Transforming Cooper Center Cabins Through Sustainable Design
One of the Cooper Center cabins currently undergoing renovation. The facilities were built in the 1970s and were slowly decomposing into the surrounding desert before the renovations began in 2008.
Colin Waite / Cooper Center for Environmental Learning
At the Cooper Center for Environmental Learning, known to many as Camp Cooper, a new chapter of sustainable design is underway.
Their mission is to connect students with the Sonoran Desert through immersive and education-based field trips and outdoor classroom programs.
Through a collaboration between CAPLA students, alumni and faculty, the center’s sleeping cabins are being redesigned to better support the students who stay there each year.
For Colin Waite, director of the Cooper Center, the updates are long overdue.
“The facilities at Camp Cooper were built in the 1970’s and have been slowly decomposing into the surrounding desert,” Waite said. “They were built cheaply and are very energy inefficient, barely supporting our growing educational programs.”
Funding from Tucson Unified School District’s 2023 bond package created an opportunity for long-needed improvements, but the roots of the partnership go back more than a decade.
“We actually started working with CAPLA back in 2008, when students from Dr. Nader Chalfoun’s Green Energy Doctor program designed facility improvements at Camp Cooper as part of their coursework,” Waite said. “These designs inspired some of what is coming to pass now.”
CAPLA and Camp Cooper alum Ray Clamons, owner of Natural Building Works, has been central to turning those ideas into reality.
“Ray inspires and informs all major facility improvements at Camp Cooper,” Waite said. “Given his status as a Camp Cooper alum, he knows the importance of our work in the community and values his role in expanding sustainable building and design projects in our community.”
Clamons '05, B.Arch, joined the project as a design consultant.
“I came to this project with the objective to explore and encourage ways natural materials could be utilized in the buildings,” he said. “Hempcrete was chosen as the main natural material.”
For Clamons, the project is as meaningful personally and professionally.
“I have fond memories of attending Camp Cooper as a third grader and was reintroduced as an adult in 2013,” he said. “I see this project as a premier example of how buildings can benefit the environment and how that can be shared with the community.”
Today, the renovation includes the largest hempcrete building effort currently underway in the United States. The hempcrete blocks are being manufactured and installed by Old Pueblo Hemp Company.
Learn more about the hempcrete process here.
Waite said the renovations also include “rainwater harvesting, the use of solar energy, greywater systems for our new showers, composting toilets to reduce water usage, the use of FSC lumber, environmentally friendly paints and stains and locally made hempcrete blocks for insulation.”
Alongside the physical renovation, an air-quality research project is underway with CAPLA faculty and students.
“Ray connected us with Dr. Omar Youssef and student Dakota Troy to monitor air quality pre- and post-construction in the sleeping cabins, with a goal of having data to show the benefits of choosing building materials and practices that improve the health of indoor spaces,” Waite said.
Youssef, a senior lecturer at CAPLA, said he has been using the site as a living testing laboratory for his environmental science course.
“The Cooper Center is an ideal setting because it lets students learn by doing,” he said. “The site becomes a teacher in its own way, and the students get to experience how climate and architecture interact at a very immediate scale. That combination of real data, hands-on learning and meaningful impact is what makes this project stand out.”
The research team is gathering measurements to understand how sustainable design choices affect indoor air quality, knowledge that could help shape future projects in the region.
“We want to have healthy and clean air in all of Camp Cooper’s interior spaces, and we also hope to see the benefits of using more environmentally friendly materials and practices on our air quality,” Waite said.
For Waite and the Cooper Center team, the cabin renovations are just the beginning.
“All future construction projects at Camp Cooper will follow a similar procedure to incorporate sustainability, and we hope that our project inspires others in our community to do the same,” he said.
For more about the Cooper Center, visit coopercenter.arizona.edu.
