Back to nature: set in a dramatic and remote rural landscape, this residential camp draws on vernacular tradition to connect with its surroundings

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 2002 by Brian Carter

Paint Rock Camp is a new residential settlement in Wyoming developed for school children from the inner city of Los Angeles. Sponsored by the Alma Foundation (the private foundation of the CEO of Coca-Cola Enterprises), it provides programmes for 76 students based around outdoor studies and activities, such as horse riding and trekking. Located on a remote 110 000 acre ranch on the edge of the Big Horn Mountains, the camp is surrounded by dramatic natural landscapes of steep canyons, tall mesas and rushing streams.

In response to the vast scale of this landscape, and though the camp is a sizeable development with recreational, educational and residential elements, it has been designed as a collection of small buildings. A total of 16 buildings are arranged in three distinct groups with an off-loading shelter and stables at the south-western boundary. Lodges for guests and the camp director are sited close to the western boundary with residential accommodation for students, a dining hall, swimming pool, recreational areas and a counsellor's lodge clustered to the east around the mouth of the canyon.

Residential accommodation consists of six cabins, each with sleeping accommodation for a group of students. Cabins are clustered in two areas of the site and connected by a new bridge. To the north, a group of cabins hovers above the sloping ground and opens up to views down the canyon while a second group, to the east, nestles into the land and looks out across the gully. As if to underline the inherently temporary nature of a camp, each cabin has been designed on steel platforms that touch the ground lightly and lift cabins high above the sloping walls of the canyon. This minimizes the impact of building on the existing ground and planting. It also helps to reveal the site, for the platforms form roofs, provide lookouts and create places for light timber-framed enclosures. Each of the cabins is small, yet carefully designed, and detailed with fitted bunks and storage, they fold out like steamer trunks to occupy the adjacent spaces of the platforms and open up to the landscape. In contrast to the light, elev ated residential cabins, the communal spaces that make up the heart of the camp are firmly grounded in the site. So, for example, the dining hall is built off a substantial and extended concrete foundation that creates a series of terraces. Planned on this newly constructed ground, dining and common rooms are grouped around rough stone walls, fireplaces and tall chimneys. These spaces are defined by clearly articulated timber-framed structures and generously glazed walls that can extend out onto outdoor terraces with expansive views over the valley.

All the buildings have been designed to adopt a familiar palette of everyday materials -- timber, stone and glass with thin steel posts supporting canted metal roofs that oversail to provide welcome shade and shelter from the weather. Their long, angular forms are extended into the landscape by large sliding barn-doors, porches and slatted wooden fences. The apparently ad-hoc arrangement of buildings on the site actually traces out the contour lines across the canyon and responds to orientation and the weather in ways that recall the wisdom of the vernacular. However, the architecture also avoids the deadening hand of pastiche that is all too familiar in many new developments across the country.

Instead this scheme embraces a seemingly unique American pragmatism to juxtapose landscape and material in a way that recalls those minimal shelters built in the first tentative moments of settlement in the west. However Paint Rock Camp also embodies a spirit of economy, experiment and social concern that recalls the pragmatic ideals of the Case Study House Program.

Architect

Charles Rose Architects, Somerville, Massachusetts

Project team

Charles Rose, Eric Robinson, David Martin, David Gabriel, Franco Ghilardi

Structural engineer

Ove Arup & Partners

Photographs

Chuck Choi