Windhover Contemplative Center

Windhover Contemplative Center at Stanford University brings the opportunity for quiet contemplation to the campus. The project received the IIDA Honor Award and ENR California’s Best Projects recognition.

To light up the building, Elcor needed to maintain the contemplative and aesthetic quality of the facility, while making the wiring and control systems state-of-the-art. The building’s thick rammed-earth walls made typical routing of power through walls unfeasible, requiring Elcor to wire the entire building through the floor instead of the walls.

In order to illuminate the artwork in the building day and night, Elcor integrated custom lighting controls that balanced the natural and artificial light of the space. The lighting control system is able to raise and lower the shades, as well as dim the light fixtures based on the amount of ambient light entering the space at any given time.

Elcor installed a separate Embedia technology to control the metal louvers mounted horizontally below the skylights. The Embedia system maximizes the use of day-lighting by controlling the amount and direction of the sunlight that comes into the galleries throughout the day. These two state-of-the-art control systems generate an ideal balance between creating an idyllic tranquil space for students, faculty, and staff, and maximized energy savings day and night.