Last week, Chu-Gooding’s Autry Resources Center was featured in the Los Angeles Times in an article titled How the Autry’s Resources Center marks a new way of managing Indigenous collections. LA Times culture columnist Carolina Miranda describes the Resources Center as “architecture that is less about top-down storytelling than engaging a community in an ongoing dialogue. And that is a model worth replicating — no matter the scale.”

Read more highlights from the article below:

“It was an epic undertaking. Last November, the Autry Museum of the American West relocated hundreds of thousands of objects from the Southwest Museum of the American Indian (with which it had merged in 2003) to its new Resources Center in Burbank. But the center — which occupies a sequence of refurbished industrial buildings on South Victory Boulevard — is much more than simply a storage or research space.

It contains a small garden where members of area Indigenous communities can employ artifacts from the museum’s collection in ritual ceremonies. Considered living objects, these artifacts need to be used, says Joe Horse Capture, the Autry’s vice president of Native collections. “They need light, they need to go outside and need to breathe.”

The Resources Center provides a well-designed, physical space in which a museum can begin to engage Native communities in a more constructive way. “This is a direction in which museums are going or should be going,” says Horse Capture, a citizen of the A’aninin Tribe of Montana. “As museums, as stewards of these collections, we need to provide Native communities a place to engage their culture.”

The Autry’s Resources Center, completed last year, is skillfully stitched together out of four industrial and light industrial buildings that had been abandoned for years. Designed by North Hollywood firm Chu-Gooding Architecture, the 106,000-square-foot complex features plenty of storage, but also a library, reading room, tribal gathering areas and spaces for collections care. The design makes smart reuse of pre-existing structures, as well as materials the architects found on-site. This included a large, weathered metal grate recycled as a trellis for outdoor plantings, which also screens some of the mechanical systems in the lobby.

Greeting visitors to the building is an airy atrium with a sloping roof, bordered on one side by a wooden screens crafted from walnut — some of which frame collections storage. Visible at the end of the atrium is the ceremonial garden, a welcome riot of green. Sliding walnut panels can be pulled shut during ceremonies to give the garden privacy, but they remain open at other times. The vibe is warm and scholarly.

The garden was designed by Native-owned firm Costello Kennedy Landscape Architecture, which is headquartered in Marin County and previously designed a 7,000-square-foot ethnobotanical garden for the Autry’s Griffith Park location. Like that project, the ceremonial garden at the Resources Center was designed with the input of Native people from Southern California.

The space is small — attached to the building’s southwestern flank — but the designers make the most of it with lush plantings of vines, juncus, wild strawberry and deer grass. Additional plantings along the entrance to the facility include elderberry, an endemic plant. When the berries ripen, says Horse Capture, Tongva artists arrive to harvest them.”