THE TEA CAMPUS 02

Tahoe Expedition Academy Campus

Fall 2022

Max Underwood | Tom Kundig

13 weeks

2022 | Year 4

Revit | Rhino | Photoshop | Illustrator | InDesign

Molood Thamasebi | Avery Moric

Our concept for the new TEA campus consists of a layered experience as students enter the forest to then find an array of buildings that blend into nature while facilitating community experiences. This main array contains learning one, cafe hill, maker hill, and the cloud performance arts center. As the students continue to walk through the campus they can discover a variety of specialized learning spaces that serve as outposts into the wilderness. Students hike and find their own paths through the forest to find new connections between learning spaces. The essential structures create a backbone and public interface to the campus while the learning spaces are scattered down the hill side promoting exploration and adaptability.

DEMOGRAPHIC | VALUES

- Campus to cater towards K-12 children and surrounding community

- Education occurs primarily outside the classroom as students are placed in their surrounding “real-world” environments

LANDSCAPE

- Dense Ponderosa Pine and Sagebrush coverage along with a natural water flow line through the site

- Prone to forest fires and long winter conditions

Topography

- Transitional terrain to inform both programmatic and pragmatic attributes of the project

- Provides opportunity for varying building types and scales

Students begin their day being greeted by the main cafe and garden space, modeled after a hill and the surrounding topography, the cafe emerges from under a layer of Earth. Coming into the site one sees an Earth form amongst the beautiful Tahoe landscape but when entering the cafe from the front they are welcomed by a vibrant community space. Inside the cafe are greenhouses that allow some of the youngest students to learn how food grows while watching the seasons change around them. Seating inside and out allows for students to bond over food and share their discoveries of the day, becoming the heart of the campus.

- Gray water collection for interior garden

- Sunlight used to heat interior

- Geothermal heating loop

Next, students alongside community members can enjoy a wonderful show at the Cloud Performance arts center . Students can climb onto and sit on the folded roof structure to enjoy plays, music, and performances with the wonderful Tahoe landscape as a backdrop. For example, the middle aged students put on plays that show to the local community what they have discovered through exploration and challenge. The black box theater below is clad with mirrors to help support the cloud-like roof structure and allows students to see themselves around and within the space.

- Reflective skin

- Solar heating for lobby

- Cooling airflow below roof

The students next visit their learning spaces which are divided into specialized learning outposts and storage and safety burrows. These learning spaces are spread across the biomes of the TEA campus, allowing students to explore the different aspects of nature within the Tahoe area. Students can engage with subject specific activities inside the outpost and when they are working in groups they can take tents and other deployables from the burrow and into nature. This allows for teachers and students to create dynamic and responsive learning environments every day as well as empowering the students to design their own learning environments. For example, the oldest students use this community outpost to host farmers markets to benefit international relief work.

- Water collection and storage for educational use

- Water filtration system to reuse gray water

- Exterior water cools interior