The Science and Engineering Quad

Walk west from the Main Quad's sandstone arcades and the architecture changes. The Science and Engineering Quad, usually shortened to SEQ, is a set of four modern buildings around a palm-lined courtyard, completed between 2008 and 2014. It looks nothing like a museum. Yet inside the octagonal Huang Engineering Center you can see the cabinet of hard drives where Google began, the servers that ran Yahoo! from a campus trailer and the Motorola 68000, the chip inside the first Macintosh.

This page covers the quad's buildings, the free displays inside the Huang Center, the public art outside and the nearby computer science and electrical engineering buildings. For the bigger picture of how Stanford shaped the region, read our Silicon Valley history.

How the quad came together

Stanford's visitor site describes the SEQ as sitting on an east-west axis with the historic Main Quad. That alignment is deliberate. Like the original quad, the new one groups linked buildings around open courts. Our guide to Stanford architecture traces how the campus kept returning to that idea.

The project began in the early 2000s, after the buildings of the Near West Campus opened in 1999. Stanford cleared an eight-acre patch of aging, utilitarian buildings and replaced them with four new ones. Together they hold nearly 620,000 square feet of offices, classrooms and labs. Named donors paid for much of it, along with a group of anonymous donors known as the Fundamental Partners. The architecture firm Boora, now known as Bora, lists the SEQ master plan and the Huang and Spilker buildings among its projects.

The gifts behind the names tell their own Silicon Valley story. Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki gave $50 million for Y2E2. Nvidia cofounder Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang and his wife, Lori, pledged $30 million for the Huang Center. University trustee Ram Shriram and his wife, Vijay, gave $61 million for the building that completed the quad. James Spilker, whose namesake building opened in 2010, was a principal contributor to the original GPS.

The Engineering Touchstones in the Huang Center

The Huang Center was built as the School of Engineering's headquarters. It doubles as a small museum of Stanford inventions. The school publishes a self-guided Innovations Tour of these displays, which it calls Engineering Touchstones. Highlights by floor:

Terrace level

• The Google storage server. In 1996 Larry Page and Sergey Brin needed disk space to test PageRank on real web data. They put ten of the biggest drives they could buy, 4 gigabytes each, into a cheap cabinet framed with toy building blocks. It could index 24 million pages a week.
• Hewlett and Packard. A display on Bill Hewlett and David Packard, who were Fred Terman's students, with the garage workbench where they built their first products in 1939.
• Anaerobic reactors. Models from Professor Perry McCarty's lab, whose work on turning wastewater into clean water and methane earned the Stockholm Water Prize.

First floor

• The Yahoo! servers. Jerry Yang and David Filo used two machines named Konishiki and Akebono in 1994 to catalog the early web. By that fall the site handled a million hits a day.
• Stanford microprocessors. The Intel 4004, MIPS, the Motorola 68000 and the Geometry Engine behind Silicon Graphics, all with Stanford roots, plus Nvidia GPUs.
• Networking. The Birth of the Internet plaque honoring the TCP work of Vint Cerf's team and early Ethernet hardware. The first floor lobby is named for Ethernet.
• The Art of Computer Programming. Volumes of Donald Knuth's famous series.

Second floor

• William Durand's propellers. A prototype from the wind tunnel tests Durand and Everett Lesley began in 1916, plus his six volumes on aerodynamic theory.
• Nanocharacterization. Images and samples from decades of Stanford work on materials at the scale of atoms.

The displays are in public areas of a working building. Visit on a weekday during business hours, keep your voice down near classrooms and do not enter labs or offices.

The Gates and Packard buildings

Next to the SEQ stand two older engineering buildings with famous names.

The William Gates Computer Science Building at 353 Jane Stanford Way houses the Computer Science Department and the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. It was built between 1994 and 1996 for $36 million, with $6 million from Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who dedicated it in January 1996. Robert A.M. Stern Architects designed it. Page and Brin did their early Google work in the just-finished building. The company's name is commonly traced to a September 1997 brainstorm in room 360 of the B wing. The School of Engineering notes more historic networking equipment on the Gates Building's first floor. In 2005 Stanford's driverless car Stanley, winner of that year's DARPA Grand Challenge, was photographed out front.

The David Packard Electrical Engineering Building is home to electrical engineering and carries the name of the HP cofounder who studied the field at Stanford. On the lawn outside stands Kenneth Snelson's 1982 sculpture Mozart I, a tensegrity piece of steel tubes held in place by cables. To see where Packard and Hewlett started, visit the HP Garage in Professorville. It can only be seen from the street.

Public art on the quad

When the art was chosen, a student on the selection committee pointed out that Stanford's arts map showed public art spread across campus except on the SEQ. That changed in April 2021 with Pars pro Toto by the Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade. Twelve stone spheres, from 16 inches to 98 inches across, are scattered between the octagonal Huang Center and a double row of palms. The stones come from eight countries. Kwade decided where each would sit by tossing small spheres onto a model of the quad and seeing where they landed. A university committee of faculty, staff and students chose the work and a Stanford alumni family paid for it.

The School of Engineering compared the result to a giant play space scattered with marbles. The largest spheres make a strong photo with the palms behind. Our guide to public art at Stanford lists more outdoor works across campus.

Terman Fountain

Just beyond the quad, the site of the 1970s Terman Engineering Center is now a park. When the old building came down, its materials were reused elsewhere on campus and a modified version of its fountain was kept. Stanford's visitor site says students like to wade and relax in Terman Fountain. It is named for Frederick Terman, the engineering dean often called the father of Silicon Valley.

Coffee and lunch

The engineering quad is well fed on weekdays:

• Forbes Family Café in the Huang Center serves coffee in the morning and a plant-forward lunch with pho, laksa and dim sum.
• Coupa Café runs a grab and go counter in the Huang Center and a cafe in Y2E2 at 473 Via Ortega.

Hours follow the academic calendar and most places are closed or short on weekends. Our page on where to eat on campus has full listings.

Visiting tips

If the startup side of this history interests you, our guide to Stanford entrepreneurship programs covers the classes and labs that keep turning students into founders.

Frequently asked questions