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Architects Get Inspiration For New Ayaprun Elitnaurvik Building From Yup’ik Culture

After last week’s meeting at Ayaprun School, KYUK spoke with the architect managing the school's new building project. This image was taken last year, one year after the Kilbuck fire that burnt down Ayaprun's original location.
Christine Trudeau
/
KYUK

After last week’s meeting at Ayaprun School, KYUK spoke with the architect managing the school's new building project. Chris Chiei said that he had a great many takeaways after speaking with the Ayaprun community.

 

“I think that overall, they want and they deserve a facility that is truly designed for how they have evolved to operate their program,” said Chiei. “The other is that they’re in a facility that truly reflects the uniqueness of the region and their culture.”

 

 

The meeting that started at 7:30 p.m. last Thursday ran later than expected, but this was a good thing, said Chiei.

 

“The later it got, the greater the information got,” said Chiei.

 

Following their three-hour discussion, Chiei got a chance to tour the temporary school facility with the faculty.

 

“It became a catalyst for a whole other level of conversation about what they need and what they don’t need, because they’re standing there right in front of it,” said Chiei. “And they’re saying, ‘you know, if we have this in the new school we have a better chance of being a really successful school program, where it'd be great if this space was a little bigger in the new school because it’s really tight for us here.”  

 

Chiei works with the ECI architecture firm based in Anchorage, which has been working with the Lower Kuskokwim School District over the past three years on the Napaskiak School.  After ECI conducted a preliminary survey of the old Ayaprun School's Kilbuck site, the district decided to use them for the new Ayaprun building.

 

After last week’s meeting at Ayaprun School, KYUK spoke with the architect managing the school's new building project. This image was taken last year, one year after the Kilbuck fire that burnt down Ayaprun's original location.
Credit Anna Rose MacArthur / KYUK
/
KYUK
After last week’s meeting at Ayaprun School, KYUK spoke with the architect managing the school's new building project. This image was taken last year, one year after the Kilbuck fire that burnt down Ayaprun's original location.

“They chose us,” said Chiei, “gave us a call, and asked us to come out and take a look at the existing site and help them with some conditional surveys of the old Kilbuck. And that grew to having them work with us on the new building.”

 

For this trip, Chiei said that they spent a fair amount of time on the Kilbuck building site to get a sense of the space in the summer versus their previous trips out in the winter months.

 

“It’s important for us, and really helpful in the process, if we understand the building site throughout the year,” said Chiei.

 

With LKSD school board members, parents, students, and teachers in attendance at the meeting, the architect began to understand some of the needs of the Ayaprun immersion school.

 

“Ayaprun is unique in the cultural immersion, where some of the spaces we’re planning are a dance space and the spaces associated with that,” said Chiei. “They really started to think about, ‘if we want this dance space to be successful then we need to store the items that we use for dance. So, like, the headdresses and fans, the qasgiq.'”

 

Chiei said that this got them thinking about how the audience can also be a part of that space. This is just beginning of the many needs and considerations for the new building, all geared toward the uniqueness of Ayaprun and what it can offer.

 

“You know, we start from nothing, we’re not trying to adapt to a building that wasn’t designed for us,” said Chiei. “If we start from scratch, what is the right way to design the buildings so that it works the best for this unique program.”

 

Chiei said that they also wanted to see the new school reflect Yup’ik values and culture, both in the spaces themselves and how they are configured. Even down to the detail of material choices and lighting.

 

“A common theme that we heard over and over again was the importance of the traditional communal hall, the qasgiq, where they wanted to see that in some form within the school. Whether it was symbolically in the shape of the dance hall or the commons,” said Chiei.

 

Chiei is no stranger to designing unique structures that encompass the region's traditional indigenous cultural values; he did it with the Napaskiak School. Their next step is to take information they’ve gathered at the meeting and summarize it into notes and drawings to help visualize scale and spaces that were discussed. They’re not quite at the floor plan phase just yet, but the current schedule has the new Ayaprun school opening in the fall of 2020.