New Architecture on Indigenous Lands by Joy Monice Malnar and Frank Vodvarka (review)

Some years ago my then–graduate student son tooled me around his University of Victoria campus until we ended up at one of the most gorgeous interior spaces I have ever experienced. I choose the word “experience” advisedly because the sensual taking in of a three-dimensional built environment is intrinsic to the creative transaction between its maker and visitor and, hence, to its artistic and cultural fulfillment. Yet that encounter remains one of the hardest reactions to convey in words. Verbiage doesn’t cut it; “Architecture must be lived to be known,” my stepfather drummed into me—a good excuse for lots of travel. Or as the Los Angeles architectural guru John Lautner used to insist, “Architecture is the art we live in.” And hence, if one allows oneself to let the architectural experience rise (or deepen) into consciousness, one can come to feel the proper, or “right,” proportions of height, width, depth, the fit of coloration and lighting and even smell, all through an inner receptive apparatus similar to that which tells our nervous system whether an orchestra’s instruments are in tune or off-key.

This interior had it all: from the stepped benches filling one end of the room to the stylized uprights fully evoking the carved crest poles of older days, plus the cosmic tie between skylight and fire pit, pulsating with that gorgeous honey-colored palette, and all magnificently re-created as a huge holding basket through that woven cedar-withe walling. Its blended adaptations of Pacific Northwest traditions were not superficial; this was an eminently successful updating, on both intrinsic and extrinsic levels, of the seasonal ceremonial room of a Coast Salish Big House. I’d often been in doubt whether contemporary architects, with their emphases on design appearances over cultural substance, could ever realize the menu of modernity, technology, and tradition that their press releases so breezily claimed. But here was one successful example, and I was knocked out.

So it was with a déjà vu of that pleasure of experienced architecture that I cracked open New Architecture on Indigenous Lands, Joy Malnar and Frank Vodvarka’s marvelously illustrated and comprehensively written survey of contemporary Native American buildings, to rediscover that very interior with a full-page color photograph and learn its backstory. Opening in 2009 and designed by the Chipewyan architect Alfred Waugh, it was the “Ceremonial Hall” and centerpiece of the campus’s First Peoples House, the spiritual heart of “a home away from home” for aboriginal students at U-Vic, “a place of culture, honour and spirit,” in Waugh’s words (74). Moreover, “in addition to symbolic qualities and use of materials, traditional building methods can actually drive current technologies,” underscore Malnar and Vodvarka, as they introduce Waugh’s detailed explanation of how the anodized aluminum louvers and mechanical damper and control system allowed fresh but unconditioned air into the rooms so that, claims Waugh, “it does not look like the technology is applied to the building but is a fully integrated element of the architecture” (75).

Such is the coverage throughout this ambitiously wide-ranging and invitingly designed book, which overflows with stunning color photos, color drawings, and project plans. It is to be savored for a great river of similar architectural narratives; it seems unfair to single out just one. Yet this example’s marriage of tradition and technology illustrates but one of the work’s continuous through lines that surface in all of the fifty-six architectural projects it investigates, largely selected from the Northwest Coast, Central Plain–Great Lakes, and Southwest of the United States, with Canadian projects ranging from British Columbia to Quebec. And each case study sets up its unique technological, aesthetic, cultural, and spiritual challenge, as Malnar and Vodvarka never fail from addressing...