The Brooklyn Rail

I spoke with architect and teacher Chris Cornelius at length on his project of creating Indigenous architecture and artifacts for contemporary and future audiences. Cornelius’s work at studio:indigenous is slow, practiced, and secret. We spoke about maintaining a magic in architecture, finding a language to talk about objects, and developing ways to share that are stripped from a compulsion to fully know and exhaustively understand. This conversation is a small part of an extended exchange that has given me great hope, and for which I am deeply grateful.

Cornelius was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and raised on the Oneida Reservation in Wisconsin. He lives and works on the ancestral lands of the Pueblo, Tewa, and Piro people.

Anoushka Mariwala (Rail): How do we talk about your work? It’s an intense—though good—struggle for me to describe your practice as someone very clearly outside of it. I don’t even have the language or vocabulary that it takes to talk about everything that you’re trying to do, the way you move through the world with such intentionality.

Chris Cornelius: I remember distinctly when I was in graduate school thinking to myself, “What is it that I want to do?” One was that I wanted to create spaces—buildings at that time—for Indigenous people that really reflected the culture, and in that, create the contemporary artifacts of the culture. If my ancestors came back from the seventeenth century, and they saw a longhouse (our people are traditionally builders of longhouses) that was built out of concrete, I feel like they would just be like, “Well, what did we suffer for? Is this all we got?” The other was really just as a professional. Someone like Douglas Cardinal, who was really the only Indigenous architect that I knew, and someone that had built his own career and created his own voice, wasn’t replicating any sort of Indigenous forms, but he was using Indigenous values in the work. That’s what I wanted to be. The dream is if another project, like the National Museum of the American Indian, came up, they would say, “We have to have Chris Cornelius design this.” That’s the goal. I don’t even think I’m quite there yet, but that was the thing that was driving and compelling me, because I knew I had to be a good architect and designer first. No one was going to listen to what I had to say unless I was, which is happening now.

Rail: A big part of this desire, what you’re preparing for, is confronting, rather than turning away from, non-Indigenous environments. You talk about being a good ancestor, but I also think that the way you think about yourself as a descendant of the practice of architecture is a refusal and negotiation with the profession, with what you’ve inherited. You’ve been very deliberate about confronting and entering systems that have historically obstructed or rejected Indigeneity, both as a designer and as an administrator.

Cornelius: I don’t think that Douglas Cardinal was the Indigenous guy, and I didn’t want to be that either—to let that define who I am. It happens in architecture a lot: there’s a sustainability person, there’s a museum person. I didn’t want that kind of sort of moniker identifying my work. UVA was the thing that changed my life. I felt like they taught me how to think about the world, and my teachers respected me as an Indigenous person. I should pull out my application essay, because it’s more like a manifesto, really. I didn’t know how to do it then, and school gave me the tools to do it. But at the same time, like, things didn’t just happen overnight. I just felt like something was pushing me forward.

I had always just thought about my grandmother and my ancestors, even my father, and I know that they had struggles that were real. But I also understood that these people were counting on me. I understand that if I’m going to do what I’m saying I’m going to do, I need to do that thing right. It was years before anyone really started paying attention to what I was doing. I knew that if I wasn’t prepared for that moment, it wasn’t going to really happen. What I really want to do is get people to think about Indigeneity differently, not in a historic way, as if it’s in the past. There’s remarkable attention towards all Indigenous creative people today, and I’m happy to be a part of it.

With teaching, I knew that if I didn’t do it, no one else was going to do it. No one else was going to be able to give this sort of content to others. These institutions I’m teaching at have begun to open up, and they are doing something by inviting me to do this work. I take that responsibility very seriously. What I’m doing is not just about Indigeneity. It’s about methodology.

Rail: I think part of the way I understand your practice is in language. There are models, photographs of models, drawings, and then the way you speak, which is this whole other thing that is necessary to enter your world. And now, we also have this manifesto that you have written, which seems like the very beginning of your thinking via words.

Cornelius: I think it’s valid to see it that way, because it is true. I find writing laborious; I don’t think that I’m good at it. When I presented my graduate thesis project, I had it all up on the wall, and I sat down at three in the morning when I finished pinning it up, and I thought, “How am I going to talk about all this?” I decided to talk about it in a sort of narrative way. I’m really fascinated by narrative, in that it starts somewhere, it builds on something, and is not just a linear thing. I think about this a lot when I’m making things, which helps me talk about them, when I’m not even sure where something came from. The drawing is mostly for me, it’s my research. If people think it’s a wonderful artifact, that’s fine. The parallel, though, is that is exactly how I think about architecture. I’m trying to make a beautiful thing that someone’s going to look at and say “That’s a nice thing,” whether or not they get the story. It’s okay if you don’t.

My thesis paper was largely based on Roland Barthes, because I just got fascinated with this idea of the sign and the signifier. This is what happens in my culture with iconography, with things that stand for much more than what it is. That’s where I value my architectural education. It’s just that we have to augment this type of knowledge with other points of view, which is the thing that architecture schools have not been doing.

Rail: The thing that I love that you do is, when you are talking about a project, you begin with this question, “What if…” What if the bear made it, what if the deer encountered it in the forest. You ask it to the listener, and answering it is not within your prerogative as much as presenting it is. It is disarming to listen to you and think, “It’s not about me.” To first remove myself from the architecture, and then secondarily, to even remove you, the author, from the architecture.

Cornelius: In graduate school, I had gotten to this point of being able to build and draw and make things. What I’m doing now, I didn’t know how to do then. I wasn’t ready. That’s where I learned how to make; I learnt the skills but not what it is. It didn’t make any sense until I did the bear model, where I was trying to remove myself from the authorship and I wanted to tell the story. What if I stopped thinking about the answers, and started thinking about the real questions. The storyteller is not trying to be a part of the story, they are just trying to prompt people. I’m fascinated with that in film too, where and how things are revealed or not. If the author interferes, it will undermine the whole thing. Architects have been doing that, interfering. They’ve been getting in the way. I feel like maybe the practice has started to gravitate away from that a little bit, the way starchitects were operating. But it was just like—I can’t blame them, but it’s how star architects were sort of operating. That didn’t feel right to me, so I was trying to remove myself but also speak and maneuver and operate my own work.

Rail: The thing with both your methods—a geometrical operation and a hand craft—is that they are so intensely legible, with closed logics of understanding their projection. A line depends on another line, a thread depends on another thread. It is its own language. You are not interested in distinguishing a building from a model, an artifact. Still, your practice is so densely bundled up in secrecy, being the only person that knows it. I don’t know how anything you make gets made. There is no complex construction drawing and there is no detail section. There’s maybe one photograph, and it’s a beautiful photograph, and you’ve probably taken it yourself, too. You are choosing what is relevant to someone encountering your work.

Cornelius: It’s funny you say that, because it is secret. I like that. I realized at some point what I was going to keep secret and what I wasn’t. It was teaching that got me to that point. I would give advice, and sometimes students would say, “Well that’s your idea, Chris, and I need to come up with my own.” It’s usually not as good, and not because my ideas are better, but because my life experiences are different. If I’ve said an idea out loud twenty times, it’s now mine forever. I’m not going to give it up. When I was making models, I still haven’t told anyone what they’re made out of and what they are, because I do think it will unravel it a little bit too much, not for everyone, but for a lot of people. If a magician tells you the woman they’re sawing in half is two women, no-one is going to buy it. It’s not to be deceptive. I have found that if I start to reveal certain things, people get focused on the wrong thing. If I tell you all about all the proportions I use and how I operate in Rhino, it’s ultimately not going to matter, despite how sophisticated it is.

When I worked with Antoine Predock, that’s when I saw it up close and personal. The way that he was doing things was the way he wanted to do them. He would make these clay models, and how they got cut was very specific, and the profession at the time didn’t see that as valid, or rational. What he was actually doing was taking what he knew about the site, the program, the clients, and making this thing. Making the thing is actually sort of magical, and if you tell too many people about the magic around it, that will sort of unravel. I started doing that on my models, and then I started doing it on the full pieces. I put these fluorescent things on the top, and I will never tell anyone what they’re made out of, because it’s just so mundane. Now, it worked in the model. What happens if I make it full scale? I don’t like architectural rationality, the assumption that something has a use and a purpose. What I’m trying to do is pull in a different kind of language, one of Indigenous regalia, and what it signifies is much deeper and much more vast than what it is made of. Can I do that with architecture? Can buildings do that?

Rail: It makes me trust the work so much, that you have curated a story for me that I am going to encounter is a gift. Architecture, I am discovering in practice, is so wrapped up in being rational, and it is consistently demanded to answer questions and justify its being in ways that are ungenerous and less exciting. What can we do?

Cornelius: When I started pursuing architecture, I was really compelled by those things. I really love how buildings are made. I really love drawing these things, doing construction sets and learning how things go together. Another thing that I learned with Predock was that the project had a budget, and we did “value engineer” things, but the decisions that were made to do that were based on the values we had established in the design already. In changing this thing from this material to this one, are we losing anything? No, so it’s okay. We were always playing that kind of game, even when we were asked questions by a contractor. There’s one thing about the school that I only show students, no one else will know what this problem is, but I knew from Predock that it was important to him, and he got really upset about it. For me, it was knowing in that moment that this shit matters. It matters. What you don’t see are all of the health clinics in Wisconsin that I designed. You don’t see all of the high school additions I designed. You don’t see the fifteen houses I designed on my own reservation. You don’t see all of that. And there’s a reason I don’t show it to you, because it doesn’t help. It doesn’t help advance what I’m trying to do or what I’m saying. So it doesn’t exist. However, it’s all experience that I have to be able to do what I do now.

Rail: Can we talk about your project Not My HUD House? I want to talk about how to make architecture at a building scale a thing to value, outside of economics of land and property. How can we have a sustained relationship with the land we are cutting, on which we are putting things? Designing without clients, which was one of your practices, is a compelling way to resolve that, because without clients, there’s no ownership, and you’re just placing models on boxes, and they resolve themselves and belong to themselves.

Cornelius: That shouldn’t stop us from seeing the world, even though legally and economically, it situates itself that way. If we as architects see the value of what we’re doing in that place, in that context, on that piece of land, at that time, that’s most valuable. The buildings that are on the High Line are almost like pieces of furniture. They’re so specific and they’re so unique, and very costly, but they also happen to be residences, and there’s still value in the design. Everyone deserves architecture. Everyone deserves real design. The unoptimistic thing is to say that capitalism has taken over things, and the people who benefit most from it are not the ones that are actually moving the system. But if I operate in a place, a reservation, where that exchange value is removed from the land, it just has a different value. It’s not about dollars. It’s actually about a thing that we’re supposed to take care of, and that does change the equation.

I knew with the Not My HUD House, if I didn’t do it, then it was never going to happen. It was a conversation in my brain for years, almost like my entire career. One summer, I designed, like, 12 of these homes when I was working for the development division of my tribe, and they were building houses so fast. I was just drawing it, and they were building it. That was just production, and I thought that this isn’t right. If we slowed this down for a minute, there’s a different way to do this. This HUD house has been deployed on so many Indigenous people in the US and Canada, why not counter that with this thing that I’ve designed? What if I can put a thing into the world that operates the same way as this other ranch home, but it’s not made out of all of these things that people don’t realize are actually harming them, or making maintenance a problem? I didn’t let the client in the project get in the way, or wait for it to happen, for someone to ask me to do it or commission it. I need to make it, because no one’s going to engage with it until they see the thing.

Rail: That project is a big move away from, like, precious object artifact-ness. It is built for duplication, replicability. And I think until that point, the work is precious and different and singular. There’s a different generosity that is associated with giving away. When you put it in the world, the assumption is that parts of it will be taken and reproduced.

Cornelius: There was a point where I went to my own tribe to say, “I’m going to give you these designs. You can have them and you don’t have to pay me for this.” But they wouldn’t do it. They just weren’t prepared for that. It was almost a step too far out of the normal operative logic of funding and building. People on these reservations literally go to a lumber yard to get all the pieces and parts to build a home. I think about Frank Lloyd Wright and the Usonian homes and his textile block houses, where you go to a store and get the stuff. Le Corbusier did it with the Dom-Ino House, by presenting a new standard way of making these homes. Everyone has views about housing that really just don’t ever catch on, because they’re almost too generic for an audience. If they’re treated like these one-off masterpieces, then they stay that way, and no-one’s really going to do it. I’m not trying to make a masterpiece. I designed this thing that is the future artifact, and if it works, it works. If it doesn’t, the market will tell me, because they just won’t build them anymore. But I think it will work, although this may or may not happen in my lifetime.

Rail: The ability to think in an extended X-axis of time, and a deep Z-depth, is something I feel you have an intense muscle for. I have to struggle to not think in a line. It makes me think that the dexterity to be able to do it, but also to translate it into some material form, is so special, where I think the three-dimensional is already in the thinking.

Cornelius: Architecture school can ruin that for us sometimes. I recall the drawing that you, Juliana, and Zack made during our time together in studio last year. Your education until the point of our studio had convinced you that it wasn’t an architectural drawing. This is a problem: not a problem with you, but a problem with the whole framework that we’re operating in. Within the past few years, I’ve started to really realize how much of my life as a very young person has to do with the way that I think now. Without giving too many details about how I grew up, on the reservation, there was an entity in our community. I won’t say what it was, because that’s not actually what's important here. That entity had a home in the woods, and so when we rode our bikes by it, we rode faster. And my heart started pounding faster, or I would start sweating, or I decided that I’m not going to look directly at that thing. What I didn’t realize was that is the power of architecture. Architecture is doing that to me. I’ve always thought about that thing when I’m building models, when I’m making drawings. I’m thinking, “How do I articulate that? Can I do that for someone else? Can an architecture still have that response?” It’s completely uncontrollable, because it’s just about experience.

Rail: Maybe, to end where we began, the closest shared language that we can sort of arrive at when looking at a thing together is the feeling, because that’ll always be there.

Cornelius: If we knew all of the things, it doesn’t have the same magic. It’s just how architecture is made. If we talk about how it’s made, or all of the stuff that’s holding something up, it loses some of that magic. What’s important is the effect of the stuff, what it has on you.

Rail: Your project ukwé·tase (newcomer/stranger) and all of its materials do it, I think. I haven’t seen it in person, so can you describe to me what deer hide is like?

Cornelius: That’s a great question, because I wasn’t really thinking about what it is, which is funny. For the piece, which I did for the Chicago Architecture Biennial, I decided to use deer hides on a third of this thing. Part of that was just to say, “Well, this is how I think about materials.” I actually think about them as if they were animals. There were a number of things that were surprising about the actual thing. I actually didn’t touch them myself. I didn’t install them. I instructed others to do it, and I made a Photoshop of how to do it, where I just took the same deer hide and copy-and-pasted it, and I said, cut it right here. To get the right number of deer hides, I actually had to order it from different sources, and they were shipped to Chicago, and they’re remarkably similar. They almost look like the same Photoshop. The people that installed it did an amazing job at cutting it on a line, making sure we couldn’t see fasteners along that edge.

I have always been compelled by deer, because they’re largely prey, so their bellies are white. There’s a reason for that, it’s called countershading, because it reflects the colors of its environment onto its belly. If it had the same coloration, the predators would see it, because its belly would be darker than the rest of its body. I wanted to take that and open it out and spread it out, to make the white another line. I wasn’t doing it as an Indigenous thing, as much as to think about materials in the same way that I think about countershading. They’re probably 3 by 4 to 5 feet long each. When they were shipped, they were all folded up into a box, like paper, and we just pulled them back apart.

Where the deer hides are in the piece, I decided to take the sheathing off and allow you to see the frame. Now we could see the backs of the hides, which are soft, and I wanted people to touch them, because I just want you to think about what that is to me. Those animals have given us a gift, and now it’s my responsibility to take care of it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find another home for the piece, so the plywood part of it got destroyed. I got the deer hides back, and now I’m in the world with them. I think about them differently than I would think about any kind of building material that’s a consumable thing, that gets replaced because of maintenance or whatever. I like the idea of materials weathering, or staining things in the world as they interact with water and air and light differently. We should think about materials like I think of the life of that animal. Now I’m responsible for them, I’m the steward of those things.

You asked what they feel like. The hair is rough. It’s not like our human hair, because it has to exist in the world and protect itself from snow and rain and mud. And then, the skin itself is just so soft. And that comparison between the two things is what I think makes it so amazing.