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| The facility’s nine labs are clustered around the atriums at the underground level, where they receive borrowed light. Interior windows keep science on display. Photo: Tim Griffiths Photography. |
In a 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education article titled “A Grand Unified Theory of Interdisciplinary,” Lennard J. Davis observed, "Being truly interdisciplinary means being willing to let go of what you know so well and freefall into what is only beginning to be formulated." Davis added that interdisciplinary knowledge in the future "might look very different from what we know, from what our ossified departmental and professional structures look like now.” He then asked a question: “[B]ut how many universities are willing to transform the blueprints of their internal structure?”
Stanford Univ.’s new Yang and Yamazaki Environment and Energy (Y2E2) Building demonstrates the university’s willingness to do just that.
The new building’s most striking features, designed by Portland, Ore.-based BOORA Architects, are its “very contemporary atriums and the large areas of transparent glass that express the cutting edge multidisciplinary work taking place inside,” says architect Stan Boles, who designed the facility with colleague Isaac Campbell. These atriums, which rise from the below-grade laboratory level to the interdisciplinary collaboration spaces on the three floors above, demonstrate how Boles, Campbell and the design team responded to one of the most important issues in science education today: If interdisciplinary collaboration is the most effective way to find solutions to the environmental crisis and introduce them into our social systems, what spaces best support those collaborations?
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| The Y2E2 building is organized around central atriums that serve as major circulatory and collaborative zones for the entire facility. Rendering: BOORA Architects. |
The center of a “solar system” The Y2E2 building houses nine cuttingedge laboratories, including two environmental fluid mechanics labs, three environmental engineering labs, one structures lab, and three remaining labs to be used by researchers recruited to Stanford in the future. Stanford's departments of civil engineering and environmental engineering occupy the facility, as well as the interdisciplinary Woods Institute for the Environment, and three strategic collaborations: the Center for Ocean Solutions, the Natural Capital Project and Food Security and the Environment. The building supports Stanford faculty and researchers studying environmental issues, regardless of the academic disciplines that would contain them under a more traditional model. Stanford president John Hennessy used an apt metaphor when he called this cluster of environmental scholars the “center of the environmental solar system at Stanford.”
The interdisciplinary occupants of the Y2E2 building have an ambitious and urgent set of responsibilities. Consistent with Stanford's history of research and tech transfer, its environmental scholars not only develop new knowledge about global environmental challenges but also use that knowledge to shape effective and practicable solutions, and disseminate those solutions into our social, political commercial, and economic systems.
While research that occurs within traditional academic departments can produce insights that are often important steps on the path to solutions, “Stanford believes that the complexity of today’s global environmental questions require breakthroughs of a different nature—solutions that are responsive to the complex and multifaceted structure of environmental challenges,” says Campbell. “These in turn require that experts from a variety of fields work together, in an interdisciplinary environment, put their insights on the table together, and then find synergistic new insights where those existing insights abut.”
The need for new insights: scientific and spatial With no clear precedent for how to organize spaces for such complex interdisciplinary work, Stanford began its design process with an ethnography of interdisciplinary collaboration. Point Forward, a Silicon Valley ethnographic research consultancy, facilitated a visioning process for the building.
Their work revealed that “The environmental groups within the Y2E2 building were interested in having labs, considered pure scientific entities, at the heart of their new home,” according to Point Forward principal Michael Barry. Yet social scientists working on environmental affairs, who for the first time would be housed with scientists in a single campus-wide environmental head-quarters, associated labs with insularity. Would the building provide the openness and outreach to the world beyond academia they needed to find applications for new knowledge?
Point Forward's work allowed 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, which they call Focal Areas: sustainable built systems; oceans and estuaries; fresh water; energy; and land use and conservation.
The design team then pursued the architectural forms that would provide the space needed for each Focal Areas, the connective space that would allow collaborative work between Focal Areas, and the spaces that would connect laboratory researchers to the social scientists responsible for absorbing research insights and disseminating them.
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| Lightweight furniture clustered around the atriums at all levels can easily be rearranged to serve the needs of students and faculty.Photo: Tim Griffiths Photography. |
A vertical town square Standing at the bottom of one of the building’s atriums, a visitor or user can see through a large glass window into the environmental engineering lab. The glass cap of the atrium distributes natural light through the space by reflecting it off of angular wall surfaces. The space is quite bright without the need for artificial light most of the time. “This building was designed to bring direct sunlight, a natural source of light, all the way down,” says Campbell, “for the enjoyment of the people using the labs, while lighting the spaces above as well.”
Just as the solar system has the sun at its center, the Y2E2 building has light-filled atriums at its core. Occupants gather densely around the atriums, which are furnished with comfortable upholstered seating that is lightweight and easily moveable to accommodate spontaneous group work. Students use the spaces to read, to wait, and to finalize notes taken in class on laptops. This same energy and activity occurs on all three upper levels, making the the atrium feel like a vertical neighborhood. Because of their dense co-location of labs, shared social spaces, stairways, corridors and classrooms, the atriums were designated "collaboration cores.”
The spaces that cluster around the atriums include lounges, touch-down stations, kitchens, seminar rooms, wayfinding stations and casual seating that establish visual, spatial and functional continuity between basement laboratories and upper-floor interdisciplinary collaboration and teaching spaces. By giving building occupants a frequent survey of the wide range of disciplines working within the building, the atriums help overcome barriers to innovation that arise when disciplines remain segregated from each other. Stairways and all interior corridors pass through the atriums, supporting their vitality and ensuring that building occupants interact.
With clear sightlines from the upper floors to the large windows that reveal the labs in the basement, the atriums address the scientists' concerns to connect all of the building occupants to the labs—the “pure scientific entities” referenced by the ethnographers—while also addressing the need identified by the externally oriented members of the building's community that it remain transparent and open.
The extensive use of glass at all levels reveals lab work, flexible seminar classes, administrative activities and social gatherings, inviting the members of the community within the building to interact. Says Boles, "It is through those interactions, whether pre-determined or spontaneous, that a tight-knit research community is formed.” And in what seems to be the core lesson of the project, a research community focused on problem- solving must seek to break down silos between disciplines.
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Daylighting is one of the major “green” features of the building, which
also features high-performance glazing, radiant slabs, active chilled
beams, PV panels and other sustainable features. Rendering: BOORA
Architects. |
Green features A research community focused on environmental solutions must also be a solution itself, doing more with less. Like many research buildings, Y2E2 requires fume hoods. Hoods are typically ventilation-intensive, demanding large amounts of energy to support their air supply and exhaust. The facility design at Stanford puts the fume hoods in the lab, where they serve as air returns for the ventilation system, and optimizes the distribution of the fume hoods through the space at a ratio of one hood for each 680 ft
² of area. Stanford agreed to a minimum of 6 air changes per hour, the minimum required by code, as opposed to typical standard practice of 10 changes per hour, reducing energy consumption.
The atriums represent the most visible energy- reduction strategy pursued in the building. They optimize the distribution of daylight and also collect rising warm air from occupied spaces in the building and channel that air upward, where it is released to the atmosphere through louvers at the base of the glass atriums’ caps. As this warm air escapes, it creates a vacuum within the envelope of the building drawing in cool, fresh outdoor air.
Other specific energy-reduction strategies pursued in the Y2E2 building include the design of an efficient and tight building envelope, high-performance glazing, sunshades, reduced plug loads, efficient computer server rooms, daylight harvesting, radiant slabs, active chilled beams for radiant cooling, energy recovery and photovoltaic panels. The Y2E2 building has reduced energy use 50% from a conventional Stanford lab building. The university has since mandated that this unprecedented level of sustainability be pursued on all subsequent buildings on the Science and Engineering Quad. (See the digital edition for a site plan and details:
www.labdesignnews.com/january2009.)
The Y2E2 building’s innovative design suggests that interdisciplinary spaces that bridge the gap between scientific research and social, political, cultural and economic systems, are as important as laboratory spaces—and that no modern lab building is complete without them.
Brandon G. Sprague is the communications director for BOORA Architects, the firm that designed the Stanford Y2E2 building and master planned the Stanford Science and Engineering Quad. BOORA (www.boora.com) has recently partnered with several institutions and organizations on the design of highly collaborative spaces for science, education, culture and commerce..
Published in Laboratory Design: Vol. 14, No. 1, January 2009