Main Quad (Stanford University)

The Main Quad is built on a slight slope so that though the back of the structure is level with the ground, the front is elevated.

At its southwestern (campus) end, Palm Drive becomes a one-way loop that encircles a large lawn called the Oval.

[1] Immediately in front perpendicular to Palm Drive is Jane Stanford Way (once known as Serra Mall[2]), which is restricted to official vehicles and bicycles.

The Inner Quad consists of a large courtyard surrounded by twelve connected buildings (numbered clockwise, 1 through 110) and Stanford Memorial Church.

The original statues were created by Antonio Frilli, but Franklin and Gutenberg went missing after renovation work in 1949 and were never found; recreations were done by a local sculptor, Oleg Lobykin, and installed in 2013.

Two castings were made and originally intended for installation in New York and Los Angeles, but the statue proved too controversial for either city.

[19][20] Between the church and building 60 is the Amy Blue Garden with benches, a sundial, and a small birdbath dedicated to the memory of Barbara Jordan, daughter of the university's first president who died aged 9 in 1901 of scarlet fever;[21] the garden as a whole is in memory of Amy Blue, a university staffer who died in 1988 at the age of 44.

[25][26] The conception of a quadrangle-centered campus wasn't formalized until 1886, several years after Leland Stanford first broached the idea of a university to the press.

[27] In a November 30, 1886 report to Leland Stanford, Walker and Olmsted recommended a homogeneous campus of quadrangles, proposing that the buildings be mostly one-story structures constructed from “massive rough stone”.

[27] According to a Gertrude Atherton report in Harper's Weekly, the plan was to mimic adobe, but considerations of climate and durability led the Stanfords to settle on a tan-colored local sandstone.

To design the quadrangle itself, the Stanfords in 1886 hired the firm of "the greatest American architect of his generation," Henry Hobson Richardson.

[29] (Richardson himself had died earlier that year, and his three main associates were carrying on his work as the firm Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge.)

Hundreds of laborers received the sandstone, cut it to size, dressed it, and finished it; skilled stonecutters and sculptors, primarily from Italy, installed it and embellished it with friezes.

[36] Most of the university's other, more recent buildings echo the Quad's basic pattern of buff-colored walls, red roofs, and arcades, giving Stanford's campus its distinctive look.

[37] The original university plan was to add additional quadrangles of buildings, initially to the left and right of the Main Quad.

However, this part of the plan was put aside for many decades until the Science and Engineering Quad was built to the west, starting in the 1980s and completed in 2013.