The treehouse near completion. A steel mesh drawbridge will link the bridge with the tree house platform.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Spying on birds and examining clouds from a lofty tree house perch are out-of-reach pleasures for many children with special needs. For two months this summer, ten University of Arkansas architecture students and their professor, Laura Terry, labored from sun-up to sun-down to change that. They're currently finishing up work on a fully accessible, 22-foot-high tree house at Camp Aldersgate, a Little Rock camp that serves children with special needs.

"All the sweat and tears and mud, and 12-hour days - it will be worth it when we see the campers using the tree house," Terry said.

Students ease a 300-pound, 18-feet-tall telephone pole into the ravine.

The tree house builds on the success of an earlier Camp Aldersgate project, an archery pavilion with adaptable stations that Terry and eight students designed and built in the summer of 2002. Originally engendered by Little Rock architects Steve Kinzler and Martha Jane Murray of the Wilcox Group, the Camp Aldersgate projects were created to help the camp upgrade its amenities and to hone students' design skills with construction experience.

Sited in a deep ravine that enjoys cool breezes from a nearby lake, the tree house is accessed by a six-foot-wide bridge that projects 55 feet from terra firma to the tree house. A steel mesh drawbridge will challenge campers on their journey to the tree house platform. Three sides of the tree house, protected by steel railings, open to views of the lake, a waterfall and a verdant grove, while the fourth side features an interactive "learning wall" with niches for nature hike finds. The structural soundness of the tree house has been thoroughly vetted by engineer Ken Jones, president of I.C.E., Inc. Consulting Engineers in Little Rock.

While campers will enjoy the tree house for years to come, the students also have benefited. The Camp Aldersgate project has shaped their development as designers with a heaping dose of hands-on labor.

"Now I know how structures work. I've learned how to develop a design into something that can actually be built and used," student Rachel Smith said.

That's precisely the point with the UA School of Architecture's Design:Build activities, which enable architecture and landscape architecture students to work through a project from first sketch to final nail. The projects have a service component inspired in part by architect Samuel Mockbee, who took his Auburn University students to Hale County, Alabama, in 1993 to design homes for impoverished families.

"His goal was to educate his predominantly middle-class students that architecture has the power to change lives," said Terry, who studied under Mockbee. And it's not just the clients who are impacted, but the students as well, Terry is quick to add. "Everybody is here to serve the camp," she said. "We bring labor, our design sensibility and a desire to make a difference. In return, our students learn in a very concrete way that architecture is a service profession."

Terry initiated both Camp Aldersgate projects with a van trip to Auburn's Rural Studio in Hale County, where her students stayed in pods built by Auburn students, toured their projects, and began drawing up plans for the archery pavilion. These plans were subjected to frequent changes in response to materials and site, part of the "design as you go" philosophy espoused by Mockbee. For example, the students simplified their tree house design once they began work at the site. "We realized that the experience of being high above the ground is enough," said student Tess Jordan.

The students also learned the value of teamwork, working together to dig six-foot holes in muddy soil and moving twelve 270-pound steel beams 100 feet downhill by carrying them centipede-fashion.

Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of the project, though, was the relationships that the students developed with the children at the camp.

"We really become involved in these children's lives," noted Smith. "We live with them, eat, play, and dance with them - and now we get to build a tree house for them."

For Terry, those connections make the project doubly rewarding. In addition to developing hands-on design and construction experience, "the students learn something about life that they can't learn in the classroom. Accessibility is very abstract in the studio environment, but becomes very tangible at a camp for children with disabilities."

Student Amanda Martinson agreed, noting that "instead of having to add a ramp or guard rail, I want to design that for them. I want to give them the world."

Sarah Wacaster, Director of Camp Aldersgate, would like to see the camp go beyond what is required in meeting the needs of children with disabilities. "I want us to be a forerunner in creating an environment where these kids can have fun - and we couldn't do it without the University of Arkansas architecture students," she said.