CASBS as Spatial Experience

What fellows feel, Sapna Marfatia, Stanford’s director of architecture, explains: the distinction the Center’s buildings and grounds enjoyed at their creation and continue to enjoy today, more than seven decades later.

For seven decades, from the early post-War period continuing a quarter into the 21st century, CASBS fellows have worked on and produced scholarship that has helped develop and advance the social and behavioral sciences. The fellows themselves are primary characters in the Center’s enduring and unfolding story.

But CASBS fellowship is residential. The physical context in which those scholars undertake their work — the Center’s buildings and grounds — is itself an important character in telling the Center’s story in full. (How CASBS even landed at its location is a rollercoaster story unto itself.) Signs of this were evident just months after the Center welcomed its first class in September 1954 — CASBS was the subject of an attractive spread in the February 1955 issue of Arts and Architecture. And it remains plainly evident today; first-time visitors to the Center can’t help but remark on its beautiful architecture and landscaping, nestled atop a bucolic, somewhat hidden hilltop not far from the Stanford Dish and the front nine of the Stanford golf course.

Fellows experience it on a deeper level. The Center as a physical place gradually seeps into the bones and psyches of those fortunate enough to spend nine or ten months in residence day-to-day as CASBS fellows. And from there, it seeps into the work. Proof of this lies, among other places, in the acknowledgments found in countless books written by CASBS fellows and entered into the Center’s renowned Ralph W. Tyler Collection. They describe a “halcyon setting,” the “serenity of the rustic setting,” “surpassingly beautiful surroundings,” and a “special ambience” that — especially when intertwined with the intellectual stimulation the Center and each fellows cohort facilitates — contribute to “ideal conditions” or “inspiring working conditions [and] delightful atmosphere” resulting in the “nearest thing to a scholar’s heaven I can imagine” and “a magical place to which [fellows] owe much merely for the privilege of being there.”[1]

Thankfully, aside from changes in interior décor and barely-visible traces of various maintenance and upgrade projects over the years, CASBS’s buildings and grounds of 2025 would look practically unchanged to William Wurster and Thomas Church, the Center’s original architectural and landscape designers, and to Morely Baer, who photographed the Center for the 1955 Arts and Architecture spread. Remarkably, a new building on the Center’s campus, completed and dedicated in 2023 and the first addition since 1954, enhances rather than disrupts the harmony among structures, landscape, and people that the mid-century designers envisioned. In fact, recent coverage in The Architect’s Newspaper notes that the new building and its immediate surroundings, by architectural firm Olson Kundig and landscaping firm SWA, take cues and learn from Wurster’s mid-century design.

In the subjective hearts and minds of generations of fellows and visitors alike, CASBS certainly enjoys a singular distinction. But what about the wider environment in which CASBS is situated? How distinct is CASBS as a physical place as it relates, say, to the architectural wealth found just within the Stanford University ecosystem, never mind beyond it?

In November 2024, Sapna Marfatia, Stanford University’s Campus Preservation Architect and Director of Architecture, delivered a presentation to a convening of CASBS’s board of directors addressing exactly how and why the Center is “a place apart.” Her talk was such a hit with board members and staff there to witness it that we asked Sapna to come back and elaborate upon some of the principal issues and themes she covered, including some fantastic historical perspective. She agreed to share some images and diagrams from her presentation as well.

Go to the CASBS website to view photos and read the interview with Sapna Marfatia

https://casbs.stanford.edu/news/casbs-spatial-experience-interview-sapna-marfatia