ETC is a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that gives low-income and disabled kids a chance to experience exciting outdoor adventures. For the ETC river program's base camp on the American River, we designed four buildings: an outdoor kitchen, a main meeting hall, a caretaker's cabin, and a bathhouse. We sited and designed the buildings to blend gracefully with their wooded riverside setting while granting easy access to disabled users.
Building materials include unhewn logs harvested through a fire-prevention program from trees native to the site. The log posts are madrone; the beams are lodgepole pine. When we needed milled lumber, we chose recycled timber or wood from forests that use environmentally sound forest-management practices.
Because the campground is used mainly during the hot summer months, the kitchen is completely outdoors. Movable walls and roofs allow the showers and meeting hall to convert easily to open spaces. In the winter, when the center is used for weekend conferences and training sessions, the meeting hall's south-facing glass wall can be shut to allow sunlight to enter and warm the space. Likewise, the shower roofs can be closed to keep heat in.