Pub. 4 2016 Directory

24 THE MONTANA ARCHITECT | 2016 | www.aia-mt.org National Outdoor Leadership School High Plains Architects Citation Award O ver the last 50 years, the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) has become the leader in wilderness ed- ucation, taking students of all ages on remote wilderness expeditions and teaching technical outdoor skills, lead- ership, and environmental ethics. Through its Wilderness Medicine Institute (WMI) NOLS offers training to more than 20,000 students each year. For many years NOLS dreamed of a campus devoted to teaching emergency medicine in a wilderness setting. The NOLS Wyss Wilderness Medicine Campus near Lander, Wy- oming is intentionally sited in a remote location for programmatic reasons fundamental to its mission. The campus’ site is poised on a dramatic grade change, banked by sage and native grasses and surrounded by red sandstone cliffs. While traditional, indoor classrooms are an important part of the WMI educational expe- rience, the classroom extends outdoors with real-life scenarios in wild terrain, including a stream, river, cliffs, and forested areas. Given the remote site and NOLS’s commitment to environmental stewardship, sustainable design was prioritized to minimize the campus’ impact on the landscape. The Educational Facility is an 11,000 sq. ft. multipurpose building at the heart of the NOLS Wyss Wilderness Medicine Campus, designed and built concurrently with five student housing cabins and a caretaker residence. The building provides two classroom spaces, a student commons, kitchen, several dining spaces, and a variety of associated support spaces. The campus received LEED Platinum certifications for the Educational Facility and student housing cabins and LEED Gold certification for the caretaker residence. In order to exceed sustainability and indoor environmental quality goals, the building form evolved so that the larger, higher spac- es—the Dining Hall and Classrooms—are housed in two east-west oriented wings with operable clerestory windows. Those two wings are bridged by a lower gathering space, the Commons, which has a low-slope roof and skylights. The Classrooms, which need to disperse students quickly for scenario study, are located in the south wing at grade, opening onto a shaded outdoor instruction space. Gates Richards, NOLS