Yocha Dehe Tribal Community Center and School

The Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation tribe was decimated during the modern-era re-settlement of Northern California’s Capay Valley. Reduced to thirteen families, tribal members either worked in the Valley’s fields or dispersed throughout the state and country. Starting with the opening of a bingo parlor, the tribe began to rebuild its collective resources, and in the late 1990s it purchased a tract of Capay Valley land to re-establish a tribal center. The Community Center represents the principal element of this renewed community. The tribe sought an architecture that was modern and expressive of their forward momentum, while being strongly related to both their cultural history and that of the Capay Valley. The resulting work attempts to articulate the tribe’s culture with a contemporary architecture that does not trivialize or mimic.

The series of low buildings, rooted into the flat landscape, encircles a community meadow, evocative of Native American gathering spaces. Wood and local stone recall agrarian and tribal building traditions. Building volumes are clear and simply crafted; structure is revealed and expressed. The roof of the meeting room is a weave of beams, joists, and purlins, a direct reference to the construction of a traditional Wintun meeting house. Visually and physically, interior and exterior spaces are joined with the orchard valley landscape and its scenic sunscapes and vistas. In correspondence with spiritual traditions, the sloping roof profiles draw the eye upward beyond the intimacy of the buildings.

This assembly of buildings now forms the center of a series of concentric circles. Surrounding the Community Center are the tribe’s new family homes, then the tribal lands and enterprises. The project includes a health and wellness center, tribal meeting house and conference facilities, library, fitness center, elementary school and tribal administration offices. Sustainable features include low-VOC materials, greywater collection systems, recycled building materials, local materials and indigenous vegetation.