Ember Recovery Campus reimagines the traditional treatment environment as a place rooted in landscape, community, and everyday life. Designed to support young people as they move through recovery and toward greater independence, the campus looks beyond the boundaries of the building to consider how the entire site can contribute to healing, confidence, connection, and a renewed sense of possibility.
The landscape is conceived as an active part of that experience. Gardens, trails, recreation, gathering spaces, and quieter places for reflection create opportunities for residents to spend time outdoors and reconnect with the rhythms of daily life. Rather than organizing the campus around a single therapeutic landscape, the design creates a range of environments—some social and energetic, others quiet and restorative—allowing residents to choose how they engage with the landscape throughout the day.
At the larger scale, the campus brings together sports fields, community gardens, an amphitheater, barn and pasture, outdoor gathering areas, and connections to the surrounding landscape. These spaces expand the idea of recovery to include recreation, practical learning, responsibility, creativity, and community. The report specifically frames activities such as gardening, animal care, cooking, building, and other hands-on experiences as opportunities to develop practical skills and greater self-reliance as residents prepare for life beyond treatment.
The result is a campus designed around progress rather than isolation. Architecture and landscape work together to create an environment that feels less institutional and more connected to the experiences of everyday life. Outdoor rooms extend living spaces into the landscape, paths encourage movement and exploration, and shared spaces create opportunities for informal interaction and belonging.
For Groundworks, the project is ultimately about the capacity of landscape to support change. The landscape provides more than beauty or recreation; it creates places to participate, contribute, retreat, gather, learn, and simply be outside. Together, these experiences form a setting intended to help young people build stronger connections to themselves, to one another, and to the world beyond the campus.
The landscape is conceived as an active part of that experience. Gardens, trails, recreation, gathering spaces, and quieter places for reflection create opportunities for residents to spend time outdoors and reconnect with the rhythms of daily life. Rather than organizing the campus around a single therapeutic landscape, the design creates a range of environments—some social and energetic, others quiet and restorative—allowing residents to choose how they engage with the landscape throughout the day.
At the larger scale, the campus brings together sports fields, community gardens, an amphitheater, barn and pasture, outdoor gathering areas, and connections to the surrounding landscape. These spaces expand the idea of recovery to include recreation, practical learning, responsibility, creativity, and community. The report specifically frames activities such as gardening, animal care, cooking, building, and other hands-on experiences as opportunities to develop practical skills and greater self-reliance as residents prepare for life beyond treatment.
The result is a campus designed around progress rather than isolation. Architecture and landscape work together to create an environment that feels less institutional and more connected to the experiences of everyday life. Outdoor rooms extend living spaces into the landscape, paths encourage movement and exploration, and shared spaces create opportunities for informal interaction and belonging.
For Groundworks, the project is ultimately about the capacity of landscape to support change. The landscape provides more than beauty or recreation; it creates places to participate, contribute, retreat, gather, learn, and simply be outside. Together, these experiences form a setting intended to help young people build stronger connections to themselves, to one another, and to the world beyond the campus.