Snoqualmie Tribe Child Development Center
Snoqualmie Tribe Child Development Center
Building for the People of the Moon, Past, Present, and Future
Origin and Vision
Teaching for Past, Present, and Future
Known to themselves as the People of the Moon, the Snoqualmie Tribe did not come to BA asking for square footage. They came with a mission: to teach their children and their community how to grow food, prepare it the way their ancestors did, and carry Tribal crafts forward into a new generation. An addition to their existing childcare facility was the vehicle; food sovereignty and cultural continuity were the purpose.
The design process began with listening. Through extended visioning sessions with Tribal representatives and the Tribal Council, the team learned the significance of the moon, the four directions, and the lunar cycles of teaching that shape Snoqualmie tradition. That cosmology organizes the site itself, echoed in the medicine wheel-inspired herb garden and the nature path that threads from the existing daycare to the new construction.
What resulted is a licensed childcare center paired with a cultural classroom, an elk and game processing room with a viewing portal for the next generation, a harvest kitchen built for traditional salmon bakes, and a teaching greenhouse rising in cedar and glass on what was, until recently, just the hospital's back-of-house lot.
“There's this beautiful story behind what the Tribe is trying to accomplish. This is an intergenerational space that everybody will be able to enjoy.”
site and structure
An Energetic Troll Beneath Every Footing
The site had always been treated as leftover space—a strip beside a hospital loading dock, first developed in 1982, laced with utilities nobody had thought to document because nobody imagined anyone would build here. The project began as a simple on-grade structure with a screen wall. It did not stay simple. Every time the team located solid ground for a footing or a post, another scan turned up something buried in the way.
The general contractor's crew hand-dug sections of the site for days at a stretch, feeding what they found back to the design and structural teams in real time. The obstacle became the argument for something better: an elevated deck carried on pilasters, grade beams, and pin piles instead of conventional spread footings—a structural approach that dramatically reduced the concrete poured into ground the team could barely map, while leaving the site's existing utilities undisturbed below.
“I felt like the land underneath our project was this energetic troll, challenging our team at every turn — like it was asking, do you really want to make this happen?”
Structural project manager Pete Krebs put it more plainly: what started as a job with conventional footings ended with none at all. "I don't think we have a spread footing on the job anymore," he reflected—the site's unpredictability becoming, in the end, a case study in lighter-touch construction the team hadn't set out to build.
Cultural Continuity
Full Circle
Nowhere is the project's intent clearer than in the elk and game processing room, which unfolded from a visioning session between the design team and the Tribe's head hunter. He walked the team through the traditional hunt—from preparation to Tribal game processing techniques—and the resulting space includes a controlled portal window into the adjacent cultural classroom, so that children can observe the process when they choose to, without it being forced on them. "He talked about bringing everything full circle with hunting — the celebration of the process, from the moment he woke up to the moment he had the elk, then offering something back to the earth that would eventually decompose. That was beautiful," said Prieto.
The same instinct shows up throughout the building: exposed cedar structure that doubles as drying racks for bark, herbs, and hides, drawing on the Coast Salish Plank House tradition; a harvest kitchen and wood-burning grill built for community salmon bakes; a greenhouse cistern that captures rainwater for seedlings. Nothing here is purely decorative. Every feature is also a lesson, designed to be used, not just seen.
Design-Build Partnership
Listening as the Real Deliverable
Native planting was never up for debate—a rare, refreshing given, according to landscape architect Gar-Yun Ho, who visited the Tribe's Environmental and Natural Resources Department early in the process and found them already cultivating tubs of Wapato for the project's rain gardens. The landscape scope became a genuine design-build partnership, with planting and irrigation construction carried out directly by the Tribe.
That collaboration had limits that the team respected. Western red cedar had been part of the original planting plan, until the team learned the trees are sacred to the Tribe and that planting each one would require its own ceremony. Rather than push forward, the team swapped in native cascara and salmonberry instead—a small decision that speaks to how closely the design followed the Tribe's lead rather than a predetermined plant list.
That same deference shaped the entire communication process. Every design decision that reached the Tribal Council required its own round of presentation and approval, effectively doubling the team's early workload. It was, by the team's own account, a genuine learning curve in tribal work—but one they came to see as the point rather than the obstacle.
What the Team Carries Forward
Collaboration, and a Different Way of Seeing the Land
Ask the team what they're proudest of, and nearly every answer starts the same way: each other. Architects, structural and civil engineers, landscape designers, and the general contractor navigated undocumented utilities, a shifting scope, prevailing-wage complexities, and a construction structure where major trades contracted directly with the Tribe rather than through the GC—and kept the project moving regardless. "Everybody was always just so willing to continue to make the project happen," project manager Jenny Prieto said of the team.
What they're taking with them is less about technique and more about posture. For Jenny, it's a renewed commitment to listening fully, even on project types she's delivered many times before. For Gar-Yun, it's a sharper awareness of carbon footprint and how a project touches the land, now carried into other work. For Annette, it's the deeper time horizon the Tribe's own cosmology offered the design process.
Reflecting on the experience, Jannotta mused, "We looked at the sun, but we also looked a lot at the moon, because they are the People of the Moon. There were thirteen sections instead of just four seasons, and overlaying that onto the site as we were designing—for me, I'd like to keep going forward with that."
