When Cal Poly Humboldt became California’s third polytechnic university in 2022, it reaffirmed a founding conviction: that learning happens in direct contact with the living world. The landscape design for Hinarr Hu Moulik East & West Student Housing, the university’s first new residential community in over four decades, was built around that same conviction. Students here don’t just live adjacent to one of North America’s most extraordinary ecological zones. They inhabit it daily.

Located a half mile north of the main campus on a former industrial site between two regional watersheds, the 11-acre complex houses nearly 1,000 students across two buildings organized around a sequence of distinct outdoor spaces. Each was designed to serve a different mode of student life: active, social, and contemplative, while simultaneously plugging each of those experiences into the ecology of the Northern California temperate rainforest.

Arcata sits roughly 450 km (280 miles) north of San Francisco in a climate that behaves nothing like the rest of California. It receives more than three and a half times San Francisco’s annual rainfall, and its heavy-fog days outnumber the city’s by more than two to one. This is not Mediterranean California; it is the Pacific Northwest, ecologically speaking. The design takes that distinction seriously at every scale.
Plant selection was grounded in direct collaboration with the university’s landscape maintenance crews and field observation of what actually thrives here. Rather than defaulting to drought-adapted California natives suited to warmer climates, the palette draws on species calibrated to wet, cool, fog-saturated conditions, including species chosen for their resilience as the regional climate continues to shift. Each outdoor zone carries its own ecological identity: the West Courtyard references the redwood and cedar forest; the stormwater garden celebrates the region’s coastal wildflower meadows; the wetland habitat speaks to the nearby mudflats and eelgrass beds, including habitat for the threatened western snowy plover. Stormwater infrastructure is not concealed. Rain chains, bioretention features, and a prominent stormwater garden are made visible, functioning as both ecological performance and daily instruction in how this landscape manages water.

The material language follows the same logic. Reclaimed redwood logs, arranged as informal seating throughout the mews and social zones, reference the driftwood that accumulates along this stretch of coastline, simultaneously reducing material waste and grounding visitors in the sensory character of the Redwood forest. Concrete seat walls carry custom formliner patterns coordinated directly with the formliners on the building facades, binding the landscape and architecture into a single material expression. Together these choices speak to the rugged, weathered quality of the Northern California coast: warm enough to invite gathering, robust enough to belong here.

At the heart of the complex, a public mews connects the two residential buildings and opens onto the surrounding neighborhood: a cafe, fitness center, and post office serving students and Arcata residents alike. The mews is designed as a social landscape, with informal seating arranged to invite conversation and pause, native plantings at eye level and underfoot, and the quiet sound of water moving through a nearby bioretention channel. Surrounding it, active courts face the busier northern edge of the site; a quiet contemplative garden sits apart from the main circulation, sheltered, still, and planted with the layered understory of the forest.

For students at an institution whose identity is inseparable from the land it occupies and whose programs in wildlife biology, forestry, environmental science, and applied ecology send them into the field from day one, the landscape outside their door is not an amenity. It is a curriculum. The design of Hinarr Hu Moulik gives that curriculum a place to live.

CLIENT: California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt
ARCHITECT PARTNER: SCB ARCHITECTS
PHOTO CREDITS: Groundworks Office and Cal Poly Humboldt

2905 St Louis Rd #508, Arcata, CA 95521