Chico Basin Ranch Bird Banding Outdoor Classroom and Cabins

The ColoradoBuildingWorkshop, the design build certificate program in the College of Architecture and Planning at CU Denver, creates award-winning projects that serve communities around the world in partnership with non-profit organizations. In 2025, the ColoradoBuildingWorkshop partnered with The Colorado Land Board at their Chico Basin Ranch property, a refuge for over 330 bird species and a hub for bird banding research, to design and build a bird banding classroom and cabins in Hanover, Colorado.

With its commitment to preserving ecological diversity and conservation, Chico Basin Ranch collects insights about migratory patterns and ecosystem health and offers education and stewardship programs to share findings and information about the science of bird migration.Researchers use bird banding as a tool to study wild bird migration routes, population trends, responses to climate and habitat changes, and the impacts of human activity on bird populations and migration.

The design of the outdoor classroom and cabins pays homage to classic barn architecture, reinterpreted as a place of observation, education, and research. Sharing similarities to a traditional barn design, the structure reflects both familiarity and innovation.

The building is the first cross-laminated timber building to use 100% Colorado lumber. The wood harvested from wildfire forest mitigation work, using timbers the industry typically deems unusable, supported the exploration of new methods of prefabricated construction.

Early in the design process, the ColoradoBuildingWorkshop teams established a list of core values to guide every phase of the project, including sustainability, honest materials, connection to place, complexity over complication, student engagement, and connection to fauna.The site required considerations not only for the ecology of its location but also to the migratory species passing through. This challenged students to consider a wide range of potential environmental impacts.

“Creating a sustainable building constructed with materials native to the area and uncompromised by unnatural processing was central to the final design,” said Rick Sommerfeld, professor and director of the ColoradoBuildingWorkshop. “This further influenced the importance of honoring the relationship between the site’s natural heritage, its resources, and its unique environment.”

Recognizing the complexity of serving both nature and people, the team aimed to remove barriers of artificiality and complication, embracing the site’s conditions, materials, energy flows, and natural and built systems so that everything works together in order to be efficient, low-waste, and responsive.In addition to serving as a research facility, the site is also an educational building that serves as an environment for student’s hands-on learning where they can engage directly with the natural world. The bird species that pass through are active participants in the site’s ecology, helping balance and maintain the local landscape.

Students in the ColoradoBuildingWorkshop exemplify the College of Architecture and Planning’s commitment to hands-on, experiential learning. They participate in every step of the project from conception to design to fabrication to the final build. Students were responsible for preserving the integrity of the materials. For this project, building materials included Englemann spruce cross-laminated timber (CLT), cord-wood, and hot rolled steel. Students carefully installed these materials for long-term use and resilience.

Learn more about this and other ColoradoBuildingWorkshop projects.