The new hospital will be the tall man on the Stanford campus. Courtesy Rafael Viñoly Architects.

One of the biggest projects on the San Francisco Peninsula is the upcoming $720 million Stanford Hospital.  It will replace — though not displace — the hospital’s current home, a three-story affair designed by Edward Durell Stone in 1959, which has a concrete brise-soleil and is very much a building of its time. The new structure, which Rafael Viñoly Architects is in charge of, looks more like a hotel than a hospital, and the design is an indication of what state-of-the-art healthcare facilities are emphasizing these days. Designed to maximize natural lighting in what is often a rather closed, oppressive environment, the Viñoly hospital features a checkerboard layout, in which buildings are interspersed with squares of open space.

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