The challenge before the architects at San Francisco-based Anshen & Allen was to transform an 11-acre, four-building vacated dot-com office complex into a satellite campus of the Stanford Hospital & Clinics system and create something “that would be the envy of everyone.”
The design award judges say they met the challenge—and then some.
“Some projects had cooler, hipper designs, but they are who they are and this really reflects that,” says award judge and design architect Debra Harris, president and CEO of Austin, Texas-based RAD Consultants. “I just think that, when you walked onto that space, it'd be like ‘Yeah, that's the Stanford I know.' It denotes their reputation for quality and excellence.”
Design awards judge and healthcare architect Steven Steinberg, a principal at Emeryville, Calif.-based Ratcliff, describes the Stanford Medicine Outpatient Center in Redwood City, Calif., as “a nice, clean project,” while judge Paul Reich, a project architect with Chicago-based Roula Associates Architects, calls it “clean and well-detailed.”
“It seemed very well-executed,” Reich says.
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Read more profiles of the Design Awards winners The center houses seven outpatient clinics: dermatology, digestive health, imaging, orthopedic surgery, pain management, sports medicine and a 20-room sleep-medicine facility.
Designers used a central “healing garden” to replicate the feel of a Stanford campus quad, and reduced the office park feel of the property by using walkways and atriums to connect and unify the buildings and creating a single point for patient entry.
“Stanford, like many colleges, is running out of space on their main campus,” says Lynn Befu, an associate principal and director of interior architecture with Anshen & Allen.
Explaining that the project required creating a facility that would be embraced by the physicians who work for the school of medicine, Befu says, “We asked, ‘What can we do that would create a campus that would be the envy of everyone and make them want to go to it?' ”
