The design of a university facility can influence interactions among students, researchers, and faculty. The Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center at Stanford University was created as a common facility for engineering education and research. It is named after Jen-Hsun Huang, the co-founder of NVIDIA and a Stanford alumnus. A $30 million donation from Huang and his wife, Lori, made construction of the facility possible. According to Stanford University, the facility housed more than 270 people when it was dedicated in October 2010.
Dedicated on October 5, 2010, the center became a landmark in Stanford’s new Science and Engineering Quad. Huang, who graduated with an MSEE degree from Stanford in 1992, funded the building to provide a shared space where different communities within the engineering school could come together.
A building that promotes collaboration
The center was designed to accommodate multiple departments and fields of study. The location allowed engineering faculty members and students to interact with biologists, chemists, physicists, and medical researchers and physicians from Stanford Medicine. At the time of its dedication, the center brought together more than 270 people from the Department of Management Science and Engineering, the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and the Dean’s Office.
This 130,000-square-foot building included a 300-seat auditorium, student lounges, workshops for designing and building prototypes, and the Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Library. It also had classrooms, meeting rooms, and office space. The auditorium would serve as a venue for seminars and other large-scale events, while student lounges would give students a place to come together without the classroom setting. The spaces were flexible, with movable furniture that could be adapted for different activities; students could use the workshop for designing and modeling.
According to James D. Plummer, then dean of Stanford’s School of Engineering, the building reflects a broader approach to engineering education. Students need to know their subjects very well and have skills in teamwork, communication, entrepreneurship, and design.
Huang remarked at the opening ceremony that he hoped the building would give students and faculty the opportunity to collaborate and innovate. He spoke about his own experience at Stanford and said he hoped future students would have similar opportunities.
As part of an overall campus vision
Stanford’s hundred-year history, Designing for the future, reveals that the Huang Center is just one part of the broader initiative at Stanford to redevelop its engineering campus between 2005 and 2014. The Science and Engineering Quad took shape on an eight-acre site adjacent to the Near West Campus. The redevelopment involved demolishing older functional buildings to make room for new educational and research facilities. Four buildings had been constructed by 2014, giving a total of almost 620,000 square feet of office, classroom, and research space.
The Huang Center serves as an administrative base for Stanford engineering. In addition to being the location of the dean’s office and the departmental offices, the building contains a conference center, machine shops, a cafe, classrooms, and the Terman Engineering Library. The Engineering Touchstones display also includes devices related to inventions by Stanford graduates and faculty members.
Sustainability was another consideration in the development of the quad. The quad took shape in stages, beginning with the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building in 2008, followed by the James and Anna Marie Spilker Engineering and Applied Science Building in September 2010, the Huang Center in October 2010, and the Shriram Center for Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering in 2014.
The university’s website describes how the buildings consumed half the energy of traditional buildings and only 1/10th the amount of water consumed by traditional buildings. These figures apply to the buildings across the complex, rather than exclusively to the Huang Center.
The Huang Center offered more than office and classroom space. Its common facilities and gathering places were designed to encourage interaction among students, faculty, and researchers and make collaboration central to the engineering campus.