2024 Hagey lecture: decoding meaning in Indigenous design

This year’s Hagey Lecture, called Decoding Meaning in Indigenous Design, took place on Nov. 12, at 7 p.m. in Federation Hall. The event was delivered by Wanda Dalla Costa, the principal of the TAWAW Architecture Collective Inc. 

Costa’s design-research firm aims to advance Indigenous architecture by centering on the meaning found in original structures, such as the tipi, hogan, or longhouse. Each project that the firm takes offers social and ideological meanings that integrate into contemporary form. Costa holds a joint position at the Delaware School of Construction as an institute professor and associate professor. She also is a senior global future scientist with the Julianne Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and has spent almost 30 years working with Indigenous communities in North America. 

In the lecture, Costa emphasized how there are many powerful lessons that come out of architecture school, but also from traveling around the world. The first lesson is visibility, and how travelling around the world makes different pieces of art visible. She said if there were Elders guiding moral decisions, it would be a different world, especially in the U.S.

The second lesson is dialogue, which is about getting people to ask questions about Indigenous designs. “Designs get people to ask questions such as ‘Why? What is it? What does it mean? What does it represent?’” Costa said. “These designs create cross-cultural dialogue. We begin to talk and we begin to talk together and I think that’s a really important distinction.”

The third lesson of the journey is preservation. “We have learned so much from all the communities we work with. And when we walk into a community of Indigenous designers, we have 10 people in a room where we’re quiet for 90 per cent of the time,” Costa said. “It’s not easy. Architects love to chat so it’s hard to be quiet and to listen. But this is a practice that we have upheld, and I think that’s helped build those nuggets of preservation that we’re aiming at.” 

Costa said the fourth lesson in the learning journey of architectural change is imagination. “What I learned is that the first lessons visibility – dialogue and preservation – actually help spark imagination, which of course is the seed of architecture,” Costa said. “We have to somehow come up with all these new ideas every time we do a project. It’s in a new site and new materials, new groups and culture. And the sparks in that imagination pervades our work and transfers it to hope.”

The last lesson is reimagination, which is about how we can reimagine simple structures into designs filled with different meanings. “At Arizona State University we have helped construct buildings designs from simple shade structures by working with local builders,” she said. “This taught us a lot about the type of wood and the willingness to preserve.” Costa concluded by emphasizing that her team is trying to decode a holistic worldview into bite sized chunks.

The Hagey Lectures are Waterloo’s public lecture series named after the university’s first president, Joseph Gerald Hagey. The lectures, which started in 1970, are meant to enrich students, faculty, staff and all members of the community.