The rising popularity of mass timber products in Canada and the United States has led to a rediscovery of fundamentals among architects. Not least Indigenous architects, for whom engineered wood offers a pathway to recover and advance the building traditions of their ancestors. Because timber is both a natural, renewable resource and a source of forestry jobs, it aligns with Indigenous values of stewardship and community long obscured by the 20th century’s dominant construction practices.
Douglas Cardinal (b. 1934) is a visionary indigenous Canadian architect based in Ottawa, Ontario. He grew up in Red Deer, Alberta. His mother, who was of German origins, loved painting and music, and both became his passions as well during his years at a Catholic boarding school. In 1953, he started studying architecture at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, but was forced to leave two years later due to his outspoken opposition to follow rigid geometry of the Bauhaus and International Style models, championed by his professors. He wanted to create buildings that would respond to nature and the organic rhythm of life, drawing from his childhood experience of being intimate with nature.
