The Cowell Ranch Hay Barn at UC Santa Cruz now has its own website, cowellhaybarn.ucsc.edu, with information on how to rent this popular, award-winning event space and the adjacent Ocean View Field.
The heart of the Cowell Lime Works operation in the late 1880s and early 1900s, the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn has been completely rebuilt and now serves as headquarters of the Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS) as well as a site for conferences, seminars, weddings, and other special events.
With demand for the Hay Barn’s use on the rise, site manager Heidi Harris has created a new website with event photos, rental details, and other event-planning resources. The site also provides access information for the adjacent Ocean View Field, located on the 30-acre UC Santa Cruz organic farm.
The Hay Barn has received numerous prestigious design and engineering awards for its unique approach to reinventing this historic space for a wide variety of contemporary uses, while incorporating key period construction techniques.
The American Institute of Architects award noted the "exhaustive documentation, piece-by-piece deconstruction, painstaking reassembly of the historic structure by weaving together new and old elements, and the incorporation of contemporary program. As home to one of the university’s most progressive programs, the Hay Barn is both an emblem of the campus’ origins and a reassertion of its commitment to innovation." The project is also a LEED-2009 Gold building.
See the new Cowell Ranch Hay Barn website, read more about the project on the CASFS website, and follow the Hay Barn Facebook and Instagram sites.
