Archinect - News

Florida State University and UCLA share resources to create a new history of Indigenous thatch work architecture in the Americas

2023-05-26T12:00:00-04:00

A new project led by Florida State University associate professor Paul Niell is working to retrace the lineage of thatch work architectures used by different African and Indigenous diaspora groups throughout the Americas in the hopes of documenting and preserving their impact on history for future generations of scholars.

Niell teaches Caribbean art and architectural history in the school’s College of Fine Arts with a focus on the architecture and cultural landscapes of the Hispanophone Caribbean in the late-18th and early-19th centuries.

Recently, he coordinated with UCLA associate professor Stella Nair, several graduate students, and representatives of different Indigenous groups to organize a three-part conference titled “Forgotten Canopy: Ecology, Ephemeral Architecture, and Imperialism in the Caribbean, South American, and Transatlantic Worlds,” that provided a framework for further study into the vernacular domestic structures that predominated in both regions.

A modern examp...

MASS Design Group announces acquisition of long-time Santa Fe collaborator Atkin Olshin Schade Architects

2022-11-16T12:03:00-05:00

MASS Design Group has announced its acquisition of Santa Fe, New Mexico-based Atkin Olshin Schade Architects (AOS) in a move they say will offer an enhancement of the relationship the two have built already through years of collaboration.

The merger makes the new combined entity Santa Fe’s largest architectural office, with further opportunity to leverage AOS’s Philadelphia operation in order to pursue “innovative approaches to preservation, adaptive reuse, and design for mission-focused organizations throughout the northeast and nationally.”

Previously on Archinect: MASS Design Group founder Michael Murphy announces he is stepping down, will join the faculty at Georgia Tech

It comes just under a month after MASS’s co-founder Michael Murphy left the firm to take a position on faculty at Georgia Tech University, handing over the reins to his former Senior Principal and Managing Director Christian Benimana and Patricia Gruits as well as the firm’s co-founder and current Chief Design O...

INVI flexes its (digital) design muscle with the new South Plains Museum and Cultural Center

2021-05-20T15:27:00-04:00

A new online home for the erstwhile Southern Apache Museum is now operating in Houston, furthering a trend of digitizing cultural spaces that has accelerated during the pandemic era.

Those looking for a transformative delve into the history of Native culture can visit the renamed Southern Plains Museum and Cultural Center (SPMCC) latest iteration, which opened last November with the help of a $10,000 grant from the city's Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs.

The new virtual museum has space for a number of different smaller specialIzed museums addressing a number of categories related to the history of Native Americans in the region, including the original institution as well as an American Indian Genocide Museum. It also features a virtual library, garden, Aztec pyramid, and health clinic.

A virtual tour of the museum via YouTube

Virtual architecture firm INVI, which touts itself as creating “virtual experiences through architecture, storytelling, and design,” according to the studi...

They need much more: $90 Million granted for affordable housing in Tribal communities

2021-04-14T11:50:00-04:00

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has announced over $90 million in grants allocated for affordable housing in Tribal communities. The funds, distributed to 24 Tribes and Tribally Designated Housing Entities (TDHEs) are intended to support the construction of new houses, the rehabilitation of existing housing, and the delivery of vital infrastructural projects.

Awarded as part of HUD’s Indian Housing Block Grant (IHBG), the funds are expected to support the construction of approximately 350 housing units. Commenting on the funding, HUD Secretary Marcia L. Fudge said “this past year was a stark reminder of just how important access to safe, stable housing is — especially in Tribal communities disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The funding HUD is awarding today will support much needed affordable housing investments in Indian Country.”

The Make It Right Foundation's proposal for Native American housing in Montana. Credit: GRAFT

The new...

GSD students launch Harvard Indigenous Design Collective

2020-06-04T16:05:00-04:00

Harvard University Graduate School of Design students Elsa Hoover, Zoë Toledo, Heidi Brandow, and Jaz Bonninou have come together to create the Harvard Indigenous Design Collective (HIDC), a group that "promotes design by and for Indigenous communities as foundational to the history, theory, and practice of design fields."

The four students all hail from Native American backgrounds themselves and, according to the The Harvard Gazette website, represent the largest cohort of Native American students to ever attend the school at once.

Bonnin, a student in the M.Des. program of Yankton Sioux, Blackfoot, Irish, Danish, French, Panamanian, and Mexican Native descent, tells The Harvard Gazette, "I am enrolled in a master’s of design program, focusing on issues of conservation and preservation. My goal is to specialize in designing atriums, courtyards, and indoor-outdoor garden spaces for small-scale residential, commercial and adaptive-reuse clientele.”

Hoover, an M.Arch. student of Anish...

Former US Embassy Building Is Declared Culturally-Inappropriate for Canadian Indigenous Center

2017-06-20T19:20:00-04:00

Classical revival is perhaps the architectural style most identified with colonization. This building, which references Washington architecture, is a building of formal rooms, offices, and hierarchies, echoing structures of European authority.

This June the federal government announced that the US' former embassy building in Ottawa will become a space dedicated to Inuit, Métis and First Nations communities which the task force of the RAIC finds to be a deeply inappropriate space for an Indigenous Centre.

"Canada's Indigenous communities have, for too long, been forced into leftover spaces that fail to connect in any meaningful way to their cultures and unique connectivity to place" says the task force, composed of about 30 mostly Indigenous architects, architectural students, interns and academics.

Dr. Patrick Stewart, the chair of the task force suggests that the federal government should provide capital dollars for the design and construction of a structure based upon Indigenous knowledge and through the use of Indigenous architects.

Sherman Alexie: Thanksgiving is a Story of Survival

2014-11-27T17:33:00-05:00

When you were growing up and now too, what did you think of a whole Thanksgiving story about Native people helping out Pilgrims? I wish we had a tougher immigration policy. It's a love story, and it's still a love story. We still love you even, if we really are your battered spouse.

A beautiful interview by Sarah Mirk on November 26, 2014, with Sherman Alexie on the meaning of Thanksgiving to Native Americans and to him and his family. He is one of my favorite American writers, the author of Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven .

What does it have to do with architecture? Let's say you are designing a football stadium... Well.., take it for what it is on the Thanksgiving day. It is also beautifully dark humored in Sherman Alexie way.