2007 Benally House : Project [DesignBuildBLUFF]

DesignBuildBLUFF is a program for graduate students to realize architecture that nurtures the spirit and improves the lives of all who experience it.

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2007 Benally house

Design term: Sep 2006 - Dec 2006

Construction term: Jan 2007 - April 2007

Participants: 10 students

Client:

Dora and Baxter

This team’s work is music to your ears.

Dora is the hands down sweetheart of Bluff, dutifully showing up to work consistently for the past 16 years at the Recapture Lodge, the effective town center (where one can find maps and descriptions from horses’ mouths about hundreds of unknown, unmarked hikes), to clean the rooms. When told - by the entire group of students - that she’d been chosen for a house, she cried unabashed tears, highly unusual for any Native American. Even more interestingly several people in the community, upon hearing the news, wept as well. As it had been for Caroline, the students had decided unanimously.

Dora, an Apache, met her husband Baxter, a Navajo, at an Indian school in Oklahoma - the schools tend to spread tribes about so that they might not congregate and rediscover culture. Baxter has a nickname, Coyote (the Trickster), which, upon reading the Navajo Creation Story conjures up all kinds of connotations. He was named for the original Episcopal missionary from Connecticut, who usurped his family’s land with the agreement (verbally, it turns out) that Baxter’s father’s family would live on it in perpetuity. Baxter’s father helped build the mission buildings, and also helped the White Man ‘discover’ Rainbow Bridge near Glen Canyon. Pictures of him are quintessential, to say the least.

Mesmerizing and humorous stories literally spewed out of Baxter, who happily joined in the building process while all of the time insisting, with that twinkle ever present, that this was Dora’s house - she’d never had one in her entire life - and that he wasn’t moving in. But that was Baxter being Baxter, most of us knew. He is one great welcoming committee to the multitudes who pass by and curiously drive in. A proud individual, he even choked up at the home’s dedication, at which all five children and countless grandchildren attended and entertained, genuinely and effusively thankful.

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