team-teach a course on the history of Silicon Valley with a professor at Georgia Tech.
Wallenberg Hall houses the Stanford Center for Innovation in Learning (SCIL), which manages and operates the building, as well as the Stanford Humanities Lab and Media X, a project that supports interdisciplinary research about interactive technology. Professors from other programs and departments can reserve rooms at Wallenberg—or adjust the lighting and temperature—from their home or office computers. Once they arrive, they can reconfigure the tables, chairs, even the walls.
Professors from low- and high-tech disciplines alike are queuing up for these classrooms. In his course last year on the poetry of Horace, classics department chair Richard Martin displayed the text in Microsoft Word, highlighting and manipulating passages to make his points. “Here’s a subject that hasn’t changed in two millennia, and he’s using these tools to tremendous effect,” marvels Bob Smith, SCIL’s director of technology services. Smith says professors usually need a week or so to get comfortable with the technology. As for students, he says, “they come in here, I show them what’s going on, and they’ve got it immediately. Twenty minutes later, they’re giving us ideas of how it can be better.”
