New Redwood City Campus sets the standard for green infrastructure in the region.
Stanford University has officially broken ground on their first major expansion beyond the main campus. O|CB spearheaded the site planning and design for the new Stanford Redwood City Campus. The new campus will house primarily non-academic functions. O|CB placed particular emphasis on place-making strategies throughout the site, working closely with Stanford to define and implement outdoor amenity spaces for dining, meeting, exercising and socializing.
Phase I will include office space, a child care center, a parking garage, a fitness center, and a dining pavilion—all configured around a central Greenway and 2.4 acres of publicly accessible open space which enhances connectivity between the adjacent communities and the new campus. The public ‘heart’ of the campus will be an oak-shaded piazza and transit center which fronts Broadway Street. Outdoor dining areas, informal performance spaces, mobile food services and various transit modes—including a possible future trolley to downtown Redwood City—will create an active street-life for campus visitors, employees and neighborhood residents.
O|CB’s water savvy landscape design contended with technical issues ranging from soil compaction and contamination to reclaimed water for irrigation with a high salt and chemical compound content that many plants will not tolerate. In fact, Redwood trees, Redwood City’s name sake, won’t grow in reclaimed water, and native plants do not necessarily grow in non-native soils. To create an adaptive landscape responsive to the site’s challenges, O|CB partnered with a horticulturist to develop a palette of plant species resilient enough to withstand and succeed on the new Stanford campus. The resulting landscape will be a tapestry of native plant species interwoven with plant species adapted to our region. The finished product will be a beautiful landscape suited to the local climate and particularly tolerant of the on-site soil and water conditions.
To learn more about this project visit Architect Newspaper and The Mercury News for more coverage.