A Vision for the Stanford New School

Investing in a sustainable future

In May 2020, Stanford announced the formation of the first new school in 70 years of the University’s history. The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability (SDSS) sets out to accelerate solutions to the global climate crisis. Meeting this ambitious goal will require culture change and new ways of working. Stanford called upon Gehl to set the foundation and the intention for how SDSS brings people and programs together through its future built facilities in a manner that will realize the school’s mission to advance the long-term prosperity of the planet.

The Gehl team led a comprehensive engagement process to develop three core documents to guide the future of space at SDSS that draws on input from the Stanford community, including key faculty and senior leadership stakeholders at the University: 1. The Vision; 2. Design and Programming Principles; and 3. a Design Decision Framework. Together, these documents will guide the future development and evaluation of success for the new school and will set the parameters for the school’s program and master plan.

Facilitating organizational transformation and sustainability in shared spaces

As a school of sustainability, its built facilities carry the weight of two, potentially competing, aspirations: 1. to invest in faculty, students, and staff by providing leading edge facilities to create the best environment for scholarship, and 2. to model a bold, new, highly sustainable approach to spatial and operational efficiency. As the leadership continues to define the school’s program, Gehl’s engagement with the Stanford community has led to not just clarifying a spatial program for the school, but even more importantly, it has facilitated broader organizational transformation using built space as a lightning rod to pose tough unanswered questions along the way.

Stanford will construct two new buildings for the school, as well as a series of outdoor spaces that comprise the “Sustainability Commons”.

To support the vision for the new school, Gehl facilitated expansive visioning exercises with key faculty stakeholders to develop four top-level objectives that set the central ambition for what the school’s built spaces should achieve . These pillars, based on collective reasoning and research, support the socialization of the Vision to the University at large.

The Gehl team built upon this work with in-depth ethnographic research to establish six design and programmatic principles for the spaces of the School. By synthesizing findings from stakeholder engagement research, and human observation, the team created these principles that lay out a detailed guide for the teams who will shape the spaces of the school throughout design, construction, and operation.

In Phase III, the Gehl team will finalize the Vision and ratify it with key decision makers. The team will also further hone and test the spatial implications of specific design and programming strategies. At the end of this phase, Stanford will have the information needed to begin an architectural programming and design process led by the future architect(s).

Across both new and existing buildings, the design principles advocate a fractal network composed of three main shared space typologies: 1) Central Courtyard: central gathering points where everyone comes into contact with the school’s research and culture. 2) Collaboration Hub: cross disciplinary shared spaces for coworking. 3) Home bases: social spaces where denizens feel at home and express their individuality and team identity.