The room was packed, as a large contingent of architecture and planning students, along with others not attending U. New Mexico, listened intently to Duane Blue Spruce speak Monday evening in the Pearl Hall Auditorium.
People sat on the descending stair walkways, notebooks in hand, hoping to learn about a relatively unexplored subject: modern Native American architecture.
Blue Spruce, who is Laguna/Ohkay Owingeh, spoke about coming from a native standpoint and how it affected him while he helped design the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
“To me, (indigenous) architecture is created by both native architects and non-native architects,” he told the crowd. “Those traditional architectural methodologies and forms can be the inspiration for contemporary works of architecture.”
Blue Spruce’s speech was part of a series held by the Contemporary Indigenous Architecture class. Every Monday, the class will have practicing Native American architects as guest speakers. Talks are open to the public.
“This is an area that has never seen the spotlight before,” said Eleni Bastea, who is one of three professors teaching the class. “It is a field that is very much in the beginning. I think we were able to get four books (on the subject) out of the library.”
The field is in infancy, Bastea said, so no one is exactly sure what even qualifies as Native American architecture.
“It is a discipline in the making. … One of the questions that comes up is ‘What do you include under Native American architecture?’” she said. “We agreed not to decide on that and leave it up to the students.”
Since the curriculum is still being developed, Bastea said teaching the class is unusual. Right now, the majority of classes consists of the weekly guest lecturers, who are coming from all over (two are traveling from Canada) to speak about what Native American architecture means to them.
Lynn Paxson, another instructor for the class, has been teaching on the subject for 15 years in Iowa. Paxson said Native American architecture is an important, and underappreciated, subject.
“Most of the stuff we think is new for sustainable purposes today, you can find all of those kind of things done historically in native architecture,” Paxson said.
Take the teepee, for example, she said.
“You start out in summer, and you roll the sides of the teepee up, and you get cool breeze. Gets a little cooler and you roll the sides down. Gets a little cooler you put a ring of rocks around the base,” Paxson said. “It’s an architecture that changes year-round to meet needs.”
Jayne Franck, a senior architecture student who attended Blue Spruce’s talk, but is not enrolled in the class, said the speaker had interesting viewpoints.
“I’m hoping to learn how to integrate modern materials into the New Mexico style and still preserve the history and the identity of it,” Franck said.
Even in New Mexico, where there is a significant presence of native
peoples, this is the first class on modern indigenous architecture at UNM, and one of the first in the country, Bastea said. It also might be the last time this course is offered at UNM.
“Realistically, I don’t see how we could have this kind of show every night,” Bastea said, citing budget restrictions. “But we hope to develop something.”