Honoring a campus' historic landscape design, while enhancing the facility to inspire collaboration.
{"autoplay":"true","autoplay_speed":"8000","speed":"1000","arrows":"true","dots":"false","loop":"true","nav_slide_column":5,"rtl":"false"}
{"autoplay":"true","autoplay_speed":"8000","speed":"1000","arrows":"true","dots":"false","loop":"true","nav_slide_column":5,"rtl":"false"}

DETAILS

LocationStanford, California, United States
ClientStanford University
SizeMaster Plan Area: 3.5 acres; New Building, Courtyards, and Entry: .5 acres

Sitting atop a hill above Stanford University’s campus, the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) has long been a destination for groundbreaking thinkers, with 30 Nobel Prize winners, 25 Pulitzer Prize winners, 52 MacArthur Fellows, and 176 members of the National Academy of Sciences among the esteemed class of Fellows. Situated between the campus’ well-known Stanford Dish and undeveloped pastures, CASBS occupies a unique place at the wildland-urban interface, functioning as a campus within a campus—an enclave for innovation.

To shape the next chapter of this legacy, SWA collaborated with Olson Kundig to revitalize CASBS’s mid-century modern setting, honor Thomas Church’s original landscape design, and enhance the facility to inspire collaboration.

Olson Kundig introduced the first new building to the campus since its founding in 1954. Strategically positioned, the new administration building frames a central courtyard, transforming what was once paved asphalt into an inviting social hub. Oriented for optimal sunlight, the courtyard is marked by prominent existing trees to enhance their presence. The trees are complemented by a series of stone retaining walls, referencing the feature often used in Church’s designs to navigate grade changes across the site and improve the connection between gathering spaces.

With no original records of Church’s design to reference, SWA drew from a portfolio of nearly 300 Stanford projects and studied Church’s broader portfolio to develop a list of signature plantings appropriate for the historic campus. The selected tree palette was expanded using a wider range of more adaptable and climate-resilient oak species, creating the next generation of oak canopy shading the complex.

The completed courtyard establishes a welcoming entrance to the CASBS campus. It also serves as a development tool, leveraging the majestic California landscape to create an atmosphere that invites engagement and events that spark new ideas. As the first major update to the CASBS campus in 60 years, the collaboration building and courtyard enhance the campus experience, honoring the Fellows of the past while inspiring those of the future for decades to come.

Related Projects

University of Houston Law Center

The University of Houston Law Center, established in 1947, has earned national recognition, with three of its programs ranked in the top 10 by U.S. News and World Report. Despite these academic accolades, the original Law Center building faced significant challenges due to its location and design. Situated in Houston’s low-lying coastal prairie ecoregion...

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 ...

Scripps College Residence

The landscape design for the new residence hall builds on the Scripps College campus tradition of landscaped courtyards formed by buildings and circulation corridors. In doing so, the design helps to establish a new east-west axis connecting the main campus to future recreation facilities to the east. The project also improves interrelationships and connection...

CREATE Campus, National University of Singapore

CREATE, the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise, is an international research campus and innovation hub at the National University of Singapore. Home to a vibrant scientific community, CREATE hosts the National Research Foundation, interdisciplinary research centers from top universities, and corporate laboratories such as the Singapore...

Shanghai International Dance Center

Inspired by the idea of movement, this collaboration with Studios Architecture achieves an artful harmony of building with landscape, program with site. The image of a dancer in grand jete kindled the designers’ imaginations and served as the project’s organizing idea. Asia’s first professional dance complex is tucked between a freeway, a subway station...

CyFair College

The CyFair College Campus is a model for environmentally responsible development and restoration of a sensitive ecosystem. Located on the suburban fringe of northwest Houston, it is surrounded by the Katy Prairie, an endangered ecosystem of coastal prairie grass meadows marked by groves of trees and connected to a system of wetlands, bayous, and ponds.

...

Scripps College Residence

The landscape design for the new residence hall builds on the Scripps College campus tradition of landscaped courtyards formed by buildings and circulation corridors. In doing so, the design helps to establish a new east-west axis connecting the main campus to future recreation facilities to the east. The project also improves interrelationships and connection...

Westmark School

Westmark is a private, second-through-12th-grade school focused on providing quality education to students with learning differences. The project itself has been divided into five separate phases, which will include site renovations for classrooms, courtyards, playgrounds, etc. The school provides a unique student experience that re-envisions traditional educa...