The Stanford University School of Medicine tasked the design team with transforming a 1960’s era Research Park office building into a modern workplace for medical science. The design team met this challenge by transfiguring the existing building; a low slung, square edifice of long, windowless, cast-stone/tilt-up concrete walls with little sense of place into a vibrant, light-filled research environment that blurs the boundaries between the natural world outside, and the technological world inside.

Given that one could easily be a hundred feet from natural light and views in the existing building, the team reconceived the interior by layering the program from inside to out. In a three-tiered horizontal layer of program spaces that begin deep in the floorplate, each successive spatial layer opens onto the next; barrowing daylight and outdoor views to nature from the previous.

This interior spatial layering touches the outside environment in two ways. Skylights on the roof bring daylight deep into two-story open gathering and circulation spaces. Out-of-date glass window walls at the north and south ends of the existing building are replaced with simple origami-like folds of new glass walls. These folds of floor-to-ceiling glass “float” above a wide-planked boardwalk along the edge of the outdoor gardens on the north and south sides of the existing building, further blurring the lines between interior and external environments.

Graced by the cool blue cypress and verdant Bosc pear-green of the north and south gardens, the color palette underlaying this binuclear program melds inside to out seamlessly throughout the spatial layout, while underscoring the modernity of this scientific facility.

Photography: Bruce Damonte