Ellipsis is an architecture that excavates omitted histories while making space for the vibrant presences and emergent futures of Black and Indigenous communities in Indiana. Drawing from J. Kameron Carter’s meditations on the poetics of “black religion” as situated between the geometry of an ellipse and the literary device of an ellipsis (...), the design resists a singular center, instead embracing incompletion, multiplicity, and relationality. An elliptical mound and canopy frame spaces for movement and contemplation. The project’s approach to programming is conceptualized as an ellipsis and able to host gatherings and workshops to reconstruct histories that were left out of modern records.

Ellipsis occupies the Irwin Block, a site where a 130-year-old building was destroyed by fire in 2022. In response to these multiple timescales of loss, Ellipsis references Indigenous land remediation techniques, particularly cultural burnings, that mythologize fire as medicine, an agent of loss and renewal enacted to maintain abundant ecosystems and to steward plant and animal life. The intervention begins with earthworks and cut-and-fill operations carving a subterranean path into the site and building a prairie mound around it. Hovering above this path and mound is a fire-treated timber canopy, providing shelter for community gatherings below.