Toronto Star

Step into the five-storey atrium of the $199-million (U.S.) building of the National Museum of the American Indian, spiralling like the interior of a seashell, and your spirit soars. Canadian architect Douglas Cardinal has moulded steel, concrete and katosa (a stone with a golden glow from Minnesota) into a rhythmic, undulating whole that looks as playful and exuberant as a child's sandcastle from the outside, with the sophistication of a cathedral within. The atrium has a circular skylight called an oculus over a web of steel. Through the criss-crossed steel, sunlight throws a pattern on the north wall of a giant dream-catcher. On the south wall, a vertical window has giant prisms inset at varying angles that fragment incoming sun into rainbows."It is a fusion of the physical with the spiritual. The first time I walked into the building, when the interior scaffolding came down, I wept," says Richard West, Jr., NMAI's director. NMAI may be the 69-year-old architect's finest building, more intimate than the much larger Canadian Museum of Civilization. But Cardinal calls it "a forgery" in a phone interview from Ottawa and has never seen it.