Off the trailNumber 04Visual design

3D Campground

An office organized like a campground: caves, canyons, mountains and a forest, stacked.

Kind: Architecture, workplace concept
Research: Three Yosemite campgrounds, taken apart
Levels: Cave, Canyon, Mountain, Forest

Rendering of a pale blue office floor with tapered columns, small trees and clusters of desks, seen from a mezzanine

Visual design

Drawings, renderings and stories from architecture school: speculative buildings and the worlds they sit in.

Camping is fun. You choose where to pitch, who to sit with, and how far from the fire to be. This project asks what an office would be if it worked that way.

To find out what a campground is made of, I analyzed three in Yosemite and reduced them to their parts: a main road, parking, footpaths, tent sites and fire pits. Then I translated each part into an office. Fire is the thing that brings people together, so inside, the fire pits became the amenities and gathering spaces. Tent sites became work areas, and the roads and footpaths became ramps.

A flow diagram with small icons translating campground elements into office elements, in blue and black — Campground to office, element by element.

A walk through the building. No sound.

A light-mobility route runs along footpaths into and through the building, delivering people to campsites with different terrain and character. The front door disappears, because transport can be called to any point up the building. Ramps connect the levels at a leisurely speed; footpaths are the quick way up and down.

Each level borrows a structural idea from a landscape. Caves are vaults. Canyons are party walls. Mountains are heavy tapered columns. The forest is a field of thin round columns.

A sectional model of four stacked floors, with vaults at the bottom, tapered timber columns above, and thin sticks at the top — The section as a model: cave, canyon, mountain, forest.

Floor plan with round vaulted rooms and curved walls, a gym at the center — Cave. Amenities and circulation are built into the structure.

Floor plan with organic walls forming linear work areas and small rooms — Canyon. Linear work areas, a daycare and small cafés; desk heights follow the terrain.

Floor plan dotted with small curved seating clusters, an auditorium at one end — Mountains. An auditorium and conference rooms, with stepped places to sit and work together.

Floor plan with a field of small columns and large curved openings — Forest. Open floor, tree-house mezzanines, spiral ramps up to a beach on the roof.

Forest: a day's path through the level. No sound.

Cave: the same, at the bottom of the building. No sound.