Lake Erie AISES Professional Chapter

Noted architect finds balance in unified vision

Posted: February 24, 2006
by: Jim Adams / Indian Country Today

OTTAWA - After confronting imperial designs in two capitals, Canadian architect Douglas Cardinal has returned home to the work of building Native communities. His recent breakthroughs in village design could well turn out to be among his most significant achievements.

This is no trivial statement for the 76-year-old Cardinal, Blackfoot/Metis, who has been called the most significant Canadian architect by no less an authority than Philip Johnson, widely regarded as one of the most significant U.S. architects. Cardinal has left his mark in both Ottawa and Washington, D.C., as the designer of each capital's museum of Native culture.

But colleagues say these projects fail to tell the complete story of an illustrious and vibrant career, one that includes a passion for planning Native communities. Since he returned full-time to this work, his results are drawing praise for their startling combination of indigenous spirit and innovative technology. One Cree village named Ouje'-Bougoumou was designed and built in the early 1990s and has received international recognition. Plans for another village for the Kamloops Indian Band were recently approved by the tribal council. Both reflect a vision of a modern settlement based on traditional Native life.

''Our communities could end up as leaders for the future,'' Cardinal told Indian Country Today.

According to one collaborator, Cardinal's vision has found its least compromised expression in the recently completed plans for the Kamloops Indian Band village, although the plans resulted from intensive consultation with village members. Here as in earlier projects, Cardinal said, he answers directly to First Nations communities, not to the federal government. ''Our First Nations have always been ordered about by architects and government bureaucrats,'' he said, ''but our own thinking about architecture has provided survival for thousands of years on the land, in a symbiotic relation with nature.''

Cardinal designed the Kamloops settlement in a circle, with a circular cluster of houses for each extended family. Each cluster centers on a small park and play area, where children and elders can interact. The community center is just that: in the center of the community. Cars are banished to the outer ring. Children can walk to school on a greenway without having to cross a road.

This design is highly traditional in purpose but was only made possible when Cardinal located an advanced technology that freed him from the limits of modern city planning.

''Cities are all designed around sewage systems,'' he said. ''Most sewage runs in straight lines.'' Cities, he said, are locked into a mid-19th century sewage disposal technology that actually dates back to the Romans. To break free, he needed a more flexible system that could accommodate his circular layout. Providentially, he found one in his home city of Ottawa, developed by a small but growing engineering firm named Clearford Industries.

Clearford President Bruce Linton spoke with awe about Cardinal's trademark curvilinear style. ''Douglas doesn't even own a ruler, I don't think,'' he said.

The find saved Cardinal from the compromises he had to make in an earlier community project, a new village named Ouje'-Bougoumou he designed in the early '90s for a St. James Bay Cree band on Lake Opemiska, about 400 miles north of Quebec City. The village is considered a great success story, receiving U.N. awards in 1995. But Cardinal said he could not give the residents as much space between houses as they wanted because of the cost of laying the sewer lines.

Still, the Ouje'-Bougoumou project set the pattern Cardinal now follows with Native communities. ''I went to the people themselves,'' he said. In open meetings with a large portion of the 650 villagers, he said, ''Each got up and gave his vision for the future of the community.''

Cardinal wrote down the ideas and went back to Ottawa to produce a design. Then he went back. As he recounts it: ''This is my idea for your community. But what does a Blackfoot educated in Texas know about the St. James Bay Cree? To impose this would be a colonial act.'' He asked for their criticisms.

''At first they were quiet,'' he said. But with some urging they started to speak. ''They tore it to shreds,'' he said.

''All I did was sit down and list all the things that could be changed. I went home and redrafted it.'' When he returned, 500 people attended the meeting.

''I went through seven iterations,'' Cardinal said. On the final presentation, ''the chief said, 'Doug wants your criticism.' The room was silent. The chief turned to me and said, 'Doug, that's your village.'''

The result, said Cardinal, is a ''lovely village,'' well-tended with 100 percent employment. ''It shows what happens when people get the right and responsibility of self-determination.''

The success of projects such as Ouje'-Bougoumou do not come easy, said Larry McDermott, an Algonquin from Sharbot Mishagma and the mayor of Lanark Highlands, a rural municipality west of Ottawa. ''Cardinal is challenging the entrenched way the federal government distributes resources to aboriginal peoples in a condescending manner that smothers local aboriginal creative processes,'' said McDermott. ''Part of his brilliance is not only design and his methodology of consulting with aboriginal peoples, but his dedication and willingness to endure limitations in order to promote aboriginal vision.''

These projects came well after Cardinal made his international reputation in 1989 with the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec. With its undulating expanse of limestone, it is considered one of the country's most famous buildings. In the mid-'90s, he devoted years to the commission for the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. That project ended in bitter dispute and was completed by another firm, but it bears Cardinal's unmistakable inspiration and signature.

He describes both buildings as an aboriginal rebuke to the ''imperial spirit'' of the dominant architecture in each country's capital, the Victorian Gothic of Ottawa and the Greco-Roman of Washington, D.C. The site of the NMAI building right in front of the U.S. Capitol, he said, makes the point that ''we are still here and we aren't going to go away.''

But from Cardinal's current perspective, these large buildings look almost like a diversion from his main love: working directly with Native communities. He recalled that he began his career in the 1960s in Alberta in the company of activists advocating Indian control of education. He helped draft a master plan for Indian education with Alberta's 52 chiefs and designed a series of school and college buildings.

On his return to Ottawa, he became associated with famed Algonquin elder William Commanda, now 92. He has designed an indigenous culture center that Commanda hopes to locate on the traditional Algonquin meeting place on Victoria Island in Ottawa. Commanda, he said, helped him work through the intense emotions of the break with the NMAI.

''After Washington, I got very angry,'' Cardinal said. ''Working with William on this project [the Victoria Island center], he made me see that I had to forgive. I learned about humility.''

''I learned a lot from William,'' he continued. ''I'm learning so much about balance, and a symbiotic relation with nature.'' These insights, he said, helped him understand his community planning with more depth. ''It has to do with the interconnectedness of all of us,'' he said. ''We are totally connected with nature.''

''We have to take responsibility,'' he said. ''People don't do things out of malice or evil intent, just lack of knowledge and thoughtlessness. If you have that knowledge and wisdom, you have the responsibility to do something about it.''