CAMP RUNOIA
Belgrade Lakes, Maine

Located in the Belgrade Lakes region of central Maine, the camp is a second-generation, family-owned girl's camp that recently celebrated its hundredth anniversary. The program called for a dining hall for 170 campers and staff, commercial kitchen, servery, and washrooms. We were asked to replace a much loved old dining hall composed of an accretion of screened porches around a shingled cabin served by an attached kitchen shed.

The new dining hall is sited at the prospect of a walking path down to the lake, overlooking a gently sloping meadow. Remnant stone barn foundations indicate that this location had been chosen before as a building site. As a gathering place for the whole camp the dining hall is to symbolize its heart and therefore needs to have a strong presence. We imagine it as a field pavilion, a rural archetype symmetrical in form with a broad front. The building is raised above the ground so it sits lightly on the land like other camp structures, some of which had been transported from across the lake as early as 1914.

Inspired by the existing dining hall, the eating area is configured as a wraparound porch enjoying abundant natural light and cross ventilation. The kitchen is designed as a large mono-pitched shed, with a translucent skylight. As a place for gathering before meals, the entry deck projects out over the meadow and offers a diagonal view of the lake. A clerestory above the servery brings light deep into the building.

The post and beam frame is designed to be fabricated off site and bolted together in the field. Over-sailing cedar eaves of the metal roofs provide shelter for the bands of screens, changed to single glazed panels for the off-season. On the kitchen shed, white cedar shingle siding covers the frame. Simplicity of detailing, such as the porch's cedar latticework, connects the building to local vernacular precedents.

A sense of lightness and delicacy in the porch structure is employed, scaled for the young campers. Appearing to hover over the meadow from the distance, the building exudes a sense of ease that comes with summer camp life lived between indoors and out.