Stanford University is located on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (32 km) northwest of San Jose. The main campus is adjacent to the city of Palo Alto, bounded by El Camino Real, Stanford Avenue, Junipero Serra Boulevard, and Sand Hill Road. The university also operates the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California, in Monterey Bay.
Stanford University owns 8,183 acres (3,312 ha), which makes it the second largest university in the world in terms of contiguous area. Moscow State University is built vertically and has a larger total floor area but occupies a smaller piece of land. Berry College, near Rome, Georgia occupies 28,000 acres (11,000 ha) of contiguous land, and Paul Smith’s College occupies 14,200 acres (5,700 ha) of land in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, but neither is a university. Duke University occupies 8,709 acres (3,524 ha), but they are not contiguous. The United States Air Force Academy has a contiguous 18,000 acres (7,300 ha) at its disposal, but it is not a university. Dartmouth College, with a large land grant, owns more than 50,000 acres (20,000 ha), but only 269 acres (109 ha) of those are part of the campus. Sewanee: The University of the South occupies 13,000 acres (5,261 ha) in its “Domain”; however, most of this is unused forest.
In the summer of 1886, when the campus was first being planned, Stanford brought the president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Francis Amasa Walker, and prominent Boston landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted westward for consultations. Olmsted worked out the general concept for the campus and its buildings, rejecting a hillside site in favor of the more practical flatlands. Charles Allerton Coolidge then developed this concept in the style of his late mentor, Henry Hobson Richardson, in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, characterized by rectangular stone buildings linked by arcades of half-circle arches. The original campus was also designed in the Spanish-colonial style common to California known as Mission Revival. The red tile roofs and solid sandstone masonry are distinctly Californian in appearance and famously complementary to the bright blue skies common to the region, and most of the subsequently erected buildings have maintained consistent exteriors.
Much of this first construction was destroyed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but the university retains the Quad, the old Chemistry Building (which is not in use and has been boarded up since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake), and Encina Hall (the residence of Herbert Hoover, John Steinbeck, and Anthony Kennedy during their times at Stanford). After the 1989 earthquake inflicted further damage, the university implemented a billion-dollar capital improvement plan to retrofit and renovate older buildings for new, up-to-date uses.
Stanford University is actually its own census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (including the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes some land in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), and in adjacent unincorporated areas of San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve). Stanford shares much with the city of Palo Alto, including its school district and fire department, although the police forces are separate. The United States Postal Service has assigned Stanford two ZIP codes: 94305 for campus mail and 94309 for P.O. box mail. It lies within area code 650 and campus phone numbers start with 721, 723, 724, 725, 736, 497, or 498.
The physicist Werner Heisenberg was once asked if he knew where Stanford University was located. “I believe it is on the west coast of the United States, not far from San Francisco. There is also another school nearby, and they steal each other’s axes”, he replied, referring to Stanford’s rivalry with the University of California, Berkeley.