Onondaga Elder Care + Community Center

FA22 Core Design Studios III: ENGAGED PRACTICES

Critics: Anna Dietzsch+ Scott Ruff Partner: Jada Cannon

The Onondaga Nation, located near Syracuse, NY, tasked our Core Design Studio with creating visions for their new elder care center. This Elder Community Center is inspired by our admiration for traditional Onondaga handicraft, which is used as a basis for how we negotiated site and intergenerational programming. In keeping with a relationship to the land, the roof acts as a projection of the slope moving with the terrain as a lifted surface. Overall, our intention was to anchor our design into the earth while maintaining the overall profile of the landscape. Combining this with an interlocking and weaving system between interior and exterior, we proposed a cohesive approach to supporting the elder community of the Onondaga Nation.