Stainless steel beads form shimmering fringe around the edge of the new Anishnawbe Health Toronto, a community center southeast of downtown Toronto. Above, perforated aluminum panels mimic the geometric patterns of indigenous ceremonial shawls. The fringes jingle gently in the wind.
“The Edge is about sound,” said Matthew Hickey, a partner at Toronto-based Two Row Architects, one of the firms that designed the building. “Jingle dresses are used for ceremonies. It’s a movement and effect you don’t normally see in architecture.”
The health center, which aims to provide more than 90,000 local Indigenous people with a mix of Western and traditional medicine, marks the first phase of a planned Indigenous center in Toronto that will also include housing and retail. More than just a visual departure from Toronto’s architecture, which has favored glass towers and black obelisks, it heralds the emergence of a new class of Indigenous architects whose work has become a major driver of the city’s landscape after decades of exclusion from their chosen profession.
“The past was not acknowledged,” said Mr. Hickey, 47, a Mohawk and member of the Six Nations of the Grand River. “A lack of identity has emerged in this place – we tend to import buildings from Europe, with benches that imitate Greek temples.”
Today, there are fewer than 20 licensed Indigenous architects working across Canada, according to Patrick Reid Stewart, a Vancouver architect who leads the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Indigenous Task Force and hereditary chief of the Nisga’a Nation. “But they are making their presence felt. There was never a voice, and now we have a voice.”
Until 1961, Canada’s Indian Act forced its indigenous peoples to choose between seeking professional training and maintaining their status as First Nations citizens – a choice that “put you in the uncomfortable position of whether you want to honor your culture and heritage or be part of Canadian society,” said David Fortin, a professor of architecture at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and a citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario. “It wasn’t just architecture – it was every professional field.”
Fifty years after Calgary-born Douglas Cardinal became Canada’s first certified Indigenous architect, his legacy is being rekindled through the work of architects like Eladia Smoke, founder of Hamilton, Ontario-based Smoke Architecture, whose projects included a $120 million anchor building at Centennial College in Scarborough, Ontario.
The Centennial College project, created in collaboration with global firm EllisDon Construction and Toronto architecture firm Dialog, “drew from an Indigenous narrative and Indigenous values,” Ms. Smoke said. The building’s features include: an interior inspired by wigwams, the traditional dome-shaped dwellings of the indigenous people of the Northeast; an exterior that is said to be reminiscent of animal skin or fish scales; and an outdoor atrium “designed according to the principles of the Midewigan, an open bentwood teaching hut,” according to a project description.
Design concepts like these have long been part of Indigenous cultures, but Indigenous architects in Canada have been “trained to apply design principles from places they don’t come from,” said Ms. Smoke, 47, an Anishinaabekwe and a member of the Obishikokaang/Lac Seul First Nation. “That’s how I was trained.”
Last year, Ms. Smoke founded Amplify Indigenous Voices in Architecture, a nonprofit organization aimed at “encouraging young people to enter the profession and supporting elders to impart architectural lessons to the next generation,” she said. After a “birthing ceremony” in September, Ms Smoke hopes to begin operations this year.
Collaboration between indigenous architects and larger traditional firms is beginning to transform the discipline. On the one hand, the Indigenous Hub is the result of a partnership between Two Row Architects and Canadian companies such as BDP Quadrangle and Stantec.
Smoke Architecture designed a ceiling-inspired building for the Dawes Road Public Library in Toronto. “On the one hand, it’s a metaphor for community service,” said Andrew Frontini, design director for global firm Perkins + Will, a larger firm that worked with Ms. Smoke on the project. “On the other hand, a blanket drapes and folds. How do you get a building to do that? I’m trained in Western architectural traditions, so big metaphors were both outside my comfort zone and a conceptual struggle.”
With Ms. Smoke’s encouragement, Mr. Frontini’s team “took a step back and found a new way of working,” he said. Using felt, wooden scaffolding and a scanning app, the company began “translating the story of a ceiling into a building. This project pushed us past our own inhibitions and the customer loved it.”
Companies like Perkins + Will don’t just work with Indigenous designers out of altruism. In 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued 94 calls to action after consulting with Indigenous communities, civic leaders and survivors of the country’s notorious Indian Residential Schools, which punished students for using their native language or recognizing their heritage. To win lucrative government contracts, you now have to “hire at least one Indigenous knowledge holder who can advise a design team,” said Mr. Fortin, the architecture professor and the first Indigenous person to lead an architecture school in Canada.
“Architects throughout history have not been the best listeners, nor do they have humility,” Fortin said. “That’s why I think reconciliation is so important and design is an opportunity to do that. It’s an undervalued way to build relationships with First Nations people. Get to know them, build trust and create something together.”
Some Indigenous architects bristle at the idea of favoritism within Truth and Reconciliation requirements. “I couldn’t get past the atmosphere of reconciliation,” said Alfred Waugh, 58, the founder of Vancouver’s Formline Architects, who identifies as a “status Indian in Canada with both Indigenous and northern European ancestry.” “I left school in 1993 when people thought I would get a free ride because of my indigenous status. My approach was to prove myself through my merits as a designer.”
With the design of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Center on the campus of the University of British Columbia, Formline became the first Indigenous company to win the Governor General’s Award, one of Canada’s highest honors.
Mr. Waugh’s 19-person company “seeks to combine indigenous ways of knowing with Western knowledge to find a positive path forward,” he said. On the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto, this approach was used to create the Indigenous House, a “humane and organic” wooden building in a sea of brutalist and modernist facades. Formline collaborated with Toronto-based LGA Architectural Partners on the design, which “makes you think about your place in this world and heightens your awareness of your connection to nature,” Mr. Waugh said.
But his decisions were also practical, including underground pipes that pump fresh air into the building. “They are based on an old anthropological diagram where birch bark tubes ran underground to supply oxygen to a fire,” he said.
Indigenous principles also shape landscape architecture. “Design has so far gone against natural systems and laws that have long governed Indigenous cultures,” said Ashley MacDonald, a designer at Toronto-based SpruceLab, an Indigenous planning firm founded in 2020. “Now we return to these natural laws. It’s about harnessing the power of wind and sun, which has always been used, and not just for decorative aspects. These are lessons that have been passed down through generations.”
Thanks in part to this inherent seed of sustainability, Indigenous architecture is “not just having a moment,” said Mr. Hickey of Two Row Architects. “It’s the future, especially in North America.”