This project for the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe is dedicated to the practice of the Smokehouse faith, a traditional spiritualism also known as Seowyn. The facility accommodates the congregation’s gatherings and ceremonies, receiving guests from the region’s larger Smokehouse community.
Peeled log construction and a long, gabled roof are reverential to the traditional longhouse structures of the Southern Salish peoples.
Cedar columns stand sentinel in the ceremony rooms, connecting the congregants to their heritage.
The dining hall forms the heart of the building. Where the log structure in the ceremony rooms embodies the raw character of those spaces, the dining hall juxtaposes deep red tinted plywood, slender wood slats, and woven pendant lights, accentuating subtle movements in the logs encapsulated by decades of growth.
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“It’s an intelligent translation that acknowledges contemporary construction, yet at the same time has a smell, sense of the coldness, sense of the earth…appropriately scaled in a way that it is caught between the human and communal structure that was really quite compelling at multiple different scales and multiple different rooms.”
– David Lewis AIA, LTL Architects, AIA Seattle Honor Awards for Washington Architecture Juror
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