When is a design no longer yours? If you had worked on it for years but left before all of the details were worked out is it still your design or is just some sort of horrible bastardization of your ideas? Where does your building stop and one that you had mo involvement with begin?

Douglas J. Cardinal, a Blackfoot Indian from Canada and architect of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, was hired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1993 but was fired in 1998 over legal and financial issues; Cardinal's firm was treated as a design architect under an American firm (GBQC from Philadelphia), he felt that he was being vastly underpaid for a tremendous amount of work. The initial design from Cardinal was approved by the Washington, DC Fine Arts Commission but new architects were brought on board (including Polshek Partnership Architects) to develop and build the museum based on that design.

The museum is located at the east end of the National Mall, across the street from the Air and Space Museum on a site that faces the U.S. Capitol. It is surrounded by pools and landscaping that is supposed to represent the original landscape in Washington when Native Americans still lived there. The building has solid massing that represents its site, with the exception of exterior rough stone walls that arbitrarily curve in plan and a massive portico that faces the U.S. Capitol Building and acts as the museum entrance. Once inside, there is a large, empty rotunda capped with a stepped dome ceiling. A staircase that connects the public floors of the building lines one side of the rotunda. On the first floor is a shop, a theatre and a large cafeteria, the second floor has another shop, while the museum galleries are located on the third and fourth floors.

The final result is a building that feels incomplete, one with glimpses of genius but without any real greatness. The rough stone exterior with all those arbitrary curves is certainly interesting but hollow, it feels as if it is trying too hard to look natural. The cantilevered portico makes the building look like it is going to tip forward, while the atrium inside that looks as if it should be exciting just feels especially blank and empty. The curved walls and soffit inside could be anywhere, there is little to connect the inside of the museum with the overall design once you leave the atrium. After knowing the history of the museum, it is impossible not to imagine how good the design would have been executed if the original architect remained involved.

American Indians are the indigenous peoples of North and South America who were driven back and victimized by European settlers for generations. They were made up of many different tribes, each with their own language, customs and religious beliefs. A common thread between all of the North American tribes was an appreciation of the land and its resources, one that has been admired and idealized in recent times by a more ecologically aware society. The museum uses artifacts, films, demonstrations and text descriptions to explain both what life was like before the Europeans and after, a world of broken treaties and displacement. It also goes through great pains to show how American Indians are surviving today, a noble idea but one that feels out of place and vastly over represented in the presentation.

To Americans today, the past treatment of its native population is one of those things that can still evoke some level of shame, although one (like slavery, segregation, the Japanese internment, etc.) that can easily be blamed on the circumstances and the past without any fear of retribution. Treaties signed between the tribes and the U.S. Government were regularly broken or ignored, a fact that makes what happened at this museum even more significant. At a building that was supposed to represent how far the American government had come in its treatment of its native peoples, contract disputes and questions about its final design continue to hang over the whole project. The more things change the more they stay the same.

Learn more about the National Museum of the American Indian at nmai.si.edu
Learn more about Douglas Cardinal and his side of the story at djcarchitect.com