The Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribal Wellness Center is a place for community to gather for recreational use, health services, and social events. The wellness center has the opportunity to become a part of a larger landscape framework and a connective thread throughout the tribal grounds. The client and community identified three principles to guide the design for this wellness ‘campus’: Connect, Gather, and Heal. The design team was tasked from community members to ask this fundamental question while developing these spaces, “does it bring life?”

The first phase of work establishes a hierarchy of circulation throughout the site, while creating both specific and flexible programmed spaces. From internal courtyard gardens, to storm water gardens, the focus on ecologically suitable plantings and biodiversity supports a sustainable campus that enhances human connections to the ‘natural’ world. Gathering within the project site will support and expand on the interior program while the gathering opportunities in the larger landscape will offer larger scale spaces hosting learning or interpretive programming. At its core, the project will create spaces for mental and physical health/healing – there are landscape spaces within the project site to support physical health and well-being. By celebrating culturally significant plant species and pre-colonial ecological communities, the landscape can offer meaning and reintroduce functioning ecosystems, as well as highlight water as a valuable resource within the landscape.