Tawaw Architecture Collective Inc. (TAW) is an Indigenous owned architecture firm, led by the first, First Nations women to be licensed to practice architecture in Canada, Wanda Dalla Costa. She is a member of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation in Northern Alberta, and brings 25 years’ experience working with communities across North America. Our team – Cree, Navajo and Pascua Yaqui – specializes in co-designing with community.
With a passion for learning about the diversity of people, histories and biomes that co-exist in America, we work in both Canada and the USA. As a team of Indigenous designers, we are aware that there has been an interruption in our histories as Indigenous peoples.
In response, we aim to re-center Indigenous ways of being, doing and knowing, and bring a new level of thinking to the architecture process. We practice architecture done in the place, with the people of the place. Visions, neither borrowed nor prescribed, come from listening to the lived experience of the user groups. Earth-centered design, participatory methodologies, mentorship, and multi-generational design approaches are where our current focus is. We work in all scales of urban design and architecture, from ecological landscapes, environmental and infrastructural planning, to interior concepts.
