Tammy Eagle Bull Is Weaving Indigenous Design Into Modern Architecture

Where conventional architectural practices are often guided by technical factors like zoning, Eagle Bull takes a different approach. "I like to go further back into the deep temporality of the site,” she says. “What was it originally? Who lived here? How did they live?"She says this is especially important when thinking about extreme heat in a place like Phoenix, which had a record 113 consecutive days of 100-plus degree temperatures in 2024. "People are like, 'This is so inhospitable. It's too hot. People can't thrive here,'" she says. "[But] people did. They had thriving cities, they had agriculture, and they were able to sustain life. And so, if we look back, we can see that living in modern day Phoenix shouldn't be such a struggle. There were strategies that were employed to manage water and to manage heat."These design principles are at the root of many modern models, says Eagle Bull, such as the “Passive House” concept, in which the built environment is crafted to work with things like weather systems and wind flows, and “life-centered design,” which takes local ecology and circularity into consideration. "The heart of all that is really what Indigenous design has been practicing for millennia," she says. As a professor of practice at Arizona State University’s Design School, Eagle Bull is helping educate the next generation of architects in these design principles. For example, some of her students recently imagined solutions for unhoused Indigenous populations in Phoenix, focusing on how shelters might be deployed quickly and safely while still centering Native culture and practices. One idea floated was co-housing, which isn't typically embraced in shelters, where men and women tend to be separated. But Eagle Bull argues these kinds of approaches have their place. "There are a lot of times where it's an extended family, maybe the son's taking care of the mother or the grandmother," she explains. "So the idea is being flexible, employing different strategies and ideas in a balance that can work best for whatever situation."In 2025, Eagle Bull became the director of a new Master's program at ASU. The M.S. in Indigenous Placekeeping and Design was founded by Wanda Dalla Costa, the first First Nations woman to be a licensed architect in Canada and a leading figure in Indigenous design in North America. It is one of only a handful of degree programs in the U.S. that focuses on both the history and practical application of Indigenous design. "There are a lot of things that we can learn from [Indigenous] cultural practices," Eagle Bull says. "They can help us not only manage the ecology and environment, but also how people exist with each other and thrive and create places that support who they are and support their community."