Great Stories
Montana Campus Corps:
College Students Meeting Critical Community Needs
Architecture Dreams: Envisioning a Biomass Campus by Milenka Jirasko

On our first trip to visit our client in September, we didn't know much about forest waste, biomass, or the lumber business. I was part of a team of five students with the MSU-Bozeman Community Design Center, and our hands-on architecture experience this semester would be the master planning of a sustainable business and education campus in a remote corner of Montana. Our client, Swan Valley Innovations, had big dreams to save the economy of their community.

We walked a forested mile-square section of land that SVI envisions as their future campus. Then we visited a working lumber mill which uses all wood waste produced on site to heat its kilns; this, our client said, as we marveled at massive equipment and towering stacks of logs, was just one part of what they imagined.

That evening we began to draw, and for the next three months we kept on drawing. By December we had a master plan of the campus, and we had grown just as excited as our clients.

This was my first experience as an architecture student working with a client and a real project, and I was not prepared for the faith they placed in us, a team of architecture students. I learned first-hand how rewarding it is to walk side by side with someone as they pursue their dreams and help them design the future of their community.


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