Stanford University: The Campus Guide, An Architectural Guide, Richard Joncas, Dadid J. Neuman, and Paul V. Turner, foreword by Gerhard Casper, c. 1999.
Foreword by the President, Stanford University, 1999.
The university as a place -- localized in time and space -- has found its most striking expression in the Anglo-Saxon world. Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Williams and Mary, Yale, Princeton, Virginia, and Stanford are all physical places, campuses to which students remove themselves for a number of years. They are also places students feel connected for the rest of their lives.
One of those present [recent reunion] was a Stanford alumna who was born and raised on the East Coast and who had graduated some thirty years ago. She described her reaction to the Stanford campus as she approached it coming up Palm Drive: "I was stunned. The Spanish architecture was outside my experience. The Main Quad and the foothills behind it were physically different from anything that I had thought of in relation to college. At first, I was not sure I liked it."
Her direct and vivid reaction was admirably refreshing. The complex that is made up of the Outer Quad, Memorial Court, and the Main Quad, and which is characterized by its Beaux Arts approach, Romanesque design, and the vast expanse of the California Mission style courtyard, with its arcades and Memorial Church, constitutes an ensemble whose effect is unique in American campus architecture.
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