Architecture is about stories w/ Chris Cornelius

Jen Hancock: 

Buildings tell stories.

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Jen Hancock: 

Some of those stories are perched on the walls of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Gargoyles tell us this is a sacred place.

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Jen Hancock: 

They are fearsome monsters, baring their teeth to scare away evil spirits.

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Jen Hancock: 

They say: Only the righteous may enter here; demons be gone!

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Jen Hancock: 

Those gargoyles gargle the rainwater, chanelling it away from the stonework. The bricks of Notre-Dame, itself, are kept pure by its stone sentinels. It’s erosion management as religious symbolism.

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Jen Hancock: 

The story is one of a pious age, and superstitious builders. That’s just the beginning, though. Stories also have a middle and an end.

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[female voice]:

Flames brought down the spire and much of the roof at Notre-Dame Cathedral yesterday. And think about this: it’s the start of Holy Week. This morning the fire is out. And prayers and offers of help [inaudible; intentional fade-out].

Jen Hancock: 

Bear with me, because there is a point to all this gargoyle talk.

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Jen Hancock: 

There were once over 100 gargoyles on Notre-Dame. Today there are under 50. Over half the gargoyles’ stories have ended—with stories of weather damage, crumbling brick, and a massive fire in 2019. Today, the remaining gargoyles symbolize resilience. They’ve kept their watch for over 600 years. Notre-Dame is being rebuilt.

This is Building Good. I’m Jen Hancock.

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Jen Hancock: 

We do have gargoyles in North America too, but the story here is a little different. And it sounds different, depending on who is listening.

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Jen Hancock: 

When Victorian architects were putting gargoyles on our buildings, they were doing it hundreds of years later than those Gothic European buildings. The story that they were telling was about a connection to The Old World; they wanted to evoke a depth of history that they didn’t think existed here.

But they were telling a story they didn’t know they were telling. They were European settlers imposing their architecture on the land. The gargoyles were telling indigenous peoples: We don’t see your history.

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Jen Hancock: 

North American construction is full of stories, if you know where to look for it. The sprawling suburbs tell the story of a post-war boom with upwardly mobile families buying cars and wanting more space. But they’re often stories written by the wealthy and powerful.

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Jen Hancock: 

Today on Building Good, an architect who isn’t imposing his stories on people, he’s listening.

Chris Cornelius:

Hi. I’m Chris Cornelius. I am Chair and Professor of Architecture at the University of New Mexico, and Principal and Founder of studio:indigenous.

Jen Hancock: 

They’re a design firm that specializes in architecture and indigenous culture. One of their projects was so groundbreaking it has been written up in The New York Times.

Chris Cornelius:

I mean, the Indian Community School is hard to beat. One of the mothers of students from that school—I think she had three kids go to that school—she told me this story.

She said one of her sons said that there’s a spirit that sits on top of the building, ah, and watches over them. And I was just like, “That’s amazing. Because we couldn’t design that.”

Jen Hancock: 

The Indian Community School is a stunning wood-and-copper building in Milwaukee. It connects indoors and outdoors with large windows and outside learning areas. Upper levels are designed to evoke birds and air, with light flowing in and over wooden seating, which looks like the mesas of New Mexico.

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The building is a triumph, because Chris understood the people he was designing for. But to understand his approach to architecture, we should tell Chris’ own story.

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Chris Cornelius:

I grew up on the Oneida reservation in Wisconsin which is just five miles west of Green Bay. I grew up in a HUD house—a Housing and Urban Development subsidized housing. Largely the reason we moved to the reservation was because of that—because there was subsidized housing for tribal members.

But I did recognize that my non-indigenous counterparts…. So I went to school off the reservation. And when I went to their neighbourhoods, their neighbourhoods were different. They had sidewalks, they had trees. Their homes had garages, ours didn’t. That whole living situation, I think, I was taking note of but not really fully comprehending what that was. I just noticed the difference. But I think that had a—a sort of influence on me, as a designer, really thinking about what places could be and how our situation wasn’t like others.

Jen Hancock: 

Other architects might have taken that start in life and decided to always include the things he didn’t have. But that’s not how Chris works.

Chris Cornelius:

I have conversations with people to understand what it is they want from me, I guess, and what it is about my work that they gravitate towards. Right? I’m looking for those kinds of projects where I can change the way that people are thinking about indigenous culture, and architecture, because I’m trying to push both of those things forward, not just one or the other.

And I should say that all projects that I work on don’t always result in a building, per se, it might be a kind of master planning exercise, or a pre-design exercise, or thinking about, “How do I help design the process to…

Jen Hancock: 

Right.

Chris Cornelius:

… design something?” Right?

Jen Hancock: 

Yeah. Cool.

I want to talk a little bit about community engagement. So, when I sort of often see this done, you know, maybe there’s been some pre-work done by like a developer, another architect, they work together. They’ve sort of put forth a set of pre-plans that then they go out and do—bring community in to comment on the work that’s been done.

You do your community consultation a little bit differently. Maybe you start from a different perspective. Can you talk me through how you do that process?

Chris Cornelius:

I would say that almost all of the projects that I do have some form of community engagement. And will say, too, that the term “community engagement” is similar to me, in my practice, to sustainability—meaning that they’re not separate things, and they’re not just parts of projects that get layered onto something. They’re integral to the thinking about a project or even a thing. Right?

So the community engagement that I try to do is I can’t come to a project with the perfectly crafted set of questions. Because that presupposes that there are specific answers that I want. I don’t always know what those answers are. And it’s really just based around conversation.

I find that if I can get people talking about the things that are important to them, I get the correct response. I get what I need out of the project—meaning like I don’t need a community to tell me whether the building that is going to be designed…. Or let’s say it’s housing. The housing that’s going to be designed, I don’t need specifics about like how big your kitchen is or how big your bathroom is. What I need are your specific values. What are the cultural values that you want to express? And what is the specific story that you want this project to tell? And not to give it to me through a—the lens of architecture or design but really, “What does it culturally mean to you?”

When I first had this sort of experience, it was really just a teacher was telling me a story about how our culture, the Oneida, we don’t tell a lot of stories about the sky anymore, or the stars. And I was like, “Well, that’s actually foundational to our Creation story.”

And so she told me the story, ah, about The Seven Dancers. And then that was the thing that really sort of drove that specific project. That had nothing to do (laughs a little) with what the project was for; it just had to do with, “How can I make this piece of architecture be a setting for telling that story and/or augment the story through its spatial agenda?” Meaning like you can tell that story and it’s always tied to that space.

And that was really how I sort of work.

And so even with smaller projects—like the Otaeciah, which is Crane, it’s a permanent land acknowledgement at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. One of my first things was I had this conversation with the indigenous student group on that campus, and just wanted to know what’s important to them. And some really important things came out of that, like: they didn’t have a place that they could identify with; that campus doesn’t have anything to do with who they are or where they came from; and the fact that there isn’t just one indigenous community there, that there are, there are students that are coming from all over the country to that particular campus, and so what does that mean to, to be indigenous there?

So really, I find that the information comes from those conversations as opposed to an interview or some other sort of exercise. But I do think those things have a role, and so in the work that I’m doing now I try to partner with other groups that are doing community engagement and—and how can I layer onto that in a way that I can get the information that I particularly need in these cultural values.

And when I say “cultural values,” too, I don’t think it’s just indigenous communities. Right?

Jen Hancock: 

Right.

Chris Cornelius:

It could be the clients could be non-indigenous. There’s other forms of culture. I’ll call it “culture” with a small “c”—like the culture of a campus, or the culture of a corporation, culture of a non-indigenous community. There are other sort of values that—that people hold that are important Those are the things that I am interested in translating into space/form/material that really how I try to ground projects.

Jen Hancock: 

Do you start drawing before you hear the stories? Or do you go hear the stories and then you start? Or does it vary, depending on the thing?

Chris Cornelius:

It varies. It—it varies. You know, if I have thoughts about a project, I might start drawing those thoughts and working through them. Sometimes it helps me formulate or frame conversations, in particular ways. If it’s a culture that is not mine, I want to know their Creation Story, because I feel like that tells me a lot about what is most valuable to that culture.

And sometimes it—it might happen parallel, meaning like the drawing or sort of ideation of the project might be running parallel to what I’m hearing from community members.

Sometimes the design starts ahead. Then get that feedback, then incorporate it into the design itself. And that’s also a—a second step to that process is once I’ve gathered the information, I bring the design back to that same group to show them how I’ve incorporated what I’ve gotten from them in how I render something (laughs a little). Or in the way that I’m communicating the project, even, back to that community is really sort of guided by that.

Jen Hancock: 

So, I kind of want to dig into a bit of some of the design process and some of what you think about.

Now, you mentioned that both the story telling and like sustainability—like it’s not like a bolt-on thing you just do—that’s integral. Like it’s—it’s absolutely embedded in your process.

How do you look at the area surrounding the building as part of that?

Chris Cornelius:

Yeah. I try to zoom out from wherever that situation is. There are certainly other things like on the ground that can tell us a lot, but then are other bigger systems and understandings of context and environment to be incorporated and—and understood.

So it depends on the project but I am really interested in these sort of larger systems and thinking about reciprocities. And when I’m intervening in a situation as a designer, and I’m going to put a physical thing there, how is that going to affect these larger systems?

I think that these things have bigger repercussions than we know. Is a building going to affect migratory patterns of birds? Those reciprocities are really deeply embedded in the place already, and so how are we intervening in that situation? Are we going to augment it? Are we going to supplement it? Are we going to mitigate it? Are we going to eliminate it? And for me, that’s just how I’ve always thought of things. I think, particularly as an indigenous person in the world, that’s really what’s been introduced to me sort of culturally is to think about the world in that way—that there are bigger repercussions for the things that we do.

I don’t need to convince indigenous communities why sustainability is important. Because it’s—it’s cultural.

The thing that I need to bring out is how will this thinking already supplement the ways that they’re thinking? What knowledge can I get, ah, from them that is tens of thousands of years old? How can I push that into the future and/or use it and leverage it? It could be very simple. It could just be about The Sun and how The Sun—that you can get energy from it, you can get light from it, you can get heat from it.

I think that it’s really about like trying to understand those reciprocities that are important to specific communities.

Jen Hancock: 

Do you have some examples—maybe some of your favourite projects—where you were able to look at the place and think about all of what we just talked about?

Chris Cornelius:

The project that really kind of kickstarted my practice and is the big sort of thing that helped me develop and prove these kinds of methodolgies is the Indian Community School of Milwaukee that I worked on with Antoine Predock, who was the Design Architect. And I was a Culture Consultant and Collaborating Designer with him.

Just for instance, I think the way that we situated the building on the site, we were very cognizant of what was already sort of naturally there—meaning not just like trees, but to begin to understand that the thing…. He talked about it as an animal. Like he called it “The Monster,” which I thought was really interesting because it was like not calling it a building for a long time that was really sort of impactful on me, as a designer. Because in that way, then, we’re trying to make a living thing that is there to be a good relative to all the other non-human relatives.

And once the building was built, occupied, one of the things that the students were really fascinated by—because we have this sort of a lot of visual connection to nature—was they would just look out the window because there were deer and cranes that were just walking up to the building. And to me, that told me that we’re being a good relative to them. And they see the building as not intrusive but as a thing that they can coexist with.

And that landscape and that wildlife has become much more robust because of that. And now they’re still a client of mine today. This is 20 years—I’ve been working with them for 20 years.

Jen Hancock: 

Wow.

Chris Cornelius:

And we’re working on a master plan for their entire property, which is over 200 acres. And so one of the first things we did was to—we hired an environmental consultant to basically go through and tell us like: where are habitats; what is living in these areas of the site? Because I said, “If we are like one flower, one insect, one blade of grass away from this being the Sandhill Crane capital of Wisconsin, we need to know so that we can intervene in that and do that. Right?

So we have learned like the things that are on the site. Like when big trees fall, those become habitats. And we shouldn’t just like allow the facilities crew to drag it off the site.

And now, just in the past year or two, we have done something about the bird strikes. So birds are—have been flying into the building. And buildings are the number two killer of birds aside from natural predators. And it’s really a big thing that I think about as a designer. But one of the things that I did as an intervention was we put these sort of vinyl patterns on the exterior. And they’re patterns that I’ve designed that are connected to cultural patterns. But they have almost virtually eliminated bird strikes in certain areas. That’s telling me, “Okay. Well, we’ve done the right thing. We’ve tried to see the building as a bird would see it.” Which is the problem, to be honest, is when birds see the sky reflected in glass…

Jen Hancock: 

Right.

Chris Cornelius:

… they fly it at full speed because they think it’s sky. And if there’s something that’s interfering that—meaning a pattern on the glass, or you can change what the, what the window is reflecting—you can, you can do that.

So that is just important (laughs a little). You know, …

Jen Hancock: 

Right.

Chris Cornelius:

… it’s important to me as a designer. It’s important to the School and their cultural values that we be a good relative to them and that the building isn’t a problem for them, that it’s actually something that they—they see.

How are we interacting and are we being a good relative to our non-human relatives that we’re augmenting and really supplementing their existence in—in a way that’s positive and not taking away from it.

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Jen Hancock: 

We’ll be right back.
 

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Jen Hancock: 

At Chandos, building is about more than concrete and steel, drywall and windows. It’s how we build and who we build with that determines the legacy we leave behind.

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Jen Hancock: 

Our commitment to a more diverse and sustainable future is built into every aspect of our business: the people, the processes, the projects, and every community we’re part of.

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Jen Hancock: 

Let’s build better together.

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Jen Hancock: 

Find out more, or join our team, at chandos.com. That’s c-h-a-n-d-o-s-dot-com.

Jen Hancock: 

When you think about choosing materials, how do you choose what your buildings are going to be made of?

Chris Cornelius:

It’s tricky. Because I’m teaching this sustainability course here at UNM, and I’m trying to get the students to think about sustainabililty from a responsibility point-of-view and that as designers and future architects you have a lot of responsibility in what materials are in buildings. And that means everything, down to the furniture, the carpet, what people are touching every day—including where did that come from, who made it, and what community was that thing made in and is it affecting that community.

Now, we can’t do that 100 per cent. But I do think that the area of sustainability which is there are a lot of sustainable products that you can specify and use, but you do have to know what you’re looking for. Because there are situations where companies, if they put a tree on their logo you think it’s a green product but really is it?

On the Indian Community School we used a lot of copper. And because the copper was an important thing to the indigenous communities of Wisconsin—there was a lot of copper in the state but there isn’t anymore. I would say today, 20 years later, I probably will not use that much copper, because it—it’s highly extractive from the planet, and there are big portions of the planet that have just been decimated from that extraction.

But also thinking about the fact that when you make a building, ultimately I think you want it to be there for a hundred years. You don’t want it to be there for fifty years and then in the land—a landfill for a million years. But if you are specifying things that are going to have their own lifecycles, can you select things that have longer lifecycles? Meaning, can you specify things that are going into a landfill 50 years from now as opposed to 25 years from now, or 75 years from now?

Because I think there are spectrums of ways of thinking about these kinds of—of materials. And so that’s—that’s kind of how I’m thinking about them. Are they deployed in ways and methods that require adhesives or other sorts of things? I’m really thinking about things as systems of assemblies, and are those systems of assembly good for the planet or bad for the planet? What are their lifecycles actually like?

Jen Hancock:

I guess that’s one of the challenges, too. I mean, if this stuff was easy, everyone would do it, no problem. It’s not easy. And you do really have to look at place. Because where, you know, one material might be more sustainable in one place than it is in another—for lots of reasons—umm, maybe depending on the power grid, depending on the natural resources. It’s just you have to look at each project and space in order to figure out what is most sustainable for that building for that community. It’s complex (laughs a little).

Does it change how you think about the interior of a building, you know, in terms of what you want people to experience inside, from a material choice? Do you have…? What does that look like for you when you think about that?

Chris Cornelius:

When I teach students about materials, I try to teach them about characteristics and qualities. And actually, I have a lecture that I give students that—that uses all animal analogies.

So if you’re thinking about something, what do you want to communicate as a designer? Is it about thickness, is it thinness, is it transparency, opacity, is it softness, is it fuzzy, is it hard, is it cold, is it warm? Like all of these things are, if we think about them in those ways then we have a—I think, a larger array of things to, to think about.

And we all have had this experience, I think, as designers, where like if you think of some—something as one material, bids come back too high, what can you replace with that? If you’re like, “Well, I can’t replace it with anything,” that’s not a great way to design (laughs a little). Right?

Like—and I learned this working for William McDonough. In that office, at least at the time, you could not specify anything that had any content of vinyl in it. That was just like, “Do not do that.” Because it’s just harsh on the communities where it’s made. It’s always offgassing in a building for its entire life.

So thinking about things like that. And thinking about the formaldehyde content in plywoods and particleboard. Those kinds of things were—that’s where I really started to—to sort of be open to what—knowing what those things were. And really like how do you look at a product and look at the MSDS sheet, and…

Jen Hancock:

Right.

Chris Cornelius:

… understand like are there cancer-causing things in this product? Really then weighing that as a designer. Like, “Am I going to specify this product or not? Or how can I replace those things?” I mean, you can’t 100 per cent avoid those things. But you can, in large systems of like what kind furniture is it and where is it made.

Carpet and paints are big ones, because they just offgas for a long time when a building is new. Someone, it could be their entire career where they’re working in an office where the carpet and paints are offgassing in their environment. Who knows what health sort of issues they might have from that. But if you, from the outset, understand that as something to look for, then you can make those kinds of decisions.

And again, if you’re thinking about it in characteristics and qualities, what are the colours that I want? Ah, what kind of feeling do I want to have in that space?

Those are the kinds of things that I try to teach students about.

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Chris Cornelius:

The other aspect of, ah, just on this sort of material thing. (Laughs a little) I try to like leverage the qualities of material. Can I get it to do things that you wouldn’t think of it doing? Can I make it seem like it’s not a solid thing, it’s a—a thin thing? Or it’s transparent to translucent or it’s perforated. Like those are the kinds of things, too, that I, ah, think about when it comes to materials.

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Jen Hancock:

You may not even be allowed to answer this but do you have a favourite building?

Chris Cornelius:

Well, for sure. I mean, the Indian Community School is hard to beat. One of the mothers of students from that school—I think she had three kids go to that school—she told me this story. She said one of her sons said that there’s a spirit that sits on top of the building, ah, and watches over them. And I was just like, “That’s amazing. Because we couldn’t design that.” You know what I mean? Like you can’t—that’s not something you designed, put in a drawing, was specified and built.

Also, other indigenous people that have been to the School not from those communities or even from the state really feeling like it is indigenous space. That tells me like there’s something we did there that worked.

I just told someone this last week that went to the School and they asked me about it. And I was like, there’s no formula, I couldn’t write a cookbook, I can’t just put that into writing what we did. I can only think about in ways that it’s how I think as a designer. Right? It’s like a sort of meta level of the ways that I work that I’m not willing (laughs a little) to question or examine too much, even as an academic and scholar, but I think that it tells me that I’ve done something right.

And it was like the methodology is important and valuable. And then can I take that methodology and apply it to other projects. And in bits and pieces I have; but I haven’t yet at that scale.

Jen Hancock:

You art touches on truth and reconciliation. Can you talk a little bit about how your work speaks to that?

Chris Cornelius:

With regard to truth and reconciliation, I think that certainly (26:10, inaudible)—and I learned this from my friend and colleague, Patrick Stewart, who says like the truth comes first, before any kind of reconciliation. Which means that we just have to be honest about the histories of the United States and Canada and the dispossession of lands from indigenous people. We just have to be honest about those histories.

In my work, I’m trying to tell people about that. So when I lecture about the work, I try to build this context of understanding that history, and really just understanding how complex it is, and that any one single project is never going to communicate that history. It’s also not going to solve that problem. Right? It’s not going to fully reconcile something.

I do think that architecture can be a way for us to reconcile ourselves to the world. How do we reconcile ourselves to a site, its history, all of the contingencies of that history, its non-human inhabitants, its ecosystems? Like really just thinking about that as a reconciliatory act. Can I mend things? Because we have become disenfranchised or, ah, sort of disengaged with the land in a way that is not healthy for us.

Certainly we’re suffering the repercussions of—of that, that, you know, has happened for centuries. But how can a project start to build those things and really kind of re-engage them in a way that you have become estranged from them? It’s like a family member you’ve become estranged from: how do I rebuild those relationships?

I think that design can do that if we’re thinking about it in the right way. If we’re always thinking about it as a project that needs to be put into a place and needs to be a shining example of itself, then that’s not really going to do it for us.

If we’re thinking about how it fits into that place for those people and those non-people, I do think that…

Jen Hancock:

Hmm.

Chris Cornelius:

… sort of reconciliation can happen in small bits and pieces. But it needs to escalate. You know, some of the work that I’ve done is in thinking about places and how do you engage indigenous knowledge. Well, that’s one way of doing it.

Then the next step is like these physical, permanent land acknowledgements saying this land belonged to these people—as an institution we’re acknowledging that. That’s another step.

A bigger step, which is starting to happen but I think really needs to happen, I think universities, umm, have a unique relationship with the land. And they’re the places that could start by reconciling themselves to indigenous people.

So. If you hire an indigenous designer for your new chemistry building on your campus, well, how is that building going to be different than any other building on your campus? (29:09, inaudible) I use the chemistry as an example, it’s because it doesn’t just have to be like The Center For Native Studies.

And having been in academia for over 20 years, I just know that institutions, like universities, if they put money behind it then they’re serious about it.

Jen Hancock:

Right.

Chris Cornelius:

Anything else is just conversation and until that happens.

And then other levels where the land is given back—indigenous designers, attorneys, politicians, clients, constituencies, bankers. You know, like if that is all indigenous, then that is what sovereignty looks like. And that is bigger than me.

But those are the kinds of steps that these things have to take. And stewardship of land. We really just have to be honest about the truth of these places. And so, you know, one of the things that certainly I’ve talked to my own faculty here at UNM about—and really why I came here was these things were already kind of happening—I try to say, “Well, what if we started our site analysis beyond when the thing became a place?” Right? So if your project is situated in Albuquerque, before it became known as “Albuquerque” what was going on here? And I do feel like the people here have that deep connection to time that doesn’t really exist in other places.

And so places like Chicago and New York, like really understanding like before that became those places, it was likely an indigenous settlement. And what was important to those people for thousands of years before that? How can we start to bring that back? How can we start to make that importance rendered visible, or not just through policy but through space, and material, and how people understand the thing? Those are the things that we really kind of have to think about.

Jen Hancock:

I love that: the idea of there can be no reconciliation without truth. Like I think that’s such a really important, ah, distinction. But the idea that you can not only use the architecture but your process to be an instrument of both truth and reconciliation—in the moment and then the permanent form, whatever that is that can be both. I think that’s a really interesting way to look at that.

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Jen Hancock:

Say a non-indigenous architect or developer is listening, and they want to start incorporating some of your thinking. Where do you think they should start?

Chris Cornelius:

Well, you certainly start in the place that you are working—meaning like finding the indigenous communities that are in that place, just to understand their cultural thinking. I do think that for non-indigenous designers, it’s really important that there is some acknowledgement of indigenous knowledge and where it came from, and not doing things superficially.

Jen Hancock:

Right.

Chris Cornelius:

And it’s tricky waters, to be honest, because you don’t want to get something wrong. And so you—you really just need to verify those things with the communities that you’re sort of engaged with or overlapping.

A large part of my work now is—is doing that—is helping clients engage those communities so that…. And that’s always the sort of first thing that I do is like am I talking to the right people?

Jen Hancock:

Right.

Chris Cornelius:

Am I looking at the right things? To be honest, (32:14) most of the time it’s not just one community; there are multiple communities. Did they come together in this place? Did they overlap? Well, whose land really was it?

So I think that we could do a better job, however, as architectural educators, by exposing every design student to these issues. Because then we could help train you, as a professional 20 years from now, to know how to do that. Just like you know how to go and find what is the zoning code that’s applicable to my site, what is the culture that I’m intervening in and how do I engage that culture? Like those are—those are the things I think that we, as architectural educators, can have a role in.

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Jen Hancock:

Thanks to Chris Cornelius, Principal and Founder of studio:indigenous.

And thanks to you for listening to this episode of Building Good.

Building Good is a Vocal Fry Studios production, supported by Chandos Construction and Bird Construction. The executive producer is Jay Cockburn. Our producer is Kattie Laur, with production assistance from Jessica Loughlin. I’m Jen Hancock, thanks for listening.