Over the past 20 plus years SWA has been working with Stanford University to reclaim the 100 year old master plan vision of Leland Stanford and Frederick Law Olmsted for the campus. This series of campus improvement projects has restored the historic axis, open spaces and landscape patterns. With Stanford Management Company, SWA designed the Sand Hill corridor to extend the road to link to the surrounding cities. The plan provides new housing and shopping to serve the University community. After Olmsted, the formal center of the university lost much of its clarity, and what had once been a rural context became more and more urban. It was only after the Loma Pieta earthquake and the appointment of David Neuman as campus architect that the university established campus-wide principles for restoring the campus. In addition to providing master planning for larger complexes and landscape architecture for specific buildings, SWA’s work has concentrated on all the pieces of a campus that help people circulate and gather: streets, pedestrian malls and spaces, bicycle routes, and wayfinding. Olmsted used plant material to create a play between formal and informal, ornamental and native. SWA uses the California-based plant palette as a backbone, while introducing something new for each project. The focus has not been on revisiting the old, but rather re-creating the original vision for the twenty-first century. As an example, Stanford’s athletic facilities were never addressed or even envisioned by Olmsted, but grew as a series of leftover spaces on the campus. SWA began a master plan that provided a framework for 22 individual projects under the Department of Athletics, Physical Education, and Recreation (DAPER). Using a grid that differs from that of the rest of the campus and thus distinguishes the old from the new, SWA created a new arrival plaza for cars, a pedestrian entry, parking, and track and field venues. They also rebuilt the key north-south axis through the area, a critical link with Olmsted’s original plan.
Stanford Hoover Institution Traitel Building
The Hoover Institution at Stanford University is a public policy research organization promoting the principals of individual, economic, and political freedom. CAW and SWA collaborated as a design team to create a building and site that helped promote research collaboration through open site connections and workspace.
SWA focused on a site design that s...
Stanford Branner Hall
Branner Hall is a three-story undergraduate dormitory built in 1924 by Bakewell and Brown, prominent architects of the time who were also responsible for San Francisco’s City Hall. The renovation design creates two significant courtyards: an entrance courtyard flanked with four-decades-old magnolia trees shading a seating area and an interior courtyard with a ...
RIT Global Village and Global Plaza
Global Village, a pedestrian-only infill neighborhood adjacent to Rochester Institute of Technology’s academic core, and its mixed-use centerpiece, Global Plaza, create a social heart for 17,200 students and 3,600 faculty and staff. The landscape architects and architects collaborated on an urban design that establishes multiple “crossroads” ...
Universidad de Monterrey Campus Master Plan
The project focuses on improving the sustainability of the 247-acre campus, designing a shift from a vehicular orientation to one that encourages pedestrian, bicycle, and transit use. Site design strategies employ indigenous plant materials and natural water retention and filtration for low-maintenance landscaping. Phase 1 includes site design for one of Latin...