Wood Hall Courtyard Provides New Outdoor Wellness Space for Students

For years to come, current and future NC State students who call Wood Residence Hall home will have a versatile outdoor space in which to relax, study or gather with friends. 

This outdoor courtyard space, which was recently dedicated as its third phase wrapped up this semester, is part of a three-year project that is part of University Housing’s long-running partnership with the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning’s Master of Landscape Architecture Design + Build Studio course. 

“What I think is really special about this studio is when you see the finished product, we’re able to talk about it with students that live in the community but also our staff too, this is a student-run, student-led project,” said Connor Brady, Wood Hall’s Residence Life coordinator. “We’re able to really connect the dots for a lot of students about the opportunities at NC State.”

Brady noted that the partnership between the Landscape Architecture course and Housing is in its 15th year, and pointed to numerous other examples on campus of the benefits. 

The Wood Hall courtyard will feature three spaces: an outdoor study lounge with tables featuring electrical outlets, a communal gathering space with movable tables, chairs and a grill, and an outdoor wellness garden featuring native plant species, adirondack chairs, a gabion bench and boulders for ample seating options. 

“For years, we’ve gotten feedback from students that they wish Wood Hall had more usable outdoor space,” Brady said. “What I hope for Wood Hall residents is that they take advantage of these outdoor spaces to really appreciate the community they live in and the serenity of Wood Hall. It’s a very serene place for our students to live. They appreciate the serenity of these spaces and what they can create, while also building community among our students and our teams.”

Hands-On Experience for Students

A trip to the Wood Hall courtyard shortly before its dedication found a large group of students transporting rocks and bags of soil, planting and watering in preparation for the space’s completion. 

The unique nature of the partnership between University Housing and the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning is that it allows students studying the design field to get real, tangible experience in a way that benefits future generations of students. 

“It’s been really nice,” said Cole Wesson, a fourth-year student studying architecture. “I wanted to take a deep dive into landscape architecture this semester, and just see what it’s about. Being out here and getting hands-on experience has really helped a lot in just learning everything there is to know about landscape architecture.” 

The course, co-taught by Carla Delcambre, an associate professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning and the Director of the Graduate Program in Landscape Architecture, and Jesse Turner, assistant professor of practice in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, allows students to go through every step of the design and construction process for these types of spaces. 

This process includes holding workshops and discussions with the students living in the residence halls about what they hope to see in the spaces, working alongside Housing stakeholders and gaining an understanding of the campus planning and design process for these projects. 

“We couldn’t do this studio without the support of University Housing,” Delcambre said. “I’ve presented work that the students have done at conferences all over the country, and there is no other university that has a sustainable model like the one we have here. A lot of design-build programs create small, outdoor spaces. It’s not necessarily a usable space that students can actually sit in and work in, use their laptops and socialize in. They’re not doing that kind of design-build. They’re fabricating site furnishings, but they’re not considering nature-based solutions that increase biodiversity on campus. We’ve created an outdoor learning laboratory. ”

Brady said that the partnership and project affirms University Housing’s commitment to student learning, and the spaces built and designed by NC State students for NC State students give an ability to specifically tailor them to the community’s needs. 

“It’s just such a commitment to all things NC State,” Brady said. “That’s what I think is so special about it. It’s an opportunity for applied, hands-on experiences. We get to talk to the residents and point out that these are graduate students who truly get hands-on experiences as if they’re in a landscape architecture firm this semester where they dream it up, we give feedback as the stakeholder clients, they’re getting the guidance from their professors, we have the budget that we stay on and they learn all of those skills. What’s cool about the partnership is we get to give feedback based on real, day-to-day experiences, and then they make it happen. They think it and then they do it. I think that’s such a cool connection. They get to walk away and say ‘I had a hand in this project.’”

Turner said that he hopes students in the class will have their minds, bodies and souls fed. 

He explained that landscape architects are fortunate to walk through the product designed from their imagination after it’s finished, and see the benefits their work will have on their communities. 

The students in this course who have contributed to the project will have a physical reminder of their work for years to come, as the outdoor wellness space continues to benefit future generations of students. 

“In our class, it’s a shared dream that we create,” Turner said. “That dream is shared by as many people as we can bring into it. We have our campus team, we have the residents, we have myself and Carla, and we all get together and have a ball imagining and dreaming what a space can be. We combine all of those dreams and imaginations together, and then we literally get to walk through it one day. We get to touch and create this legacy that we get to experience by building it, walking through it and sharing it with the people we built it with. To me, that’s the most powerful thing about what we do and what it means to be a landscape architect. You’re literally creating physical reality from imagination.”

A Commitment to Sustainability

These projects also come with a commitment to NC State’s sustainability goals. For example, the Wood Hall courtyard will feature native plant species, as well as pollinator-attracting plants, and a design that uses recycled bricks and leftover materials from other projects, lowering the carbon footprint.

It also contains design elements that allow for the proper treatment of stormwater. 

“All of our treatment of water is that it must flow through a garden that we create before it leaves our site,” Turner said. “Those gardens are intended to improve the water quality and also use that water for the plants. We’re introducing green infrastructure retrofits to existing storm drain utilities on site to make sure the water passes through a garden before it passes through a pipe where possible.”

Including the wellness garden – an area where students can relax and find a quiet moment to unwind and recharge – also adds to the sustainability component, one that all involved with the project hope remains for years to come. 

“We want to make outdoor living spaces that are useful and that are going to be long lasting,” Turner said. “From a sustainability perspective, a good design means that it will remain.”

This post was originally published in DASA.