Saket Vora

I might have mentioned the Yang and Yamazaki Environment and Energy (Y2E2) building before. It is the home for the civil and environmental engineering department, the Woods Institute for the Environment, the Precourt Center for Energy Efficiency…you get the idea. So it was a must that their building be a campus leader in efficient and sustainable construction and design.

For my advanced topics in energy efficiency in buildings class, we had guest speaker from the architecture firm boora and a building design engineer from Arup who worked on the building. They spoke of the design motivation of the Y2E2 building and Stanford’s historical architectural designs and plans, the importance of the building’s programming and how it affected design, and then into the very features of the building itself. It was neat to hear from the folks who designed it why they did the things they did. A few notes:

Transition Zones

Transition zones help ease the visitor into and out of the building environment. There is the courtyard formed the the L-shape of the building, then the visitor walks into arcades similar to those found in the Main Squad. Lobbies with 4 story atria greet the visitor, who then moves further into the building into more enclosed offices. Not only does this strategy influence lighting, it also helps with expectations.

Attention to detail with daylighting

This is looking downward in one of the atria. Directly in front you can see conference spaces — glass walled rooms located at the intersection of wings to encourage shared spaces, collaboration with different areas, etc. Note the stepped back design? The rooms are not directly on top of each other — the bottom room juts out farther. Take a look farther down:

The bottom area with the couches is the basement level. These atria penetrate through all 4 floors and the stepped back design was to ensure that despite angle of the sun in the winter, sunlight could reach all the way down to the basement and warm up the thermal mass that helps regulate temperatures. All the floors are made of concrete, making the building thermally massive.

Solar Gain Mitigation Strategies

Directly in front is the north facing side of teh building and on the right is the east facing side. Note the difference in window design. The north windows are not recessed heavily and have minimal framing. The east facing windows, which see the morning sun, are deeply recessed with vertical fins to further prevent sunlight from entering. This reduces the cooling load of the building while still aiding in daylighting. On the south side, overhangs are present to shade the windows during the summer months but admit light in the winter months.

These are but three elements to a very complex integrated design. The Y2E2 building is the first in the new Science and Engineering Quad (SEQ 2) which is currently under construction behind the Packard electrical engineering building.

This is a view of the construction from a terrace on the Y2E2 building. Click for a larger panorama. SEQ 2 will also house the new Engineering Center (the octagonal building in the center of the above photo), the School of Engineering HQ, a Nanocenter, and a Chemical Engineering building. It is also represents a recommittment to original architect Frederick Olmsted’s vision of a quadrangle focused campus. Olmsted was one of the most landscape architects of the time — he did Central Park in NYC.

Above is the original plan for Stanford, which is an aerial view with Palm Drive pointing south. A view of the proposed SEQ 2 quad:

And the image below shows how the SEQ 2 will occupy Quad #2 space on Olmsted’s original plan. These photos are from an article in Portland Spaces.

As the architect from boora said — it really comes down to “a sense of place.”