Engineering Memory of the Month

Unpacking into Packard…

Moving during the summer can be a sweaty job, but a decade ago the faculty, graduate students and staff of the electrical engineering department had the pleasure of unpacking their belongings and equipment into the coolest, freshest building on campus: the David Packard Electrical Engineering Building (seen above in a 1999 photo).

With its signature steel and glass “keel” and new space for offices, labs, a grand lobby, and even a café (now the bustling eatery, Bytes), Packard provided a prominent and spacious new home for the department. Previously, electrical engineers could be found scattered among several locations such as the Durand building, the Advanced Electronics Laboratory, and the Electronics Research Laboratory, some of which were decades old but intended to be temporary.

Although the department’s faculty members were eager to name the building for the legendary co-founder of Hewlett Packard, the name didn’t become official until they were moving in. Both Packard and William Hewlett had modestly refused to have buildings named for them while they were alive. Packard (seen in a 1986 photo) died in 1996, and with consent from his family, the university’s board of trustees approved the name on June 11, 1999 (a teaching building later named for Hewlett sits directly across the plaza).

Next year the Packard building will gain a new neighbor to its south: the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology [pdf 548kb].

We are interested in your nostalgic photos and the stories they tell. If you'd like to share them with the Stanford Engineering community, e-mail them to David Orenstein.

– August 2009