Elder Circles

The Onondaga Nation is one-fifth of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy - a governing body that grew from a peace treaty between five indigenous nations, and which is the oldest ongoing participatory democracy on Earth. The Haudenosaunee are the people of the long house, a structure both literal and metaphorical as it relates to their traditional housing and lands. The ancestral long house was designed as a flexible, participatory structure - it was a base framework, growing in length as it welcomed new clan families beneath its roof. A dotted line of central cooking fires structured its open plan, acting as both spatial barriers for individual families and communal hubs for gathering. Their modern long house is a gable-end structure, functioning as a meeting place and community center, but it fails to address this community’s most dire need - housing and engagement for its aging elders.

Elder Circles is a reinterpretation of these long house typologies in a modern context - a linear structure which branches and grows, centered around a network of central ‘fires’. These new ‘fires’ become loci; organizing elements that anchor the loose plan, connecting and dividing its overlapping programmatic wings. Its roof begins as a gable, covering the most public volume, but splits into two shed roofs to house its more intimate spaces.