At first, his office was a 1979 Dodge pickup. Then, a used 1992 Isuzu Trooper with four-wheel drive. Sure, he had an office on campus, but when the administrative director of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve needed to work on-site, his car became his work space, holding his files and notes. There was a small trailer on the preserve, but space was so limited inside that research material had to be kept in a nearby shed.
By the late 1990s, director Philippe Cohen was lobbying for an all-encompassing building serving the needs of researchers, students and administrators—but it had to be built right. It had to fit with the Stanford preserve’s mission: to contribute to the understanding of the Earth’s systems and protect natural resources.
Accordingly, Jasper Ridge’s 10,000-square-foot Leslie Shao-ming Sun Field Station, which opened last year, is constructed largely from recycled materials and designed to minimize its impact on the environment. The lead gift for the $3.3 million building was made by Anthony Sun in memory of his wife, Leslie, ’74, a former docent at the preserve. In early February, the station received the first annual San Mateo County Green Building Award.
When Cohen shows visitors around the station, he sounds like a kid showing off a new toy. “It’s really cool,” he says. The exterior is redwood siding recovered from demolished buildings in Escondido Village and Woodside. The insulation is recycled newspaper, millions of torn bits pumped into the walls. The bricks on the ground outside came from the basement of Leland and Jane Stanford’s campus home. And, since a significant percentage of carbon emissions worldwide comes from the manufacturing of cement, the concrete used for the floor of the building is made partly from fly ash, a waste product of power plants.
One of the first things noticeable about the field station is its massive windows. The double-paned, insulated glass keeps out heat but lets in daylight; no artificial light is needed until sundown. And several high-tech building features suggest Inspector Gadget has gone environmental. Solar collectors above the windows are tilted to maximize intake of sunlight, which is used to heat water in a tank inside the building, which is then pumped into wall radiators when the building needs heat. Photovoltaic panels on the roof, dark so as to blend into the hills, collect sunlight and convert it to electricity. “Our electrical bill is essentially zero,” Cohen says.
Cohen and the Rob Wellington Quigley architectural firm took care to select a site and position the building so that it would fade into the preserve surroundings. They were concerned that a standard pitched roof would make the building look big, Cohen says. So the designers inverted the roof into a V-shape. Since it formed a gutter, Cohen figured the field station should collect rainwater for study and use. A 25,000-gallon holding tank is being installed outside, and ultimately water will flow from the roof to pipes leading into the tank.
Inside the building, steel cables and trusses run between large steel columns at the ends of the building, keeping structural support along the periphery of the interior while using a minimum of material. The preserve’s research center finally has a home, in the center of the building, where lab benches stretch through a large open space. Two classrooms accommodate the more than 2,000 undergraduates who study at the preserve annually. In the rest rooms, there are, “of course, low-flush toilets,” Cohen says. “What would you expect?
“We did [all] this and it didn’t cost more” than using conventional building materials, he says. “It just means thinking through more and doing a lot of planning.”
“I think they did very well,” says John Hermannson, author of Green Building Resource Guide (Taunton Press, 1997) and a member of the San Mateo County award committee. “They thought about all the little details.”
That’s true right down to Cohen’s office, where his PowerMac G4 hums along on the electricity from the photovoltaic panels. Sure beats that Dodge pickup.
—Brian Eule, ’01
