Oregon State Parks was handed a gift: The donation of an 8,000 acre, rugged and fragile prairie parcel, tucked in the deepest part of Oregon’s Cottonwood Canyon. With golden rolling hills, a mile of river access, and a historic farm, the site was a mere dot on a map, twenty-five miles from any gas station, and fifty miles from the nearest town over 400. The design brief? Turn landscape into place–create the backbone for 13 different types of education programming, on a restrained budget, for a wild climate. A beautifully challenging project, the Cottonwood Canyon Experience Center resonates, invites, and humbly serves the community and future generations. It is the environmental answer to the classroom, connecting communities to one another and the natural world, deeply rooted in the specificity of the place. 

It has become crucial that spaces be designed to foster not merely learning, but well-being, even inviting healing. State Parks asked that the Center contribute to healing the disconnect between youth and the natural environment, dubbed “nature deficit disorder”(NDD). This connects to the Park’s emphasis on furthering environmental literacy: the understanding and motivation to make responsible decisions that consider our relationship to natural systems, communities, and future generations. Academic research indeed suggests that time outdoors can facilitate greater progress in mental health outcomes, showing it helps reduce stress and increase life satisfaction, with a positive influence on attention and cognition, memory, stress and anxiety, sleep, and self-perceived welfare. 

Responding, the Center is designed to be welcoming, familiar, and adaptable–a stepping off-point to adventure into nature, and a warm respite to return to, again and again. Designing not for one, unified curriculum nor for one, unified kind of student but for a wide variety of programs, ideas, and communities, The Center’s utilizes every possibility for maximizing its humbling potential to foster and grow local youth’s connection to their outdoors, aiming to serve and invite this and future generations of curious minds in search or need of adventure, while effortlessly recognizing and reflecting the site’s history and unique place in the land. 

The space is full of light, and configured to respond to the prevailing winds. It often fills with the scent of the local, resilient Juniper it was crafted from. Often considered a wood suitable only for burning, the choice of this material underlines the design’s incentive to create an space of inclusivity, curiosity, and innovative thinking. Connecting the students with local natural resources is a means to help root and connect the community today, and to set a course towards a community of the future–learning this land has always provided for the various cultures that have lived here, and it will continue to nourish us as long as we understand and care for it.