Tammy Eagle Bull Is Weaving Indigenous Design Into Modern Architecture

Where conventional architectural practices are often guided by technical factors like zoning, Eagle Bull takes a different approach. "I like to go further back into the deep temporality of the site,” she says. “What was it originally? Who lived here? How did they live?"She says this is especially important when thinking about extreme heat in a place like Phoenix, which had a record 113 consecutive days of 100-plus degree temperatures in 2024. "People are like, 'This is so inhospitable. It's too hot. People can't thrive here,'" she says. "[But] people did. They had thriving cities, they had agriculture, and they were able to sustain life. And so, if we look back, we can see that living in modern day Phoenix shouldn't be such a struggle. There were strategies that were employed to manage water and to manage heat."These design principles are at the root of many modern models, says Eagle Bull, such as the “Passive House” concept, in which the built environment is crafted to work with things like weather systems and wind flows, and “life-centered design,” which takes local ecology and circularity into consideration. "The heart of all that is really what Indigenous design has been practi...