CalPoly Pomona Students to Architectural Students to Design JTREE Campus
Joshua Tree Residential Education Experience (JTREE) continues to make progress in their mission to establish a multi-day outdoor education campus for youth inside Joshua Tree National Park (the Park). Most recently, JTREE has partnered with CalPoly Pomona Professor of Architecture, Michael Fox and his design studio students beginning in Fall 2022.
These students are enrolled in the Bachelor of Architecture 5-year program and 3-year master’s program. The curriculum includes lecture classes in Architecture Theory and History, Human Behavior, Professional Practice, Programming, Sustainability, Building Technology, Structures, Codes and Digital Media. Students are expected to demonstrate their knowledge of the areas in a design studio project. This topic for this studio will focus on a design of a real project in Joshua Tree National Park.
Former Joshua Tree NP Superintendent and JTREE Board member Mark Butler is serving as the primary liaison with the CalPoly design team. Mark expressed the appreciation for the CalPoly partnership in saying, “JTREE is delighted to be working with advanced architecture students from Cal Poly to begin the initial design process. It is totally consistent with JTREE’s philosophy to have all aspects of the program encourage and promote learning about the desert. Additionally, this design effort will be a perfect complement to future reviews and designs required by the National Park Service.”
In September, twenty CalPoly Pomona students and Professor, Michal Fox, camped in Joshua Tree National Park and visited the proposed sites to gain an understanding of this real-life project and the environment it will live in.
Michael explains, “A principal objective of the design project is to use the architecture itself as a research project to understand and test what works architecturally in extreme environments as fruitful examples for use in typical architecture real-life everyday applications. Designs with limited resources in extreme environments leads to a much higher respect of nature and the human being generating a strong drive to improve life on earth.
The studio associated lectures and field trips will provide a theoretical and practical overview of design for extreme environments. Students will work to produce complete designs including structural development and construction/ fabrication concepts. Students will be immersed in discussion, speculation and open-ended problem-solving. Students will work in small teams who together will have to learn about the impact of constraints and learn to work collaboratively to produce a viable design. Issues of materials, connections and human interactions are prioritized as design considerations.”
The JTREE Board of Directors will participate in a mid-term review of student projects providing productive feedback as they continue to completion of their campus designs. In early December 2022, Professor Fox’s students will present their final designs to the JTREE Board. We are thrilled with the support and participation of the CalPoly Pomona professor and his students.
