Students Build ‘Living Museum’ of the Chumash

Paul Boillot squints up at the azure sky, where a brown hawk drifts lazily, propelled by wind currents that sweep through Point Mugu State Park from the nearby Pacific Ocean.

From this vantage point, things look much as they did centuries ago, when a vibrant Chumash Indian culture thrived in these hills and on the beaches not far off. Muwu, at what is now Point Mugu, and Shisholop, on the beaches of Ventura, were important capital cities, and the Chumash spread far and wide through the mountains and valleys from Malibu to San Luis Obispo.

The settlements have vanished, but Boillot has come to the rolling hills south of Newbury Park on his own kind of vision quest.

He heads a team of UCLA architecture students which is building a Indian cultural center in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, near a peak called Boney Mountain.

Working closely with local Chumash Indians and the National Park Service--which manages the land--Boillot, 26, and his colleagues have designed a 1,300-square-foot, ranch-style building to house Chumash artifacts. Outside, they’ll plant the reeds once used by the Chumash for basket-weaving. Chumash crafts will be demonstrated, native dances performed, and other observances held.

Not a ‘Static Museum’

“This won’t be a static museum but a living village,” says Boillot, who also plans to build a small outdoor amphitheater, pedestrian bridges and outdoor display areas. Construction is to start this summer.

The redwood structure will be called the Rancho Sierra Vista/Satwiwa Cultural Center. Satwiwa is a Chumash word that means bluff and was the name of a historic Chumash village in the Newbury Park area, according to National Park Service anthropologist Phil Holmes.

Indian artifacts, including golden eagle feathers, abalone shell jewelry and fused shale arrowheads--many of which were collected on the National Park Service land--are displayed in several glass cases at the house of Art Alvitre, a Chumash Indian who lives on the federal parkland and opens his living room to as many as 150 visitors each Sunday.

UCLA’s own vision quest is to build a transitional Indian center until money can be raised for a 5,000-square-foot permanent structure with museum-quality displays.

Richard Schoen, the professor at UCLA’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning who is supervising the project, said it might be five years before the permanent site is financed and completed. In fact, the students still have to raise most of the $200,000 they need to build the temporary cultural center and have helped form a nonprofit arm called the Friends of Satwiwa to bring in donations.

“There’s a need in Southern California to learn about the indigenous people,” says Alvitre, who adds that he and many of his fellow Chumash support UCLA and the National Park Service “150 percent.”

Boillot, who is completing his third and final year in the master’s program and will oversee construction this summer, says the temporary facility will be powered by solar energy and cooled by prevailing ocean breezes.

It will also provide a rare opportunity for students to transform their classroom-drafted blueprints into a stone-and-wood reality.

“The idea was to do a real project that was permanent,” Schoen said. “This provides a microcosm of what students experience in real building.”

Schoen adds that too many architecture students complete their years of graduate work without ever picking up a hammer or seeing how two pieces of wood fit together.

“It is very important to get a sense for materials and to compare the design to the reality of a building,” says Ulrich Flemming, professor and acting head of the department of architecture at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University.

Flemming, whose school also offers a “design-build” course, says Carnegie-Mellon students have built a ceramics studio in West Virginia, a bandstand and performing stage outside Pittsburgh and an addition to a nearby parish church.

‘Ambitious Project’

But he lauds the UCLA-planned cultural center as “an ambitious project, given the size and breadth of issues involved.”

Boillot says he and the revolving group of up to 10 architecture students who have worked on the cultural center design since 1986 have learned more than just practical skills.

They have designed their own courses at UCLA, conformed to federal building code requirements, incorporated design ideas from diverse groups and, to raise money, printed a brochure and given presentations.

“You learn to be diplomatic. You wear a lot of different hats,” says Boillot, unfurling blueprints of the final design.

Holmes says the Indians at first requested that the cultural center be circular, in a style that would evoke their own traditional dwelling places.

The students found that building a circular center would prove too expensive. But, bowing to the symbolism of the circle, Boillot added an outdoor amphitheater made of stone gathered from the local hills, where Indians can enact traditional dances and tell stories.

Totems Positioned

Boillot says the cultural center will also include a number of Indian “Kutimuts,” a type of carved totem pole that symbolizes passage from one life to another. With the approval of Indians, Boillot has positioned these totems at the building’s entrance so that they align with the sun during the winter solstice.

The project started in 1986, when UCLA’s Schoen solicited National Park Service officials for projects that his students might design, free to the agency. Schoen said park officials drew up a list of 20 ideas but the cultural center piqued the most interest.

“It captivated us,” says Boillot, recalling his first impressions after hiking up to the site, which lies off Potrero Road.

Alvitre says, “There’s a lot of energy here, . . . a lot of spiritual life, and a lot of people can feel it.”

On April 23 the students plan to unveil their final model of the Indian center at the site in conjunction with several days of Indian cultural programs.

Although most of the architecture students embarked on the project without any previous knowledge of Indian culture, Boillot says he quickly came to sympathize with their life style and traditions and tried to incorporate such elements into his design.

Today, Boillot says with some earnestness, “we’re on the same wavelength.”