From the earliest days of the University—indeed, before a stone was ever laid—the vision of Stanford has been inextricably tied to a profound sense of place. We owe this heritage to Leland and Jane Stanford, who clearly felt the work of a great university deserved to be done in a setting that inspired the hearts and minds of its faculty and students.
To that end, the Stanfords collaborated with two noted architects, Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles Coolidge, on the original campus plan. Olmsted was the designer of New York City’s Central Park; Coolidge was a young associate of Henry Hobson Richardson, a veritable icon of American architecture.
I have thought a great deal about the vision of the founders in recent months, as we have come to a critical juncture in planning future buildings on the Stanford campus. The Stanfords were well aware that while dynamic, creative institutions must honor their history, a university must not be a static organization. “Let us not be afraid to outgrow old thoughts and ways, and dare to think on new lines as to the future of the work under our care,” Jane Stanford wrote in 1904.
Recent construction on campus pays homage to the notion that, to pursue excellence, we must dare to think along new lines. A great university must have facilities that are equipped—academically and technologically—for their times. We have found that buildings like Wallenberg Hall and the Clark Center are models for the scholarship and research of a new century.
One of the great ironies of my job is that people who see the campus for the first time often say how wonderful it must be to have so much room to grow. I certainly understand where that impression comes from. Over the years, Stanford has given much consideration to keeping the feel of “the Farm” by preserving open spaces in the core of campus and on its periphery.
The reality, however, belies the outward appearance. For example, while Stanford has more than 5,178 acres in Santa Clara County, we are constrained from building on about three-quarters of that land by the terms of our General Use Permit with the county, which confines new construction inside an “academic growth boundary” on the core campus. The pressures on that available land have become intense as the University keeps its commitment to stay on the frontiers of knowledge.
To stay on the cutting edge, we will have to learn to synthesize old and new. Perhaps the most basic change is that the density of some newer buildings will have to increase. We will need to do more “infill” construction, making better use of the already developed clusters and corridors. We also may have to take a serious look at some buildings that are not serving the academic initiative as well as they might and make some tough decisions about whether they should be replaced with buildings that better serve the University’s needs. It goes without saying that Stanford’s architecturally rich heritage will be nurtured and protected at every point.
I can also say emphatically that this does not represent a Manhattanization of the campus. There will be rigorous height and massing standards, and while new buildings may have what planners call a higher floor area ratio (total floor space divided by site area), they will be consistent with the University’s look and feel and enable us to preserve open space. In fact, preservation is part of the rationale—if we continue to build at low densities, before long we will use up the remaining open space in the core campus. The ambience provided by that open space is one of Stanford’s great assets and differentiates us from our peers. We cannot sacrifice it.
There are other changes we will have to face in the coming years as we confront these questions. We will not be able to maintain the luxury of devoting so much space to purely administrative functions on the core campus; we will have to consider whether some administrative and clerical jobs can be performed at nearby off-campus sites. We also must begin to find solutions to parking needs that do not rely on low-density surface lots but instead make more use of parking structures.
The proposals for some of our newest building projects—the Munger Graduate Residences and the new Science and Engineering Quad (SEQ 2), for instance—embody the changed reality in both the challenge and the opportunity they present. For some people, these buildings represent a disconcerting departure from the past. We take these concerns seriously and will do all we can to address them.
While we will always honor Stanford’s history, we must not be afraid to outgrow old ideas. We must embrace the responsibility inherent in the founders’ words, and ensure that their University—our University—will continue to be one of the world’s great centers of learning and research.
