Stanford University School of Medicine Center for Academic Medicine

2024 Design Awards Citation Recipient

Stanford University School of Medicine Center for Academic Medicine

The Center for Academic Medicine at Stanford University is a refuge of respite and rejuvenation.

Fondly called the “Treehouse at Stanford”, the Center was designed to address physician burnout, establishing a restorative workplace away from the hectic patient care environment that enables clinicians to focus on their academic research endeavors and improve overall patient outcomes.

Nestled in the southwest corner of Stanford’s historic arboretum, the Center promotes interaction between occupants and the natural environment. Lifting the west wing two stories above the ground draws the arboretum under and through the structure, forming a large two-story porch below. Stanford’s community can socialize and collaborate in a diverse mix of outdoor spaces that are directly connected to nature. By expanding the arboretum into the project site, the Center is essentially inside the arboretum itself.

The design moves 20 percent of the program and major vertical and horizontal circulation beyond the building’s walls. Porches, balconies, and covered walkways extend from the building while upper terraces create the sensation of being in the trees. These diverse spaces are climatically tuned to provide comfort, allowing occupants to collaborate in a lush, naturally ventilated outdoor environment.

Inside, nobody is more than 30 feet from a window and views of nature. The colors, textures and patterns of the arboretum’s landscape have been abstracted to form a biophilic palette for the interior.

The Center leverages its connection with nature to enhance the quality of life and health and well-being of occupants and the Stanford Medicine community.

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It took into account passive elements of design in the formation of the building, which doesn’t always happen. Well integrated passive design, mature response to both design details and environmental performance. The jury appreciates the indoor/outdoor integration, landscape, and facade response.

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Measure 1: Design for Integration

The Center provides diverse research disciplines within a common, collaborative environment. The Mediterranean climate and an adjacent nature preserve inspired the team to develop a master plan for the campus to act as an extension of the arboretum experience by featuring connected interior and exterior workspaces. Emulating the coast live oak’s role as an ecosystem engineer, narrow wings envelop a courtyard providing diverse settings for collaboration near the woods and in plazas, balconies, walkways, porches and terraces.
Externally, the courtyard allows the arboretum to flow through the buildings toward the medical campus. Porches and plazas extend from the building to form summer and winter gardens, places for activity, reflection, interaction, or concentration. A permeable landscaped courtyard seamlessly connects both the university and public community to the arboretum’s walking trails.
Internally, the workplace promotes interaction between medical practitioners and nature. The narrow architectural forms grant plentiful access to daylight and views, adjacent trees and bird sounds. Biophilic design blurs the boundaries of this indoor-outdoor workplace environment.
With 20 percent of the building program established outdoors, the project demonstrates that economic, energy, carbon and resource goals are best achieved by building only what is necessary and letting nature do the rest.

Measure 2: Design for Equitable Communities

The team worked with Stanford Medical School’s leadership and Clinical Educators to plan a workplace that would accommodate clinical faculty and staff in a highly collaborative work environment. The program needed to accommodate departments of unspecified sizes and easily adapt to future changes. The team conducted space needs analysis and offered recommendations for department chair suites, office sizes, desk sharing policies, and areas for idea-sharing, concentration, and relaxation. Besides establishing new benchmarks for clinical workspace and research, workshops established the vision for the Center as an environment that offers “quality of life” support for clinical faculty.

Measure 3: Design for Ecosystems

The Center’s site and landscape is designed as a campus in the Arboretum. Located on a former surface parking lot, the Center restores nearly half of the previously impervious site into publicly accessible greenspace increasing the on-site vegetative area by 85% through native, drought-tolerant plantings. The Center allows the coastal live oaks and supporting understory species of the arboretum to come within the courtyard and surround the building on the other two sides, expanding the arboretum into the site and creating a biodiversity corridor for the native fauna. 9 mature trees were preserved or transplanted on-site from across the campus.

Measure 4: Design for Water

The team took an aggressive approach to water conservation and reuse. In addition to a 44% reduction in water through the use of low-flow fixtures, the Center is connected to university’s central plant. This includes a heat recovery chiller plant, ensuring that the cooling water is provided by reclaimed water. During site excavation, groundwater was diverted to a nearby pond, and routed back to the Center for establishment irrigation. The entire roof is a water capture device, with each drain leading to a dedicated landscape zones. During drought season, the campus uses offsite reclaimed water for irrigation.

Measure 5: Design for Economy

The design expands 20% of the building program outdoors and undercover across the Center’s courtyard, porches, balconies, and terraces, including primary vertical and horizontal circulation, casual workplace, conferencing, and collaboration spaces. This reduced first-cost expenditure, upfront MEP costs, and lowered overall construction cost of the building. In the long term, the strategy also reduces energy consumption, carbon footprint, and operating costs over the lifespan of the building.

The program was appropriated for departments of unspecified sizes and easily adapts to future changes. The design achieved an 86% building space efficiency ratio, 56% greater than Stanford’s recommended guidelines.

Measure 6: Design for Energy

The Center was tailored to take full advantage of the site – from planning decisions driven by sun, wind, and ecosystem to building details. The optimized façade responds to differing environmental conditions on each face, meeting specific solar heat gain targets while optimizing comfort and daylight. The all-electric building’s integrated systems are connected to a central plant enabling hydronic provision of cooling and heat recovery. With 20% of the building program outdoors, the reduced EUI enables a net-zero ready building which is further offset by an off-site solar array, supplying 98% renewable energy, enabling the Center to achieve net-zero energy.

Measure 7: Design for Well-Being

Biophilic design elements blurs the boundaries of this indoor-outdoor workplace environment and supports the health and wellbeing of occupants. Externally, the courtyard allows the arboretum to flow through the buildings toward the medical school hospitals. Porches and plazas extend from the building to form summer and winter gardens. Internally, the workplace promotes interaction between medical specialists and the outdoor environment. No one is more than 30 feet from a window, enabling 90% of occupied spaces have a direct view to the outdoors. The narrow architectural forms grant plentiful access to daylight and natural ventilation, serving as a connection to nature.

Measure 8: Design for Resources

The structural team focused on a strategic column grid to align the column grid layout for the U-Shape above grade structural steel frame and the below grade concrete parking structure column grid. This improved constructability and lower cost for the building. It was also a crucial early step in integrating the braced frame locations and functional spaces to weave the various building components together to achieve high performance from multiple systems simultaneously; structural optimization of the grid and lateral system layout, access to daylight to reduce building energy demands, highly functional interior spaces and efficient parking layouts.

Measure 9: Design for Change

Due to the university’s proximity to California’s San Andreas fault line, the building’s structural system was optimized to withstand a major seismic event. The team used computational performance modeling of the structural system to provide an expressive, integrated skeleton that supports resilient flexibility. The courtyard and west porch have been activated to provide alternative spaces, presenting flexible work environments during the COVID-19 pandemic. By providing 20% of the program through a diversity of exterior environments occupants have a workplace that is flexible to distancing, enriched by fresh air, and climatically tuned in response to detailed universal thermal comfort index simulations.

Measure 10: Design for Discovery

The design team conducted post-occupancy evaluations on occupant comfort through indoor and outdoor environmental quality measurements and informal interviews. The team also conducted ecosystem services analyses to measure the project’s ecological performance in terms of carbon sequestration, air quality, water quantity and quality, soil quality, biodiversity, and wellbeing. Compared to the previous development (i.e., surface parking lot), the project illustrated a 400% increase in ecosystem services. The analyses also measured the impact of expanding the green roof on available roof area for future consideration, which resulted in an additional 200% increase in ecosystem services.