California Headwaters Center, Feather River College

Feather River College teaches 1,500 students on a sprawling rural campus adjacent to Plumas National Forest land. These surrounding wildlands provide a hands-on setting for the college's Environmental Studies and Outdoor Recreation leadership programs. The California Headwaters Center sought to further connect studies with the outdoors by mixing research and cultural heritage in the form of a hatchery-museum. This fusion emerged from the joint vision and partnership of The Maidu Indian Tribe and California Fish & Game.

 

As the Project Designer, Lehmberg sought to express this union in the design through the sequence of rooms and indoor-outdoor relationships. The traditional Maidu Roundhouse became a key element in the design expression, housing the museum and Salmon Lifecycle Lab on two levels. Entering the roundhouse from the ground floor, students and visitors weave amidst large open top fish tanks to ascend a curving stir to see the tanks from above. The top of the stair balcony invites one to survey the whole room before leaving the roundhouse for a different kind of viewing platform- an immersive view of an outdoor pond aquarium up close. Lehmberg chose round shapes for the ponds and lined them with lush native landscaping, in contrast to the typical hatchery of long rectangular concrete tanks. By softening the edges and materials, Lehmberg blends the hatchery into what looks and feels like habitat. This embodies the school’s hands-on approach, by providing an experiential understanding of the fish life cycle- students can smell, touch, and feel.

 

Project Designer for NTD Architecture