Anderson Collection Gallery at Stanford University
Stanford, California

The new Anderson Collection Gallery will house the private modern art collection of the Anderson family at Stanford University.  Adjacent to the Cantor Museum, it will be a modern ‘Pavilion’ style building designed by Ennead Architects with large glass walls and windows framing views to the surrounding landscape.  The landscape design seamlessly completes a grove setting for the gallery, despite challenges such as a former parking lot, building site and construction staging ground to the north and west; and uses a combination of devices to hold building and site in juxtaposition, mutually contrasting and complementing one another.  Site elements include Entry Plazas, Sculpture Courts, and outdoor Event, Dining, and Performance Spaces. 

Careful attention has been given to sustainable site strategies for stormwater management, native plants and heat island mitigation.  A retention basin over the former parking lot is designed as an undulating, sculpturally contoured basin reinforced with overlapping drifts of planting and canopy trees.  The topography erases the interruptive impact that the parking lot had on the naturally sloping site, and helps tie the sides of the building back together again as a cohesive grove.  Around the base of the building, an articulated ‘plinth’ of dark, angular, slate-like stone is held by a knife-edge slate-colored retaining wall.  The plinth visually grounds the building and preserves the existing grade around a number of large existing oak trees.  At the east entry, a precast concrete seat wall reinforces the plinth edge.  In the same dark slate color, polished to a high gloss, it is set on concealed piers so it appears to float above the grade, framing the entry to the gallery and physically containing the space of the entry plaza, while preserving the existing oaks. 

Project Team:  Ennead Architects, O|CB, Devcon, Degenkolb Engineers, Taylor Engineering, Engineering Enterprise, Cornerstone Earth Group, Atelier Ten, Brandston Partnership, R.A. Heintges & Associates, Robert F. Mahoney Associates