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AS THE WORLD CURVES
Controversial architect wins huge commission. Five years later, he loses it in a Washington scandal. Today, he's a changed man. Trevor Boddy Follows the twists and turns of Douglas Cardinal's latest drama.

Text: TREVOR BODDY

1 | 2 | 3 | AUG 03

"Who's the cigar store Indian?" a distracted reporter asked. Architect Douglas Cardinal, the figure in question, stood on the edge of a press conference unfolding in Montreal's Club Saint-Denis, his crisp suit contrasting with his craggy, high-cheekboned face. At this unveiling of his design for a proposed Cree cultural centre in a new central Quebec town, it was surprising that the part-Blackfoot, Alberta-born architect prompted so little attention; his design for the entire town of Oujé-Bougoumou had helped earn two United Nations awards. Standing stiffly in front of his architectural model, Cardinal seemed resigned to a role that bordered on tokenism. During a break, he whispered to me, "I am here to be seen to be here."

I hadn't seen Cardinal in three years, though I got to know him well while writing a critical biography on the man and his works in the late 1980s. He had aged noticeably, the lines across his wide brow marked deeper, his monklike hair greyer and thinner. "You know, when I told the sisters I wanted to become an architect, I never figured I would spend so much time fundraising and promoting," said the Catholic-residential-school graduate. "I raised millions for the National Museum of the American Indian – that is, until they fired me," he said, the telling furrows on his face melding into a wan smile.

Many found Cardinal's 1998 loss of that project less shocking than him landing it in the first place. In 1993, he surprised the highly competitive world of museum architecture by winning the commission for the Smithsonian Institution's 260,000-square-foot National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Well-known in Canada for his undulating Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Que., he had almost no profile in the United States. He won the US$199-million-commission on the strength of his success in working with native communities, as he had on a planned Indian fine arts college in New Mexico. The prestigious NMAI promised to do for Cardinal what the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, had done for Toronto-born architect Frank Gehry. For a time, Cardinal flirted with the spotlight, rubbing shoulders with supporters like Nelson Rockefeller, Jane Fonda and Ted Turner.

Five years later, Cardinal scandalized both his client and colleagues when his Ottawa-based firm withheld the architectural drawings late in the design process. This dramatic action was the flashpoint in a dispute over fees and creative control that started when a new museum director was appointed mid-design. Since then, the Smithsonian has steadfastly denied him full credit for the building that is slated to open in September 2004. Cardinal's firm is last in the 67-word official list of credits for the NMAI – after consulting ethnobotanists, electrical engineers and the person responsible for lobby tapestries.

Later Cardinal protested his removal by publishing a 134-page screed on his firm's Website titled "A Forgery for the Smithsonian." The august institution was not amused. "Mr. Cardinal," the architect recalls being told by an exasperated official, "Washington does not work this way."

Cardinal says bluntly, "I was ghettoized. They promoted me as Indian for their own purposes; then they used the same identity against me, saying I did not have the management or technical grounding needed to finish the building." When I relayed this to two of his former NMAI colleagues, public affairs director Thomas Sweeney and facilities planning coordinator Duane Blue Spruce, I got a stock response ("Mr. Cardinal contributed to a schematic design for the NMAI"), their employer's gag order on the Cardinal affair still intact after five years.

Cardinal lost the commission only a few months before he cashed his first old-age pension cheque. For anyone else, this turn of events would have meant an ignoble termination to a brilliant career. Yet the righteous anger I expected was not there. Instead, I found a 69-year-old professional enjoying a happy personal life with his fourth wife and two preschool children (he has six other children) and a flourishing design career. But the shadow on his finances and reputation created by the NMAI affair still affects Cardinal and his family. He says, "I never went under, though it would have been much easier to do so, and it has taken me five years to pay back every cent I owed." This has meant a life without credit and a constant scramble to meet his payroll and personal financial obligations.

If I were to update Cardinal's biography, the outcome of the Smithsonian affair would not be an appended tale of failure and victimization. What I found were remarkably few hard feelings on the architect's side and a sinuously banded mesa of a museum that might just be a better Cardinal building than Cardinal could have produced on his own.

1 | 2 | 3 | AUG 03