This 60,000-square-foot, four-story, brick-and-sandstone- veneer structure had been mothballed for 30 years due to seismic deficiency. To enable its renewed life as the Science Teaching and Learning Center required all new building systems and a complete seismic retrofit of grand proportions. Built in 1903 and designed by Clinton Day, this is one of Stanford’s “noble buildings” constructed under the direction of Jane Stanford and is the only remaining sandstone building of that time. Its scale and verticality distinguish it from the low, Richardsonian Romanesque buildings of the original quad. Stanford identified Old Chem as a focal point of master planning efforts and the anchor for a new science quad.
A primary design goal was to maintain the presence of the building as a free-standing object in space, so the necessary building addition was carefully designed as a partially subterranean single-story whose roof is an expansive terrace aligned with the main level of the original building.
All interior structure was removed, the brick-and-sandstone shell braced, and new shotcrete walls installed. Reinforcing the unreinforced masonry shell, removing all the floors, and rebuilding were major technical challenges, as was inserting modern teaching labs, retaining the daylight character, and managing complex technical systems such as fume hoods needed to vent dangerous chemicals out of a building with a pristine gabled roof having no place for giant exhaust stacks.
