Customer Reviews

Stanford University: The Campus Guides

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This is another volume is the Princeton series on U.S. universities, using a similar format: the campus is divided into "walks," with each chapter covering one walk and commenting on each building. As one reviewer here did not seem to understand, this is not the insider's guide to Stanford, nor even a full history of the University. That said, the reviewer made a telling criticism: in a campus defined by its setting, showing the buildings without showing the surrounding trees and open areas gives a false sense of the appearance of the place.

When compared with other volumes in this series, "Stanford" is a little better than average. The entries are brief and factual, without the rather elliptical architecture speak that characterizes some of the Ivy League volumes. Most buildings are represented by a small photograph. There are a very few full page pictures.

Based on the date of publication, this book was not written for the Princeton series, but was adapted for it. The maps appear to have been added more recently, and the method of presentation is different from the other volumes. Here, the buildings are considered not by location but by period, starting with the original structures (including ones destroyed in the 1906 quake) and proceeding up to the present. This means that adjacent entries are adjacent in date of construction, not location. Building 71 may be half a mile away from building 72. In the original publication, written for a Stanford audience, this was not a problem, but it may be difficult for those who do not know the campus. There are a number of errors in the maps, with some buildings not listed or not marked on the maps. Finally, a few entries seem wrong: Toyon hall is listed a dormitory for 150 men. Hmm... that's what it was when built, and perhaps (I doubt this) it is today. When I lived there 20 years ago, it was a dorm for about 230 men and women. Nice picture though.

In fairness, the chronological approach is more logical, even if it makes it harder to read the maps. It allows the reader to see how building one structure can change the look and the traffic patterns of a large part of the campus.
On the whole then, I recommend this book as a good way to see Stanford, so long as you understand the limitations of this kind of history. Just don't look for pictures of the tree or LSJUMB!

The concept of a university campus is something that is very American and not easily communicated to people who come from other countries. As an international student at Stanford in the mid nineties I had hard time describing what it meant when writing back home simply because there is no equivalent word for "campus" in my native Croatian. Most American universities have been conceived as self-containing scholarly communities, an intellectual idealization of the Greek polis. This is one of the reasons why most of them to this day are located far away from the major urban centers, and many of them have actually been the nucleus around which the surrounding college towns had grown. This concept of a university is nowhere more clearly realized than at Stanford.

Stanford quite literally is a separate town (no, it is not located in Palo Alto). It was built on the private farm of Leland Stanford, an erstwhile governor of California and builder of the western part of the transcontinental railroad. The total area of the campus lands comes to over eight thousand acres which makes it the largest contiguous university campus. However, most of that land is undeveloped and a relatively small fraction of it is used for the regular university buildings. Even so, very few parts of the campus are within an easy walking distance from the surrounding communities.

From its early years Stanford has been known for its magnificent architecture. The central "Main Quad" is arguably one of the prettiest campus centers in the United States. As the university grew many new buildings have been built, with a very mixed architectural impact. At various stages of its growth very little attention had been paid to various aspects of overall architectural planning, but in recent decades there has been much more of an effort to make a more thoughtful approach to campus planning.

Even after I graduated I had made many trips to Stanford, and have always enjoyed taking long walks all over its campus. However, for the most part I had not been familiar with the history or the purpose of most of the campus buildings. This illustrated guide goes a long way in filling the gaps in my knowledge. The guide is broken down in several major sections that aim to replicate the main stages in the campus architectural development. Almost every building of any consequence has its own little section. The writing is very good, detailed and informative, and yet even people without any formal knowledge of architecture can fully appreciate it. The guide ends with the developments in the late nineties, and its just a snapshot of Stanford at that point in time. To me this actually makes this guide even more endearing, as it reflects Stanford as I had known it while a student there.

Let's face it. Most of us will never get to study at, or be hired by this prestigious Bay Area institution. That doesn't mean that we can't enjoy the beauty of its grounds and buildings. Stanford, in addition to being one of the very best universities on earth, is also one of the most beautiful.

Institutional histories tend to be excessively pedantic affairs. I know of no history of a university yet written that is an exception. They're generally dull, tedious things written for people who want to be sure that THEIR college is the best. And as another reviewer has noted, the style of writing is usually over-refined and staid. This book is no exception to those rules. But that said, it gives us a portrait of a university and its history through the grounds and buildings, bringing it to we who have no other chance to learn about Stanford but with our own eyes. So, the book may be dry and incomplete, but the university itself is gorgeous. That's what saves the entire effort.

Stanford started out life back in 1885 as an idea not unlike the ideas John D. Rockefeller had for the University of Chicago. And while Chicago became a world-class university directly out of the box, it took some decades for Stanford to catch up. It wasn't for lack of good buildings, as this book will prove. There are really two things that make Stanford exceptional in this regard. First, it transformed itself from a somewhat troubled early design, strapped by the heavy hand of the founder's wife and a devastating earthquake in 1906, into one of the world's great universities in less than 50 years. Second, when the vast majority of colleges and universities in the United States (and the world) were always seeking to make themselves into carbon-copies of Oxford and Cambridge, Stanford and its designers dared to try something new. Look at this book and then go to the university to see for yourself.

The Campus Guide series focuses on the architecture of noteworthy campuses. This volume on Stanford is organized by time period, tracing the development of the campus from its inception up to 2005. Contemporary color and historical black-and-white photographs illustrate almost every page. Site plans show the development of the campus.

When I accepted an admission offer from Stanford, I wanted to learn all I could about the environment into which I would be entering. Having read the book, I developed expectations about the culture of Stanford, expectations which, upon arriving on the Stanford campus, I found to be errant.

This book is quite a disappointment. Suffering both from poor editing and omission of crucial facts, the contents do not flow smoothly. The text is presented in a somewhat offensively over-refined and pretentious manner, the kind one finds in art museum catalogs or as introductions to Penguin Classics. The reader gains little sense of the beauty of the campus, as only a few of the photographs depict the excellent landscaping, the detail of Quad buildings, or the quality of materials and construction of the buildings. The foothills of the Stanford campus, and the trails leading up to the Dish aren't even included -- an omission that reflects poorly on the editors. Equally poor editorial judgment can be found in the photograph of the Hoover Tower appearing in one of the chapters -- this famous landmark is shown in its early construction, as an unsightly steel frame amid a dirt field.

To the credit of the authors, they give an engaing account of the history of the variously defined Stanford master plans, and of the culture which gave rise to the different stages of the campus' expansion.

In general, the reader's labors are not rewarded with fresh perspectives, or a sense of the spirit that habituates Stanford. If one toured the Stanford campus before reading the book, one might wonder what drove the editors to present such an excellent environment so vapidly.

This is the worst book on Stanford that I have ever seen. The pictures are small and faded . . . I have photos taken in 1975 with a cheap camera that look better than what you'll find here. (Ah, but the cover pic looks awfully nice, you might think. Yes, it does. Fine bit of hucksterism from Princeton Architectural Press.)