September 21, 2004

	Images Courtesy National Museum of the American Indian

It should have been a recipe for kitsch: a museum resembling a mesa carved by the wind, its flexes and curves of honey-colored, rough-cut limestone rising from an idealized Native American ecosystem. But the National Museum of the American Indian, which opened today, is a masterful abstraction and one of the more interesting buildings on Washington, D.C.’s National Mall since I.M. Pei’s East Building of 1978.

The NMAI occupies that last museum location on the Mall and forms a new gateway to the Smithsonian Museums. It was designed and curated by Native Americans, showcases Indian history and culture from an upbeat Native perspective, and Native tribes contributed $33 million of the $219 million price tag.

After winning the design commission in 1993, Ottawa architect Douglas Cardinal, of Native Canadian descent , created a scheme reflecting themes voiced by native artists, elders, and chiefs with whom the museum consulted in nearly 150 Native communities from the Arctic to the Galapagos. Cardinal was dismissed over a legal dispute in `98, but “by then the design was set,” says director W. Richard West, a Southern Cheyenne and Stanford-educated Washington lawyer. Original team members Johnpaul Jones (Cherokee/Choctaw) Donna House (Navajo/Oneida), and Ramona Sakiestewa (Hopi) implemented Cardinal’s design. To quell questions of design authorship, West says the Smithsonian “is indebted to Douglas Cardinal for his work of genius.”

In keeping with many Native traditions, the five-story, 250,000-square-foot building faces east toward the rising sun, and the U.S. Capitol 500 yards away. An entrance with a sweeping overhang opens to a 120-foot wide rotunda, which is less architecturally convincing than the exterior, probably because it lacked Cardinal’s sure hand. The rotunda, soaring 120 feet to a skylight, opens to curving galleries and two circular theaters, a resource center, gift shop and food court.

Andrea Oppenheimer Dean

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