AAP students lend their creativity to a new vision for 4-H camp

After Camp Owahta's arts and crafts building burned down last year, Kelly Guy, executive director of Cornell Cooperative Extension Cortland County, saw an opportunity to do something different with the camp, but she needed ideas.

Now she's getting dozens of them - from students in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning's B.Arch Engaged Practices Design Studio course, who spent a semester getting to know the camp, its uses and its potential.

The 75-year-old 4-H camp, about 30 miles northeast of Ithaca in McGraw, serves more than 400 campers aged 5 to 15 in Tompkins, Cortland and Broome counties who come for day or overnight sessions over the course of six weeks in July and August. The buildings are aging and uninsulated, but the 128-acre site features forest, lawn, a human-made pond, a ropes course and more for outdoor play and learning.

"Nothing up here is meant for winter," Guy said. "So the board was really interested in having something for the community here in the winter, because there's snowshoeing, there's cross-country skiing, there's wildlife exploration, there's all types of different things in that season that we can't offer because we don't have heat and running water."

She contacted Hanna Tulis, lecturer in AAP's Department of Architecture, hoping for a 20-minute brainstorming session.

To Tulis, the project sounded like fertile ground for second-year architecture students, so she and her colleagues made it the focus of their Spring 2026 sophomore studio, with 69 students crafting their own visions of the camp's future. Six instructors - Tulis; Sean Anderson, associate professor of architecture; Val Warke, the Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory; and visiting critics Stefana Kuzmova, Margaret Kirk and Emma Silverblatt - guided the students' efforts.

"Kelly's needs, I think, dovetailed pretty nicely with pedagogical objectives for the sophomores," Tulis said. "This is a really good moment in their education to think about who is using their spaces and what are they doing there."

The students delivered concepts as varied as: An opera stage in the woods, wellness retreats, artists' communities, a U-pick flower and apple farm, a series of round huts for gathering and storytelling, a tea house and a carpentry community that could live on site and train while building the next generation of buildings.

The students created drawings, brochures and 3D models of their ideas, which they exhibited at a reception May 8 in Milstein Hall.

Guy hopes to take elements of the students' designs and concepts forward into the final building design and overall plan for the camp.

"I am so impressed and overwhelmed by the amount of care and time and effort that each student put into their project," Guy said. "I can see so much thought about things that I said and conversations that we had."

Nature-inspired designs

Lucas Leeds '29 and his project partner Stella Vass '29 wanted to bridge the forest and lawn spaces at the camp with a large elevated building right at the treeline. They placed what they called "follies" deeper into the forest, to inspire play and exploration. In the model, a swing overlooks the forest, and a talk tube that amplifies sounds encourages explorers to listen to the forest.

This Camp Owahta could be used as a kind of hotel or lodge space, he said.

"Our project, in short," Leeds said, "started by looking at the very phenomenal things about the forest, looking at things that you can feel, smell, touch and taking those ideas and making it into an architectural proposal."

They were careful to keep much of the existing building placement but add the infrastructure the camp stakeholders had requested, like a kitchen and bathrooms. Leeds said he learned an architect's role is to meet those needs, but also to show the client that "your site, your space, your world can become much more and this is what we envision for it."

Mannat Singh Takkar '29 said a phone call with her 6-year-old sister inspired her to add a Zen garden to her design, which focused on physical and mental wellness.

"I was like, 'What do you think you want the view from the pool to look like?'" Singh Takkar said. "And she was like, 'Maybe the sky or maybe, like, flowers.'"

She learned from the camp director and counselors that some campers are dealing with trauma and mental illness, so she designed a building that leads into the woods, which to some children feel dark and scary, in an inviting and gentle way.

A day in the life of a camper

The AAP students visited the camp twice, the first time in February. They left the shoveled paths and waded through knee-high snow, taking photos, walking the grounds and learning the character of the site. They also gathered input from staff members and former campers.

"The questions that the students had were phenomenal," Guy said. "They wanted to know structure. They wanted to know who uses what pathways, what's in the pond, what kind of wildlife do you have?"

They returned two months later for a work day, mulching the ropes course, cleaning the sports equipment shed, rebuilding raised garden beds, weeding and washing windows.

Afterward, they couldn't help but play.

"I was thinking to myself that this is exactly what architects should be doing," Leeds said. "We should be out here feeling what it feels like to be a camper and then going and designing for that camper."

This summer a student intern from AAP will live and work at the camp to help whittle the new ideas down to something implementable.

Guy will then take those concepts to the camp's leadership board and start seeking funding.

"So far, we have only raised about one-third of what is needed to rebuild," Guy said. "These student concepts will help us tell the story to funders and show what is possible for the future of Camp Owahta."

Lab supports community engagement

To help coordinate partnerships like this one, Tulis and her fellow instructor Silverblatt have launched the Participatory Research and Outreach (PRO) Lab to vet collaborations and match them up with the right groups of students. They will also offer engagement and continuity beyond the initial project, for instance continuing to support Guy as she focuses on a specific site plan.

Real-world projects benefit both the students and the community partners, Tulis said.

"Just telling students to 'build a library' can't possibly capture the level of complexity you'd find in a real project," she said. "From unique site needs to varying stakeholder viewpoints and priorities, it can be a bit messy, but that's the real work."