Boora Architects

Within the new Yang and Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building (Y2E2), Stanford's environmental scholars are forging a new interdisciplinary research approach that will yield the breakthroughs required for watershed solutions to the environmental crisis. Building on its long history of innovation and transfer, Stanford is making major investments in institutional infrastructure to support such interdisciplinary work. The Y2E2 building also breaks new ground as a Beyond LEED building, halving energy consumption and reducing potable water consumption by 90 percent.

The Y2E2 building is the first of four buildings to be completed between now and 2010 that will complete Stanford’s new Science and Engineering Quad (SEQ). In 2004, Stanford hired Boora to develop a master plan and design guidelines for this quad, which will comprise 500,000 square feet of interdisciplinary teaching and research space within four highly-sustainable Beyond LEED buildings.

A typical organizational structure for interdisciplinary work is the academic institute, which convenes faculty around a subject matter but provides little or no fixed infrastructure.  Y2E2, however, would be a building that would stand for hundreds of years. A study by Point Forward, the Silicon Valley-based ethnographic research consultancy, helped the building occupants to make a critical organizational decision before beginning design: rather than dividing the building into academic departments and assigning space accordingly, the multidisciplinary occupants chose instead to assign space based on their research topics.

The building's occupants chose these topical study groups, called Focal Areas, to reflect the integrated nature of their subject matter.  They named them Sustainable Built Systems, Oceans and Estuaries, Fresh Water, Energy, and Land Use and Conservation. The design team then began the work of finding the architectural forms that would support this interdisciplinary organizational structure.

To ensure that even the interdisciplinary focal areas did not become siloed from each other, Point Forward envisioned several universal shared spaces in the building.  They termed those spaces collaboration cores.  The collaboration cores would be characterized by dense co-location of labs, shared social spaces, stairways, corridors, classrooms, and multiple levels of vertical space connecting people on multiple floors.

The four contemporary atria that rise the full height of the Y2E2 building are the architectural form given to Point Forward's collaboration core concept.  Each Focal Area is anchored to the collaboration cores, spaces that allow the multiple disciplines represented in the building to collaborate, to remain connected to the basement laboratories producing research innovations on which their work depends, and to remain transparent and open in response to the needs of the more extroverted social science disciplines.

Like vertical town squares, the Collaboration Cores serve as the interactive hubs for the building.  They are made up of social spaces including project studios, lounges, kitchens, stairways, and touch-down stations.

The atria draw Palo Alto's abundant light to all levels of the building -- including the basement, where the building's labs are located -- reducing electrical demand for lighting, while also serving as stacks for the building's natural ventilation system.

The building's nine laboratories occupy 54,000 square feet and house multiple departments, each with unique research and teaching programs.  They include two environmental fluid mechanics laboratories, three environmental engineering laboratories, one structures lab, and three remaining labs to be used by researchers recruited to Stanford in the future.

Instead of double ventilating labs -- with one system for the labs and a second independent system for the shared fume hood rooms -- the design economizes by having the fume hoods multitask.  The design locates the fume hoods in the lab where they also serve as air returns for the ventilation system.

The building also houses traditional classrooms with excellent acoustics, healthy finishes, state of the art instructional technology, and moveable wall and furniture systems.  These will allow the building to accommodate growth and change in the building's uses over time.

A social entry accommodates large gatherings while also supporting social interactions between classes. Retractable walls are used on the exterior to allow activities taking place in the social entry to spill onto the outdoor terrace.

Private offices feature light shelves that light the space with daylight. Glass partitions also introduce light from the atria.

The design of the Y2E2 building extends this historic campus context, giving it a modern expression. Delivering this contextually sensitive architecture today required the design team to find an alternative to the labor-intensive construction processes used in Stanford’s original buildings. Along with an integrated design build process, where general contractor Hathaway Dinwdiddie served as our partner, a precast exterior wall system allowed the project to be delivered at a very high-quality level within its modest cost per square foot target and its aggressive schedule, which reduced construction duration by over 40%.