Douglas Cardinal & Hans Ulrich Obrist Discuss Architecture as Ritual

Douglas Cardinal, one of Canada’s preeminent architects, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of the Serpentine and one of the world’s most influential curators, came together earlier this year for a wide-ranging conversation about Cardinal’s life and work.

Raised between his German Catholic mother and Blackfoot father, Cardinal drew inspiration from both European and Indigenous traditions. He spoke about the spiritual roots of his flowing, organic architecture, and how rituals such as sweat lodges and fasting shaped his vision. Cardinal pioneered the use of computers to realize complex forms, designing landmarks such as St. Mary’s, St. Albert Place, and the Canadian Museum of History—yet his architecture is shaped first and foremost in reverence to nature.

Obrist, renowned for his long-running Interview Project and for shaping the global conversation on art and architecture, engaged Cardinal on the intersections of biography, belief, and design. Their dialogue opened new perspectives on how architecture can serve as both cultural testimony and ecological practice.

Read an edited version of the full interview transcript below.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: It’s such an honor to meet you, Douglas. I’ve admired your work for a long time. I wanted to begin by asking about your beginnings—you started so early, when you were seven years old. How did you come to architecture? Or how did architecture come to you?

Douglas Cardinal: I was sent to a residential school, actually a convent, to become a good Catholic—so my mother wouldn’t go to hell for marrying “a savage,” as they said. My father was from what they called a “backward” community, and my mother was a farm girl, raised by a German family near Calgary. Her father had come from Germany when the Lutherans took over the religion there—he was very Catholic—so they came to the Americas, settled, broke the land, and farmed it.

But my mother didn’t want to be a farm girl. She wanted to help people, to become a nurse. She went to Calgary and got a job with a Jewish family, looking after their children. They supported her to attend nursing school, and she graduated. She became a strong advocate for human rights—especially for the elderly—because in those days, if you became senile, you were just sent away, hidden. She wanted to change that.

The medical system was very patriarchal—nurses did the real work, and the doctors treated them terribly. My mother was a beautiful woman, and the doctors courted her, but she found them too authoritarian. She wanted to be respected for her mind and her compassion. One of her friends, also a nurse, invited her to visit for the weekend and meet her brother—a Native man. That’s how she met my father.

HUO: And your father, from the Blackfoot community, was a forest ranger who built log houses and furniture. He taught you about animals and about being in communion with the environment. That must have shaped you deeply.

DC: Very much so. My father was tutored by a Jewish scholar who taught him European history and culture. He was an excellent writer—his prose was almost a work of art. He’d been raised by his grandmother, who was the matriarch of the Bear Clan, the “Good Strikers.”

They were called that because they were warriors who had to defend their people from raiders. But my grandmother and the other women decided that constant fighting was a waste of life and energy. They gathered the clans and declared peace, saying it was time to live differently—to live for creation, not destruction.

Even the wolves, they said, do not kill each other for territory. The weaker one yields; the stronger one spares him. There’s a wisdom in that balance, a harmony. My grandmother taught that life should be lived that way—with respect, not domination.

HUO: That connects beautifully to something you once said—that a building should be like a woman: nurturing, protecting, and creating comfort for those within. Could you talk about that?

DC: Yes. That belief comes from my grandmother’s teachings. She taught that people must love and care for one another, and that we must treat Mother Earth with the same respect. All life comes from the mother—we are all born in water, nourished by women. Women are the water-keepers, the life-bearers. They surrender their bodies to nature so that life can continue. That selflessness, that connection to water and earth, is sacred. Architecture, for me, must reflect that—it should cradle, not dominate.

HUO: That sense of fluidity—of the feminine—runs through your work. Even your first major project, St. Mary’s Catholic Church, is curvilinear. Why the curve? Where does it come from?

DC: When I was studying architecture in Texas, I had a professor—a German-Jewish man—who told me, “The way you talk, you talk like Rudolf Steiner.” I hadn’t read Steiner then, so he offered to translate his works for me. He taught me Steiner’s ideas about the spirit in art—how form can carry life, how a building’s soul can be felt. That changed me. It made me realize architecture could be spiritual, not just functional.

HUO: Let’s talk about the spirit in St. Mary’s. The building seems to glow in the prairie light—it feels almost alive, tied to your heritage and your memories of the land.

DC: The client, Father Marx, was a remarkable man. He was an oblate priest trained in Rome, deeply interested in architecture and the reforms of Vatican II. He wanted churches that embodied the new liturgy—open, human-centered, designed for the people rather than for ritual alone.

For nearly two thousand years, church plans hadn’t changed—they were modeled on Roman basilicas, the courthouses of the empire. The clergy stood apart, separated by railings, and the people were spectators. Vatican II changed that. It asked us to create spaces where people could participate, where the sacred could be shared.

Father Marx’s earlier church had burned down, and when he decided to rebuild, he told the Archbishop, “I want to design this church around the new liturgy, and I want this architect to do it.” The Archbishop remembered meeting me years before and agreed. That’s how St. Mary’s came to be—a new kind of church, rooted in the prairie, shaped by the land, and infused with spirit.

HUO: The church seems to merge entirely with its surroundings — the prairie, the sky, the light. It’s as though it grew out of the land itself.

DC: Yes. I wanted the building to emerge from the earth, not sit on top of it. The forms of the prairie — the rolling hills, the curving rivers — shaped the architecture. The building had to feel organic, as if it were molded by the same forces that formed the landscape. Concrete became my clay. It could carry those curves and hold the light in the way I imagined.

Father Marx understood that. He had a deep connection to the land and to the people. He wanted the church to reflect a living faith — one not confined to dogma but rooted in community and the rhythms of the earth. The walls were meant to flow, not divide; the space to embrace, not to command.

HUO: It’s fascinating how this idea of space as community — as a nurturing form — recurs throughout your work. From St. Mary’s to the Canadian Museum of History, there’s always this sense of movement, of life.

DC: Movement is essential. Life moves; it flows. Everything in nature is in motion — water, air, the growth of plants, the way people gather and disperse. Architecture must express that same dynamism.

When I began to design public buildings, I didn’t want static monuments. I wanted forms that could breathe — that could respond to the light, to the people inside, to the land around them. The building should feel alive.

HUO: There’s a spiritual continuity there — between your cultural heritage, your early experiences, and your architectural philosophy.

DC: Absolutely. My heritage taught me that everything is connected — the land, the water, the animals, the people, the ancestors. You can’t separate them. When I work, I try to design within that circle — to honor it.

When I designed the Canadian Museum of Civilization, for example, I wanted it to tell the story of this land, but from the perspective of the people who were already here — the first peoples. The curves of the museum echo the rivers, the hills, the organic forms of the continent. It’s a living landscape — a narrative carved in stone.

HUO: And it’s also about reconciliation, isn’t it? About healing.

DC: Yes. Architecture can heal. It can reconnect people to the land, to each other, to their own stories. When you walk into a space that respects you — that honors your culture, your sense of belonging — you feel seen. You feel part of something larger. That’s the opposite of what those old colonial buildings did. They imposed. They excluded.

My work tries to undo that — to say that architecture can listen.

HUO: I love that — architecture that listens. It reminds me of something you said once: that a building should not shout, but hum quietly, like the earth.

DC: Exactly. Buildings should not be aggressive. They should have humility. They should whisper, not command. The world has enough monuments to power. What we need are spaces that care for the human spirit.

HUO: When you speak of spirit, it’s never abstract — it’s embodied, physical, environmental.

DC: Spirit is everywhere — in the air we breathe, the ground beneath us, the light on the walls. For me, spirit isn’t something separate from matter; it animates matter. That’s what I learned from both my Indigenous culture and from Steiner — that every form has energy, and that energy can nurture or destroy.

A well-designed building should radiate calm. It should hold people, make them feel safe. That’s the sacred dimension of architecture.

HUO: You often speak about collaboration — with the land, with clients, with communities. How do you see your role as an architect in that process?

DC: As a listener. My role is not to impose a vision but to draw it out of the people and the place. The community always knows what it needs. The land always knows what it can sustain. My job is to translate that knowledge into form.

That’s why I work closely with Indigenous elders, with craftspeople, with everyone who will inhabit the space. It’s a circle of creation. Architecture, for me, is never a solo act — it’s communal.

HUO: It’s interesting, because your buildings also have this incredible technical precision — the engineering is so sophisticated — yet it always feels organic.

DC: Technology is just another tool. It should serve the vision, not lead it. When I started using computers in the 1960s, people thought it was strange — an Indigenous architect working with early digital modeling. But I saw it as a way to give form to fluid ideas. The computer allowed me to draw curves that would have been impossible otherwise.

But technology alone means nothing. What matters is the intention — what kind of world we’re trying to build with it.

HUO: That idea of intention seems central — that architecture, like ceremony, is about intention.

DC: Yes. Every gesture matters. When we build with care, the building carries that care forward. It becomes a vessel of good energy. When we build with greed or ego, the building holds that too. That’s why design is a sacred responsibility.

HUO: That’s beautifully said. And perhaps a final question: when you look back across your career — from the prairies of your childhood to the great museums and cultural centers — what do you hope your architecture will continue to say to the future?

DC: I hope it says that we belong to the Earth, not the other way around. That we can live with humility, with beauty, and with compassion.

Architecture is not about buildings; it’s about relationships — with each other, with the land, with spirit. If my work can remind people of that, then I’ve done what I was meant to do.

HUO: What was the story you were referring to earlier?

DC: I had married an Irish Catholic woman, and her father and priest opposed our marriage. They brought trumped-up charges against me and even convinced a local magistrate that I should serve jail time. It was unjust. The archbishop heard about it and intervened—he said it was wrong and hired the best lawyer in Western Canada to defend me. Years later, I met him again with Father Marx. He asked what became of me. I told him I’d gone to Texas, become an architect—and that Father Marx wanted me to design his church around the new liturgy. We already had drawings and a model. The archbishop was pleased to meet me under better circumstances but reminded us that the parish still had to raise funds. Father Marx, being an Oblate like the archbishop, asked for his support. He explained our design and how it embodied the new liturgy. The archbishop listened carefully.

HUO: So the liturgy shaped the form. But you’ve also mentioned a “spider” and that the roof couldn’t be poured in concrete. Can you talk about how that vision came?

DC: The new liturgy meant centering the congregation around the altar—creating a true gathering for the Eucharist. That’s why there’s an oculus: light focuses on the altar so it becomes the heart of the space. I looked back to the early Christians celebrating in the catacombs: they gathered around simple altars placed where shafts of light entered. My first impulse was a circular arrangement—people encircling the altar. But the altar also speaks to the four directions; processions orient from east to west, with movement through the baptistry and into the nave, and the offertory to the south. Those orientations carry deep symbolism.

As for the roof: I needed to span over a hundred feet without heavy, conventional trusses. Walking one day, I watched a spider build a web—how it created strength with almost no material, distributing forces in a delicate net. That became my clue. I studied Gaudí’s hanging-chain models and built my own weighted model to test the geometry of a web-like roof. The review board admired the model, but they wanted a full mathematical analysis stamped by an engineer.

HUO: That’s a serious computational problem for the time.

DC: It was enormous—about 81,000 unknowns, 81,000 simultaneous equations. The engineer I consulted said it would take seven mathematicians a hundred years to solve by hand. National Research Council in Ottawa was exploring computer methods, but there wasn’t a working solution we could use yet. I searched widely, back to Texas and elsewhere, and eventually partnered with an engineer—Henry André Ricketts—who understood the promise of computer analysis. The challenge was that no machine we had access to could handle it easily; in Chicago there was a computer that occupied floors of vacuum tubes. Still, we kept pushing, using the latest tools available to honor the vision: a luminous roof that draws light from above so the altar—like in St. Peter’s, but unmistakable here—reads immediately as the reason for the space.

One last image from that era: I remember visiting a colossal computer in Chicago—floors of glowing vacuum tubes because chips hadn’t yet arrived. Above the door there was a sign and, humorously, an abacus mounted “for emergencies.” It captured the moment: we were at the edge of computing, improvising with whatever tools existed.

HUO: In the ’70s you developed your own program and then came to St. Albert Place.

DC: Yes. Even with the church I had started thinking computationally, but by St. Albert Place it became essential. The site was a wetland with an underground river running beneath it and another river flowing in front. To build there, I drove a field of piles down through mixed strata—past the water-bearing layers and into the rock base shaped by glaciation. On top of that, I designed a system of pile caps and a raft slab, then three structural slabs for the three levels, plus a basement and a sub-basement slab keyed to those caps. The sequencing, loads, and elevations were too complex to manage conventionally; we needed computers.

I partnered with an engineer who’d written software for highway design across Texas and northern Mexico. He’d built a system that converted aerial spot-elevation data into continuous contour models—essentially connecting thousands of points into topography. I said, “If anyone can adapt this to architecture, you can.” He replied, “Then let’s do it.”

We began by digitizing the critical layers: the founding rock elevations, the pile-cap grid, the raft slab, and so on. He generated computer drawings of the base layer with precise elevations, then calculated pile spacing and cap capacities from that data, producing a rational grid tied to real soil behavior. From there we modeled the raft and superstructure. This was before AutoCAD—we were working on a Hewlett-Packard HP 1000 with roughly 512K of memory. Primitive by today’s standards, but powerful enough to coordinate a curvilinear building over unstable ground. That’s why St. Albert Place is often cited as one of the first buildings comprehensively developed with computer technology.

HUO: And at the same time your work took on a deeper ritual dimension—through Robert Small Boy and the medicine men.

DC: Meeting Robert Small Boy in the ’70s was transformative. Through him and his medicine men, I entered ceremonies—sweat lodges, fasting, Sundances—that taught me where creativity truly comes from. A shaman once told me: all the knowledge of humankind fits in the Creator’s palm—that’s what we already know. From the tips of the fingers to the edge of the universe is everything we don’t know. Creativity comes from that unknown—not from what you know, but from what you don’t even know you don’t know. That’s the ground of real invention.

To approach that place, you submit to ritual. You fast. You enter the sweat lodge—unbearably hot—and you learn to quiet the ego, to listen. Those experiences aligned with my architectural instincts: to make spaces that are ceremonial, that gather people, that open to mystery rather than closing it down.

HUO: One of my favorite projects of yours—the Stony Plain studio and residence in the early ’80s—feels like a sculpture born of that spiritual praxis and the prairie itself. How did you conceive and live in that space?

DC: Stony Plain was an experiment in living what I was learning—letting the land shape the form and letting ritual shape daily life. The studio curved with the site, caught light like a vessel, and created quiet places for reflection and work. It was also a healing space. At one point the pressures of the Western, industrial pace had taken a toll on my health; those Indigenous teachings, ceremonies, and the way of living embedded in that studio helped bring me back into balance.

HUO: Earlier you mentioned healing and identity—living between Indigenous and Western worlds.

DC: There was a period when the pace and pressure of Western life nearly broke me. It was Indigenous ceremony that brought me back. I realized I’m a highly sensitive soul with a strong analytical mind—carrying both lineages. That duality—Western and Indigenous—became a question I had to live inside.

A shaman from Wyoming used to visit our elders. Because of residential schools, some memories of our ceremonies had been interrupted. He carried those teachings intact. His people had never surrendered; they refused to be confined to a reserve and kept moving to protect their ways. When they finally came north, they asked to stay with relatives—seeking rest for their women and children. From him, I learned to return to ceremony.

HUO: Let’s connect that to Stony Plain: how did you design and live in that studio?

DC: Through sweat lodge and fasting—vision work—I saw the building as part of nature. It should tuck into the hill and open to the south, so winter sun could strike a high-mass wall—a kind of solar “sink”—and store heat for release at night. Think of a contemporary pit house or greenhouse: plants thriving, the wall absorbing the sun’s energy by day and giving it back after sunset. The house followed the rhythms of the land, not the clock.

HUO: Then the mid-1980s change—winning the competition for the Canadian Museum of History—pulled you back to the city.

DC: Yes. I had to leave that little paradise for Ottawa. Communities in Alberta had asked me to design a new educational facility for their people and to help bring education back under their stewardship. The Minister of Public Works said, “If you design it, I’ll help you present it to the Prime Minister”—Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Community leaders told me, “You walk in both worlds. They’ll listen to you.” But they also said, “First, you must carry our vision.” They held a ceremony and asked me to dream. The next morning I returned what I’d seen in that dream so they could confirm I had received their intent. That is how I learned to speak about education, culture, and architecture with one voice—community first.

HUO: Turning to today—after so many realized projects—what are your favorite unrealized ones?

DC: A house for us. I owe my wife a home—a place of peace at our center. That’s still a dream.

HUO: And beyond the house?

DC: A project in Saudi Arabia. A Saudi prince—an astronaut—returned from space, stepped from the shuttle, touched the ground, and kissed the Earth: “This is my mother, my home.” He wanted a science center that honored that revelation—the union of Earth and cosmos. I submitted a design and won the competition. We were working with the ambassador’s office; his family had served the king as physicians, so there was a special trust around the project.

The design drew on desert forms—dunes, wind-carved stone, moonlight on sand. The building would read like an oasis of knowledge: an organic shell sheltering galleries about space and Earth, with a central void—an oculus—to track light like a sundial. Inside, a flowing sequence of spaces would carry visitors from ground to sky, from geology to astronomy. It remains a favorite vision: a place where technology bows to wonder, and where you leave understanding that touching the Earth is also touching the stars.

HUO: Could you tell us more about the Saudi project—how the vision emerged?

DC: We went out into the desert under a full moon, far from any city lights. It was pitch black except for the stars and the moon. The team built a small fire so we could read shadows, and we sat in a circle. They passed a sacred pipe, a shared ritual that reminded me of our own ceremonies. We agreed to begin in silence, reading passages from the Qur’an and honoring the moon above us.

As I read, I marked verses that spoke directly to the place: passages about observing the paths of the moon and stars, about planetary movements and perfect mathematical proportion—about a cosmos described with awe and precision. When I shared those lines, everyone nodded: yes, that is the vision. The building would be an oasis of knowledge—an organic shell oriented to the heavens, with a central oculus tracking light like a desert sundial—joining Earth and sky.

HUO: That’s beautiful. May I ask one last thing? I run an Instagram account where we publish a single handwritten sentence from artists and architects. Would you offer a line—a message to the world?

DC: (smiles, pauses to think)

Treat the Earth as our mother.

Honor all life—land, mountains, waters, every being—on this amazing blue planet, our source of life.