With the announcement of plans for a second science and engineering quad to the west of the first one, the University is one step closer to fulfilling architect Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1888 master plan of seven quads along an east-west axis. Dubbed SEQ 2, the project will be built between 2006 and 2014 at an estimated cost of $375 million to $420 million.
The quad’s four buildings are designed to encourage collaboration among hundreds of faculty. The environment and energy building will house the Stanford Institute for the Environment, the Global Climate and Energy Project, and much of the department of civil and environmental engineering. The dean’s office, the department of management, science and engineering, and the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering will occupy the School of Engineering center, with space left over for classrooms, a library and a café. The bioengineering/chemical engineering facility will bring together two related departments and place them in proximity to the School of Medicine. And in the Ginzton replacement building, researchers will continue work at the intersection of physics and engineering, including quantum electronics, superconductors and semiconductors. They and others will take advantage of the sophisticated labs in the linked basement underneath all four buildings that will be free of outside light, noise and vibrations.
“The program that’s going to go in each of the buildings is being thought of as a whole,” says Jim Plummer, MS ’67, PhD ’71, dean of the School of Engineering. “Opportunities for sharing facilities between the buildings, for creating labs that bring people together from the various buildings and elsewhere on campus, are going to be a very important element of the overall design.”
At least three major buildings will be razed to make room for the new quad: the applied physics building, Ginzton Laboratory and the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory, including the modular building that houses the Gravity Probe B project. Terman Engineering Center, which suffers from dry rot, likely will be demolished after the new School of Engineering’s center opens.
