conscious building BY ZANE FISCHER
THE PLAN FROM KUNKEL
COURTESY OF JOSEPH KUNKEL
A Native architect upends urban planning and architectural design on tribal lands
E
nvironmental psychologists say that our physical homes are one of the key ways in which we define ourselves, in which we project and understand our sense of self. This is why cookie-cutter suburban homes are so easily lampooned as emblems of banal sameness, of the failed promise of individuality insinuated by the American dream. If your house is just like the house next door, do you even matter?
But what if you don’t have the luxury of this kind of domestic anxiety? What if federal monies provide your housing and the most efficient use of that funding has been to plop easily replicable if characterless blocks into rigid grids and hand over the keys with the expectation that you’ll be grateful? What if you had no choice but to have your house be the clapboard equivalent of government cheese? For decades, critics of the housing provid-
ed to Native Americans through the Department of Housing and Urban Development have railed against government structures perceived to be of low quality and symbolic of a soulless sameness so thorough as to seem sinister. But all of that is changing, and an unassuming 31-year-old named Joseph Kunkel is leading the charge. A few factors are at work in transforming the way housing projects manifest for Native people across the United States, trendmagazineglobal.com
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