By Mike Peters

A Tlingit long house could have blown everything apart for Michael Fredericks on her very first job.

The freshly minted president of the new architecture firm Rim First People was hosting a design charrette, a public discussion about a building for the Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program. ANSEP's creator at UAA, executive director Herb Schroeder, wanted a structure that would feel like home base for students from all over the state. The young people in the crowd were eager to see a building on campus that represented Native culture—any Native culture; they weren't fussy.

But others from the community, and dozens came to a series of public meetings at UAA, were more particular. The original concept, which was presented to Fredericks and her team to implement, was a Tlingit long house. The site is on Athabascan land, and local elders found the idea totally inappropriate.

Totally.

"For a while, it seemed like we weren't getting anywhere," says Michael Nabers, who was a student then and now runs a tutoring program for high-school kids through ANSEP. At meeting after meeting, he says, people just dug in their heels.

Fredericks says she now can't remember whether there were seven meetings or seven designs, but concedes the process was a bit of a marathon. She did not share Nabers' dismay, however. She relished it.

Eventually, a new design came to the table: a canoe.

Nabers didn't get it at first.

"I looked at it and said, 'What the … ?'"

But the canoe was quickly embraced by the group.

"The canoe is a perfectly engineered vessel," says 0Fredericks. "It rides across all Alaska cultures and across engineering. It represents Alaska Natives culturally without being specific to one."

Creating the opportunity for that dialogue, even though it became stressful, was exactly why she and Larry Cash, founder of the parent firm Rim Architects, launched the First People division in the first place.

"I'm more interested in making a building feel Native than 'look Native,'" she says. "And what's Native is really the input process. Participation is not just about the end design—it's about how it makes the user feel."

Architects who are asked to give designs a Native feel face one universal danger: Will the result be too literal?

Johnpaul Jones, the Seattle-based designer who was the lead architect for the final design of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., knows the problem well.

"I was once asked to make a building look exactly like a Navajo basket," he says.

"Do we really want something that can come across as cheesy once the initial appeal wears off?" he asked rhetorically at a planning conference in Anchorage last fall. "No. We want a Native sensibility, not a cartoon."

A decade ago, Michael Carlson, a principal architect at McCool Carlson Green in Anchorage, was eager to incorporate Native sensibilities into his 1996 design for the federal courthouse on Fourth Avenue.

"But I'm not Native," he says, "so I was careful not to expropriate a culture that wasn't mine. Nothing in the design is overly literal, but the intent was to honor regional communities, including Athabascan, Alutiiq and Unangan."

Fredericks says the ANSEP building's final design is "a little more Disneyland than I wanted originally," but the result has grown on her. And her peers like it, if the four awards the building has won since its completion in 2006 are a guide. The most recent accolade is the most prestigious: a 2008 American Architecture Award, sponsored by The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design together with The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and Metropolitan Arts Press Ltd.

"When I was in high school," Fredericks says, "it wasn't good to be Native." Like many parents of that generation, her father, Glenn "Tiny" Fredericks, urged her to "matriculate into modern society."

Today Fredericks, 32, is savoring a shift in attitudes. "Now, with the Native corporations showing people a path to success in a fairly short time, there is a lot of new pride," she says. "Young people who had missed their own language and culture growing up are now looking back as well as looking forward."

Her father, a Yu'pik tribal chief in Georgetown, was a friend of Larry Cash, and the two men became role models for young Michael, who admired her dad's land-claims activism and Cash's professional skill. At age 15 she was working odd jobs in the Rim offices—"watering plants and filing"—and collaborating with her parents as they worked with Cash on a master plan for Georgetown.

That was her first lesson in listening.

"There were 122 enrolled people in the tribe," she says, "and everybody had a chance to get their say" in a process that took more than a year. The results weren't intuitive, she says, remembering the first decision the community faced: Do we subdivide?

"That sort of personal possessiveness wasn't what our culture was about," she says. "But most people said, 'This is what we've been waiting for.'"

In Anchorage, she parlayed her plant-watering job at Rim into an architecture internship, a stepping-stone to formal studies at the University of Washington. While she awaits her certification as an architect next year, she works as a conduit between her clients and the designers who will translate their aspirations into buildings.

Designed to Educate

The two-story ANSEP building opened in October 2006 with a spare interior that Rim's architects kept skeletal so that students could study it.

"The building opens up, getting bigger as it goes up, like a canoe does," she says. "That's a dynamic with lessons for engineers as well as architects."

The heart of the building is an expansive common room on the ground floor, where students gather on Friday afternoons for lectures and conversation with visiting professionals. There is a wooden dance circle in the center, with plenty of room for performances and award presentations. "Recitation rooms" upstairs allow students to take markers to the front of the room in turn and solve problems collaboratively. A classroom, computer lab, a small kitchen and staff offices are tucked into other spaces. The 12,000-square-foot building includes engineering labs and computer centers that keep college students connected with high-school kids they mentor in villages. The building was designed by Rim First People, developed by JL Properties Inc. and constructed by Davis Constructors.

"This was a perfect first job for us," Fredericks says. "The sense of community that ANSEP wants to foster for Native students at UAA exactly parallels the relationship we want to have with clients."

Building an Image

Some projects don't leave much room for interpretation, as Fredericks found when the firm took on the Head Start building in Kwethluk. "The parameters for the building were pretty rigid," she says, "so the interior finishes became the palette of participation; lots of natural colors and textures."

But in other projects, architecture can become the brand itself. After the ANSEP canoe design was a reality, the program's logo became a canoe. The birch-bark motif reflected in the exterior tiling at Cook Inlet Tribal Council's Anchorage headquarters have also become a corporate symbol. That, says architect Jones, is Native design that succeeds: "The structure becomes the grandfather," he says.

While ANSEP's interior is spare and clinical—a 3-D study in engineering for students—the mission was different at CITC. Here the users come for job training, education, health and social services, and the mandate for Fredericks and her team was to create inviting, friendly, familiar space. The building name, Nat'uh', means "our special place" in Dena'ina Athabascan, says CITC president Gloria O'Neill. "It was important that our people feel comfortable here."

The birch-bark motif of the exterior delivers a familiar connection to the surrounding natural world. But the real-earth connection comes once a visitor enters, where the boxy tile and glass exterior morphs into curved walls, frosted glass and myriad textures that evoke grass, wood and water. There are subtle suggestions of natural light: adjacent walls are painted slightly different shades of the same color to suggest, Fredericks says, "the effect sunlight has when it comes into a room at an angle."

Movement in Progress

While Fredericks and Cash founded Rim First People to meet Native needs they didn't think were being served, she's discovered that she's not the only one engaging clients this way, and the movement is growing. Cold Climate Housing Research Corporation hosted several community jam sessions to develop designs for an evacuation center in Newtok and residential housing in Anaktuvuk Pass. Native corporations—some of the busiest builders in Alaska—expect such interaction as a matter of course.

As an architectural intern at Rim Architects in 2002, Fredericks was inspired by the ASRC tower in midtown Anchorage, which used stone and glass finishes inside and out that were inspired by Arctic Alaska. "When I saw how shareholders came in and experienced that space as their own, I knew why I wanted to be an architect."

Now, her team at Rim First people is designing a new hospital for Barrow that should be completed in 2013; other projects include an apartment building for seniors in Eklutna (opening next spring) and an office building for Eklutna Inc. that is currently the design development stage.

"We've just come back from a charrette in Barrow, and the 52 people who came to talk about the hospital plan there know that they are important to me and to the hospital."

And while that upfront effort consumes time and money, Fredericks insists it saves money in the end, especially in rural Alaska.

"The community is invested," she says, "so once the process moves beyond drawings they can make things happen quickly, without some of the typical obstacles."

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