When alumni come back to Stanford, they often remark on how our physical campus continues to change. The Farm is always evolving to meet new needs.
But a crucial part of our strategy as we build and modernize is to preserve the best of Stanford’s past.
As knowledge in academic fields expands and new opportunities emerge for Stanford to play a leadership role, our facilities must keep up. We need to provide the best possible spaces for our faculty and students to engage in collaborative academic inquiry, often across departmental lines. We also need to ensure our physical plant incorporates the latest advances in technology, energy efficiency and structural safety.
As we have built and renovated, we have made a point of honoring Stanford’s legacy and maintaining the distinctive character of the campus.
A good example is our Science and Engineering Quad, completed last year with the opening of its fourth building, the Shriram Center for Bioengineering & Chemical Engineering. It’s not just that these buildings, modern and efficient, so clearly evoke Stanford’s sandstone and red-tile architectural heritage. The quadrangle itself actually advances Frederick Law Olmsted’s original plan for the Stanford campus—a plan organized around a series of quadrangles extending laterally from the Main Quad.
The Olmsted plan included a framework of north-south and east-west malls providing long sight lines across the campus. With the Science and Engineering Quad, we have re-established a key east-west axis in the plan. Standing in the center of the new quad, one can look all the way across the Main Quad to the distant steps of the Bing Wing of Green Library. That axis has been echoed in the arts district, where the new Bing Concert Hall was constructed to directly face the historic Cantor Arts Center at the opposite end of Museum Way.
Throughout campus, including in the arts district where the McMurtry Building for the Department of Art & Art History will be completed this year, new and innovative buildings feature a distinctively Stanford palette of colors and materials. Open courtyards, evoking the Main Quad and highlighting the campus connection with the California landscape, have been incorporated into many new facilities, such as the Knight Management Center. We also have worked to preserve open spaces by pursuing underground parking where possible, as at Wilbur Field and a new parking project currently under way at Roble Field.
We also honor Stanford’s past by literally preserving it. We have completed exterior face-lifts for two iconic campus buildings, Memorial Auditorium and the Cantor Arts Center. We have been working to restore the historic red-and-white pavers around the Main Quad as well as stained glass panels in Memorial Church. Two historic statues of Benjamin Franklin and Johann Gutenberg, removed from the front face of Wallenberg Hall in 1949 as part of a renovation project, have been recreated and installed overlooking The Oval.
With the Arrillaga Outdoor Education and Recreation Center providing new workout and swimming facilities on the west side of campus, the nearby 1931 Roble Gym is being refurbished to provide improved space for drama, dance and other artistic pursuits of our students. Most ambitiously, we are rehabilitating the Old Chemistry Building, opened in 1903 but declared a structural hazard and closed in 1987. It will be transformed into a new Science Teaching and Learning Center, anchoring the biology and chemistry district of the campus.
At Stanford, planning for the future involves honoring our past. As our physical campus continues to change, we intend to preserve a strong sense of place that, for our alumni, will always make Stanford home.
John Hennessy was the president of Stanford University.
