Architect of the land of the unknown.

To understand Douglas Cardinal, one of contemporary architecture's most distinctive interpreters of the built environment, look at an ear.

The word listening constantly keys his own discussions of his work. Listening, for him, means truly hearing the voices of humans, clients and building users, and their needs; but also hearing the subtler communications of sun, moon, wind, water, and earth with the materials and spaces that make a building and its place in the world.

Ears, with their whorls and ridges, marine curves and infolding, also are emblems of the organic, natural world. Cardinal, of Blackfoot and Metis Indian lineage and a lifelong advocate for Native American rights, draws his forms from this world and shapes them in the forge of an intensely personal vision. The resulting rhythmic, spirit-filled structures earning Cardinal awards such as the Order of Canada, given for major contributions to the advancement of Canadian civilization and the country's highest cultural honor) inspire, excite, and occasionally, infuriate an international constituency of clients, critics, and the general public.

"There are two domains: the world of the known, which is also the past, and the world of what is not known," Cardinal has said. "The world of the known is what you can hold in your hand: the unknown is what stretches from your fingertips to the horizon. Which world would you rather be in?"

According to Cardinal, the unknown in Native tradition is "the land of the eagle." Here is where imagination lives, in the not-yet-created, the future. According to those who use and those who view his projects, from the Canadian Museum of Civilization to rural elementary schools to the Edmonton Space Science Centre to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., Cardinal's work comes to this world straight from the land of the eagle.

For Cardinal, carrying vision into the world means being a diplomatic pacifier of government agencies, skilled manager of large groups of people, hardheaded business person, pragmatic problem solver, and one of the world's first architects to use computer design technology.

Almost every Cardinal project represents a small war: After finishing a multipurpose center for the city of St. Albert in Alberta, Canada, the town manager was quoted as saying, with a smile, "Short of lying or stealing, Douglas Cardinal will do anything to build what he wants." However, he continued, "it wasn't an unhealthy thing. We were determined we wanted something unique, and he was determined to build it."

Regardless of his profession's pragmatic necessities, Cardinal's vision is first and foremost that of an artist, one who jokingly calls his style Baroque Modern. "I want to put emotion back into buildings," he says. Colleagues, scholars, and critics find it harder to fit him into any school or movement. According to Canadian architecture critic Trevor Boddy, "the man is unique."

Creating the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec, dream project of then prime minister Pierre Trudeau, meant pulling order from the chaotic convergence of an international design competition, fifty government agencies, thirty design subconsultants, two hundred subcontractors, and a "fasttrack" construction schedule.

"I'd fought Trudeau's government for years on issues of Native rights. For ten years I'd come with Native groups to Ottawa to the Department of Indian Affairs to get Indian control of Indian affairs. That was our commitment, and we were able to achieve this. Trudeau had final say in the design competition for the museum, and I wondered whether he would honor the commission. He said, If you bring the same commitment to my vision of this museum as you did to your people, then we'll have a good museum. He knew I didn't know what kind of battle it would take to get that building built: But he knew that if I gave my word I would keep it, and the museum would be built."

Cardinal won the competition, designed the museum, and oversaw its seven-year construction process requiring over thirty thousand drawings and costing an estimated $255 million. For six years Cardinal and his staff lived with this undertaking seven days a week. Facing Canada's Parliament building across the Ottawa River, the glass, copper, fossil-studded-limestone, and brick museum, which opened to the public in 1989, has been called Canada's most significant building after its Parliament.

Farther north in Quebec, the model rural community Cardinal helped the Ouje-Bougoumou Crees create, after sixty years of displacement and government mistreatment because of their tribal lands' mineral wealth, won a 1995 United Nations award for innovation in sustainable development and human habitation.

Grande Prairie College in Grande Prairie, Alberta, earned Cardinal a 1972 award for excellence from Canadian Architect magazine,. just at the time the architect got word that the Alberta Public Works Department was planning to cancel the project to reduce the department's budget.

The Edmonton Space Sciences Centre in Edmonton, Alberta, eloquently demonstrates Cardinal's versatility and commitment to the needs of each site and client. Sleek in white metal rather than his buildings' usual skin of brick, the center looks as if it should be piloted rather than toured. Containing the world's only theater featuring both IMAX and Omnimax projection technology, the center attracts almost half a million visitors annually. In 1980, the city of Edmonton selected this building as its flagship project commemorating the province of Alberta's seventy-fifth anniversary.

Cardinal projects, from AIDS hospices to schools to private residences to two of the continent's major public buildings, are scattered from the American Southwest to the Canadian Yukon. His own home, symbolically, remains unfinished. The brick and glass house begun in the mid-1980s on 160 prairie acres outside of Alberta has fallen victim to his daunting schedule. The house grew without a blueprint. "Every morning the mason would just show up. It was great fun," according to Cardinal. The only right angles in the building form the elevator shaft. The house has two waterfalls, atriums, an indoor pool shaped like a fluttering flag, towers and anthropomorphic spires, and is recessed into a hill. A striking, exuberant yet solemn sculpture rising out of a grass sea, the house attracts sightseers in spite of its rural location.

Cardinal's current project, the National Museum of the American Indian, planned for completion in Washington, D.C., by 2002, combines a powerfully symbolic building project with one of the world's most powerfully symbolic sites. Still in the design phase -- nevertheless already requiring seven-day workweeks for Cardinal and his staff -- the museum honors the cultures of indigenous people from Canada, the United States, Central America, and South America. The site on which the museum will grow is the last parcel of undeveloped land on The Mall, at the front of the Capitol and across the green from I.M. Pei's postmodern geometry lesson, the National Gallery of Art East Wing. As the millennium arrives the new museum will close and complete the Mall.

The process by which the museum design originally took shape began when Cardinal gathered Native tribal elders from North, Central, and South America in a series of meetings and asked them to bring forth their visions for a museum dedicated to Native culture. From Cardinal's original interpretations of these visions in hand-drawn sketches, and the process of ongoing creation, feedback, and revision that is Cardinal's hallmark -- coming back to the source continually, completing the circle -- a working design emerged.

"It took millions of years to evolve a human being; it takes a while to evolve a building, and if it's going to serve people you should invite criticism, because it isn't yours, it's theirs. Like this building on the Mall. It's for everybody here. It's the heart of this country, and therefore all of these people have much more of a right to criticize. I have the opportunity and the honor of pulling it together, but it can't be my vision, it has to be the vision of many people, not only the elders but the people here in Washington, the Fine Arts Committee, the Smithsonian. It has to be a vision that they feel is rightfully theirs.

"Sometimes you have to take a real beating to make the project look really good -- you have to really listen. I've found sometimes your ego is in the way of something great happening. With the entrance to this building, I'd done maybe twenty models, and people would look with furrows on their brows, because I still just didn't have it.

"And then one time, aha, I suddenly had a feeling for what it should be. I sketched it, made a model, put it in place, and then all the people came in and looked, and said, hey, yeah, that's it, and we all knew it was right, but we didn't know why: Nobody could say, this is it, for the following logical reasons; you just know when it's right. I think that architects don't trust the people they work with enough."

Cardinal calls the museum "an abstraction of natural rock outcroppings." He has also called the museum "the most challenging project I've undertaken to date," one with a daunting list of clients and stakeholders: the U.S. government, Smithsonian Institution, a number of Washington bodies overseeing design and architecture on the Mall, the American public, and the Native Americans who, Cardinal says, expect the museum to be "a powerful statement."

Douglas Cardinal's name reached international recognition in 1967, three years after his graduation with an architectural degree from the University of Texas. (He had been asked to leave the University of British Columbia's School of Architecture after a year because his organic aesthetic based in natural forms clashed with the school's reigning Bauhaus ideology.) Born in Calgary in 1934, Cardinal spent part of his boyhood on a farm in Red Deer, Alberta; after graduation it was in Red Deer that he opened his first office as an architect, working on small jobs. Then, the local parish decided to build a church. When Cardinal heard this news he telephoned the priest, Father Werner Merx, to say he had some ideas, ideas that the priest liked.

"It's interesting that my work has so much involved church and state," Cardinal says, "because if I relied on the history of my family I would abhor church and state. However, some of my most innovative and visionary work has come through visionaries within institutions."

A two-year process of dialogue and negotiation with the priest and the parish building committee followed, and a career was launched with the 1967 completion of Saint Mary's Church.

"I remember working with Father Merx," Cardinal recalls, "and having the whole design finally done to his satisfaction and having him say, Okay, now build it. I said, well, Father it still doesn't work for me. We've got these ideas together, but I have to pull it together in such a way that these forms make sculptural and artistic sense. I said I need two more weeks. When he came back in two weeks he said, you haven't changed anything. I wouldn't presume to change its function, but I had changed its aesthetics, and now it all related. So he says to me, Are you happy, and I said, Yep, then he said, well, I'm happy, let's go build it.

"This is the kind of relation we have with all our clients. We keep making presentations, then taking feedback and criticism and coming back and drawing the whole thing again, until you finally evolve, and that's the important word, evolve a design that addresses all their concerns.

"I don't regard a building as my vision, because if you're only interested in developing your own visions and what you feel is professionally right for a client, then what you're doing is playing to a mirror, and I get really bored looking at myself. Instead, we say, this is your vision, I'm interpreting it; have I interpreted it right? Please criticize, because your vision and dream has to work for you."

Cardinal's extraordinary design for the church featured a roof patterned after a spider web. Confirming the necessary engineering calculations to ensure the undulating roof would hold was beyond the capability of extant Canadian computer technology, and required a search of the United States for machines that could complete the work. Once the building actually began rising, Cardinal took to wearing dark glasses on the street to avoid angry Red Deer residents who considered the building an insult to the mother church. Nevertheless, when finished, Saint Mary's was profiled in Time magazine and immediately became a regional landmark. Today, a picture of Saint Mary's Church leads viewers into the City of Red Deer's World Wide Web site. Cardinal has called the building Ids most faithful expression. Critic Boddy says of it, "You enter a building like that and know there is no other."

One of eight children, Cardinal grew up amid Alberta's prairies, wavelike low hills, asymmetrical aspen groves, and mountains. Natural forms of land and plants and animals ground Ids aesthetic philosophy, and the ways that "nature solves various problems with an infinite variety of structural and mechanical solutions." Whenever she sees one of his buildings, his sister Joan, a painter, has said she sees the rhythmic hills behind which she and her brother once hid, hunting gophers, and the vertical reaching of birch and aspen groves scattered over the prairie.

Since his twenties Cardinal has maintained close contact with Native elders, and these relations infuse his life and his work. "I have felt my training with them is as important as my formal training as an architect, and I continually come back to them. They said, the more you learn, the less you know about where we need to go as human beings; we have to explore beyond what is known, because what we know is what's gotten us into the mess we're in."

Cardinal credits traditional healing practices for his recovery, as a young man, from a serious car wreck. He participates in ceremonies and practices such as sun dances, sweats, and fasts, but also simply uses the telephone for conversation. For fifteen years he communed continuously with Alberta tribal elders; now he establishes contact with elders in the Native communities for which he works, such as the Kahnawake Mohawks in Montreal and Lloyd Kiva New in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Cardinal also includes Bernini, Boromini, Inca and Aztec builders, Aalvar Aalto, traditional Middle Eastern buildings, and Art Nouveau among his inspirations, and cites a special affinity for Antonio Gaudi, the visionary twentieth-century Spanish architect. "Every period from the Greeks to the Goths, they go through a period of setting up rules, like the Renaissance, and then achieving within those principles a very high level of creativity. Then they get bored with it., and want to go from more rational to more emotional, like the Baroque period, which is taking the rules and bending and twisting them to get more emotion and feeling into a building. That's what I want to do.

"What I try to do in each project is question everything. I don't feel traditional wisdom is the answer. I don't think the precepts of planning and architecture are answers; if I'm designing a school I ask, what is education? I put into question everything, then come up with a different way of looking at it which respects the individual and its relation with the environment."

Each building is an organism, and each space serves a function in that organism, like a cell, according to Cardinal. His design job is uncovering the genetic code of each particular cell and investigating the relation of each cell to the whole. Cardinal's ideal building would open during the day and close at night, like a flower.

"I want my buildings to feel warm, for users to feel like they are part of these forms; like sea creatures in seashells, forms evolved from needs of the sea creature. The building should feel the same way; somehow you want people to feel empathy for a building.

"I've always felt that the culture I was working in has created an adversarial relation with nature, and with its own nature. There's even a written spiritual foundation [the Bible] for that kind of thought, saying humans should have `dominion' over the animals and the rest of creation, when we're really part of all life.

"You can see it when a child is being created in the womb; the whole evolution of life, cells to gills to a point where you can hardly tell the difference between primate and human -- to assume we're not connected with all life is what's gotten us into some real nightmare situations in our built environment."

However, Cardinal's natural curves and circles, slopes, and snaking lines demand supernatural engineering and design capabilities. It was estimated that the hand calculations required to conform the structural integrity of the rippling Saint Mary's Church roof would have occupied ten people, working full time, for one hundred years. Cardinal's office was one of North America's first fully electronic architectural firms, beginning its integral use of computer technology with Saint Mary's Church and tossing out its last drawing board in 1981. Cardinal also places "smart building" technology and innovative energy conservation and environmental sensitivity at the core of his building.

"What the computer allows is the opportunity for change. It was very hard for my draftsmen before, because they'd put their hearts and souls into these wonderful drawings, and I'd make changes all the time, and that was very demoralizing to them. I always hated to do that. We were one of the first to totally computerize, because I could see there'd be less of a, stake in the drawing aspect. There's a difference between a fine drawing and a fine building, and a lot of people are willing to compromise their buildings to maintain their fine drawings.

"I've always look at the building I'm working on as my best project. Buildings are like footprints in the sand; they just tell you where you've been. When you finish a building, it's like a child you're nurturing, like a seed you're germinating, but one day you come there and the door's locked and it isn't yours anymore, you have to let go. It was never yours anyway.

"I've been lucky enough to have two major projects, ones that are unique in the life of a nation and unique in the fife of an architect. They state not only who you are but who all the people are who were involved. They're artifacts of the time, and it's really important they be true to all those people.

"The great need now is in urban centers, where people are trapped and don't realize that they have power. They need to have the tools to get their communities developed. Our profession can help, especially where people are experiencing the same things we [Native people] went through.

"Beginning with the Museum of Civilization, I felt very ethnocentric, tied to western Canada. Then the prime minister sent me all over the world, visiting museums and collections, seeing the wealth of knowledge and craft all over the world. I spent so much time on that project, traveling around the world to study, guiding international guests around the museum, going elsewhere to talk about it -- I don't feel so tied to a particular group anymore. I want to get out there and look at things on a broader level. It's almost like my card should say, Doug Cardinal, Architect, Planet Earth."

Douglas Cardinal poses with the model for his current project, the National Museum of the American Indian, in Washington, D. C, opposite. A roof detail of copper domes and limestone and fossil walls at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, left, shows the architect's appreciation for natural form and substance