Stanford’s campus, primarily the Quadrangle, enjoys an international reputation as one of the most beautiful anywhere. But for a century the external appearance of new construction has strayed ever further from our core identity. The last beautiful campus buildings (the art gallery, Roble Hall and the Knoll) appeared before 1920.

The most appealing Quad elements are red tile roofs, rough stone texture, enveloping arcades and ornamental carvings. Tourist photographers focus on Quad corners, where stone carving is abundant. Even the cover photo of The Campus Guide to Stanford University depicts a plethora of carvings in the foreground, with­­­­ Memorial Church’s decorated façade beyond.

After the Quad was completed, ornamentation gradually disappeared from campus.  Some newer buildings feebly imitate the Quad’s color and roof tiles, and abstractly its arcades with shallow arcs and square, unadorned columns. But many recent starkly modern abstractions bear no resemblance to Stanford’s core.

In 1948, campus planning director Eldridge Spencer departed radically from Stanford’s historical styles, stating that he’d achieve design unity via the abstract concept of form. He encountered intense alumni opposition when his modernist design of Stern Hall became public. Undeterred, he built more modernist buildings here until continuing controversy led to his resignation in 1959.

Subsequent Stanford campus architects have presided over progressive industrialization of the face of the campus, culminating in the new medical complex and its vast expanses of glass curtain wall. These buildings could stand in any city in the world. From a photo, nobody would know where they were located, because they have no identity.

Why no attempts at beauty or local identity on a beautiful campus? I think it’s modernist ideology. Modern architects find ornament superfluous, and want to efface memory of past styles.

A Stanford Daily column of October 8, 2007 explains this point of view. The author was a new graduate student fresh out of the architecture program at M.I.T., calling herself Little Ms. Modern.

“The descendents [sic] of [the] first concrete boxes are being designed today, continuing their ideals of functionality, clarity, and elegance in a refreshing variety of shapes and materials, updated for what modern life has now become. Whereas those old brick colonials [at Harvard] feel cramped, dark, and clumsy, a modern building effortlessly accommodates modern life, and does much more. Contemporary technology provides better natural light, reduced energy consumption, larger and more open spaces, improved climate control, and zestier geometry.”

But does traditional style necessarily equate with poor physical functionality? Must new buildings eschew stylistic compatibility with the old? Is a uniquely Stanford architectural identity unimportant?

Last autumn I conducted a survey of architectural style preferences in Palo Alto, which to date has garnered 960 responses. Results have remained consistent since response size was 70. Six campus buildings are depicted.

Survey respondents rate historic buildings more aesthetically pleasurable than modernist buildings by a ratio of about 3:1. They believe architectural ornaments are still appropriate today by a more than 10:1 margin.

Ms Modern wrote, “Visit … new de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and tell me you don’t feel the electrifying juice of modernity pulsing through your veins.” Yet in the survey, the de Young lost to the Stanford Art Museum by a 2:1 margin, or almost 3:1 without architects’ responses. The Packard Electrical Engineering Building lost to Wallenberg Hall (in the Quad) 23% to 77%.

Expecting that we wouldn’t like the de Young, the modern maiden concluded her article: “I certainly won’t be changing my own mind, and it would be a pity if you continued to wallow in bad taste forever.”

In my experience, Ms. Modern’s ideas and attitudes represent those of the ruling class of modern architects. They are diametrically opposed to those of the rest of the populace, including the sophisticated Palo Alto and Stanford communities.

But who has the more universally valid aesthetic taste, and whose taste should new campus building designs cater to, that of architect ideologues, or that of building users and passersby who must look at these buildings every day for the next hundred years?

See a sample of the survey results online at www.paloaltoarchitecture.info.

-Douglas Alton Smith Ph.D. ’77