Stanford Report, August 6, 2003

Tully Shelley III of MBT Architecture, left, and David Nelson of Foster and Partners helped turn the vision of the Bio-X Leadership Council into a reality. Their teams, with Hathaway Dinwiddie Construction and other partners, reinvented the lab space and finished the project on schedule, safely and within budget. Photo: L.A. Cicero

"The whole nature of the Bio-X program is much bigger than this building," said David Nelson, a partner at Foster and Partners, the London-based award-winning architectural firm led by Sir Norman Foster. "This building has become a tour de force in connecting old with new across 100 years of evolution from the Quad to the Med Center."

The $138 million building -- experimental in all senses of the word -- accomplishes that feat by embracing what Nelson calls "an inherent anarchy." But that anarchy is aimed at creating the alchemy to spur discovery.

"People in the building are affected greatly by what the building tells them about communication," said Bio-X Leadership Council Chair Matt Scott. "This is a building that draws them in. People walk into the courtyard and are immediately embraced by the building. The result of that is a sense of community center, a sense of belonging, a sense that people doing very different kinds of things are all welcome here."

Half of the roughly 700 Clark Center occupants already have moved into their new labs, said Scott, whose lab was the first to take occupancy. The remainder should trickle in by early September. The first interdisciplinary scientific symposium in the building took place on July 31, and the center's grand opening is set for Oct. 24.

A campus 'hinge'

"The building is what I like to call a hinge," said David Neuman, university architect and associate vice provost for planning. "It hinges between the core academic traditional Stanford campus and the Medical Center and its differences, both in terms of its planning relationships as well as its architectural relationships." The center's limestone face matches the warm, stony hues of nearby contemporary buildings, and a Golden Gate Bridge-colored paint trim closely matches the traditional rust-colored roof tiles of the Quad. Landscaping by Peter Walker & Partners of Berkeley preserved old trees on the site to incorporate the old into the new.

The three-story building features three wings enfolding a courtyard, at the center of which is a circular stage for events such as concerts. Beneath the stage, underground, is a round auditorium with 150 Cardinal-red seats. The room is rimmed with a skylight that can constrict like the iris of an eye to block incoming light.

Construction of the 146,000-square-foot building was completed "on schedule, safely, and within budget," said David Bowden, senior vice president and chief strategic officer for Hathaway Dinwiddie, which has renovated numerous Stanford buildings, notably Memorial Church after the 1989 earthquake. At the peak of the Clark Center's construction, 450 workers were on the job, he said. "It was a wonderful team effort," he said. "The building has certainly pushed the boundaries of laboratory design."

Realizing a vision

Foster associate Christopher West agrees. "The reason is that the original faculty members who started the project really had a vision about working completely differently, and they brought us on board with a real challenge, which was to reinvent the lab completely." Structurally, the building combines rigidity with flexibility to facilitate the use of sensitive equipment such as lasers and microscopes and to withstand seismic activity.

Reinventing the lab space was a challenge because different types of research demand different facilities. For example, "wet" labs for chemistry require fume hoods, chemical storage cabinets and safety stations, whereas "dry" labs for computer science need wiring for network connectivity. "We had to create a lab that could adapt to each kind of science," West said.

To that end, the services -- gas, water, electricity, networking -- come into the room through the ceiling for quick and easy connectivity. Researchers can just roll their lab benches to the desired spot, plug in and start working. Even faculty offices -- frosted-glass cubes -- are mobile. In traditional labs, the services dictate the floorplan. Here, the services serve the floorplan, said Tully Shelley III, architect and principal at MBT, a partner in the project with expertise in building laboratories. The firm designed the Beckman Center and the Mechanical Engineering Research Laboratory and is currently working on the Stanford Auxiliary Library and an expansion of the Lucas Center.

The rolling lab benches are shorter than their usual stationary counterparts. Small components allow the space to be used "in a very different way," Nelson said. "You're not literally confined by a rectilinear plan." That mobility, coupled with a lot of open space, blurs the boundaries between labs. And the existence of "hotel space" -- bright yellow lab benches designated for visitors -- folds another ingredient into the recipe.

With a design that turns traditional labs inside-out, the Clark Center's lab support space -- fermentation rooms, refrigerators, chemical storage cabinets, etc. -- are pushed to the lab's periphery rather than occupying central space.

And when researchers from the 23 university departments represented in the Clark Center want to take a break and grab a bite to eat, they can gather in the first-floor restaurant. "When you go to that sort of place you're still actually working, but the brain is in a different state," Nelson said. "You're eating, and there's something [mentally] still going on, but you're not as focused. Many people here have had experiences in other laboratories where the breakthrough happened in the restaurant." The restaurant, with seating to exceed the needs of just the Clark Center occupants, is intended to be a magnet for researchers from other buildings.

If all goes as hoped, Bio-X may spur some of the most radical scientific experiments of its time. But it is also a social experiment. With all that sharing going on, Bio-Xers may want to draw straws to work out an answer to their first collaborative question: Who's going to keep track of throwing out the moldy stuff in the lab refrigerator?

The walls facing the courtyard of the new James H. Clark Center are made of glass. “People walk into the courtyard and are immediately embraced by the building,” says Matt Scott, chair of the Bio-X Leadership Council. Photo: L.A. Cicero

University Architect David Neuman sees the Clark Center as a "hinge" connecting nearby buildings, both traditional and contemporary. Photo: L.A. Cicero

• Bio-X
  
• Neuman narrates a visual tour of the Clark Center's exterior