Indian Community School
Award of Merit: K-12 Education
Indian Community School was recently relocated from Milwaukee to rural Franklin, Wis., and serves students in grades K-8 who are descendants of enrolled Native American tribal members.
The goal was to create a space that reflected the school’s curriculum and philosophy, which incorporates native cultures and spiritual traditions.
The school believes that the role of education is not confined to academics, but must be based in native cultures and traditions. American Indian spirituality, languages, ceremonies, cultural identity and pride are components of learning.
The new facility was built with the intent to serve as a place where children will receive a formal education but also where they can celebrate important milestones, including college graduation, marriage and other cultural events.
An Authentic Design
The architect, New Mexico’s Antoine Predock, started his planning with a trip to Wisconsin Indian reservations. The building follows the contours of the land, and classrooms look out on 200 acres of oaks, cottonwoods, meadows and wetlands.
The limestone cladding is a mixed with broad saws of copper shingles that have already weathered to a rusty purple. A seamed-metal roof, underlain with pine, swoops, dips and undulates across 100 elevations.
The entrance opens to a vast gathering space with soaring columns of white pine from the Menominee Indian Reservation in the North Woods.
Polished limestone floors are inset with cast-bronze medallions that evoke the phases of the moon and slender strips of bronze that mimic the flight patterns of migrating birds.
Other touches include jutting balconies that offer sweeping panoramas; red cherry floors and doors; drum-shaped amphitheater with sun-like copper dome from which pine strips radiate; a Place of Nations room for relaxation edged with paintings; and copper water trough meant to suggest the Mississippi River.
Structurally, the school is made of four materials—concrete, stone, wood and copper.
An issue for the contractors was to align the materials seamlessly in a building without any straight lines. The two-dimensional drawings were converted to three dimensions via building information modeling technology.
The information was then used to verify structural shop drawings, such as glulam and structural steel. In addition, it was downloaded into a Total Station survey device and then given to the trades.
Jury Comments: “This is very nice. A lot of different materials were used. This has a standing-seam copper roof. It’s a nice project honoring American Indian culture.”
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