on site 11: architecture in the circumpolar regions

bjorn otto

2004

architecture in the circumpolar regions

11 neil ford

$7.50

®

Historical Atlas of the Arctic. p6 Derek Hayes.

Douglas & McIntyre,Vancouver/Toronto, 2003

publisher The association for non-profit architectural fieldwork [Alberta] guest editor Tracey Mactavish on site review editor Stephanie White

issue 11 spring 2004

the architecture of the circumpolar region

design + production Black Dog Running printer Humphries Printing, Calgary comments, ideas, proposals editor@onsitereview.ca www.onsitereview.ca advertising sales t: 403 266 5827

contributors Chris Allen PĂŠtur Armannsson Graham Ashford Michael Barton Gwen Boyle Bjorn Otto Braaten Robert Bromley William Brooks Joe Ferraro Stephen Christer Stephen Fancott Aleta Fowler Studio Granda David Hernandez Quintela Florian Jungen

Tracey Mactavish Mike Mense Becky Messier Harriet Burdett Moulton Ove Neumann Gavin Renwick Stephen Robinson Petra Sattler-Smith Tom Strickland Don Taylor Simon Taylor Bill Waechter Byron White Stephanie White Antonio Zedda

published with the assistance of the Canada Council Grants to Literary and Art Magazines

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On Site review 11

Spring 2004 1

becky messier

real places —

becky messier’s greenhouse Yellowknife

Klinik HIgh School Cambridge Bay Nunavut

11 stephanie white

Contents

antonio zedda

gavin renwick

northern nature

graham ashford

4 14 16 18 21 24

Becky Messier: Becky’s greenhouse, NWT Graham Ashford: Banks Island Antonio Zedda: Being Boreal in the Yukon Bjorn Otto Braaten: 70ºN, Tromsø, Norway Chris Allen: Finnish Wood Culture Florian Jungen: Eskasoni, Cape Breton, NS

pétur armannsson gwen boyle

northern occupation T om S trickland : On being a northern country, 6 an interview with Adrienne Clarkson 8 Tracey Mactavish: Northern Towns 11 Gavin Renwick: Gameti Ko, NWT

chris allen

northern responses 26 Manoo: Polar Cube 27 Gwen Boyle: Excepts from an Arctic Journal tom strickland

northern living

adrienne clarkson

byron white stephen robinson

Harriet Burdett Moulton: Iqaluit Greenhouse Aleta Fowler: Houseboats in Yellowknife NWT Byron White: Bush Camp Robert G Bromley and Stephen Fancott: Wha Ti, NWT 37 Simon Taylor: Traill’s End,Yellowknife, NWT 28 30 33 34

mike mense

simon taylor 40 43

tracey mactavish

harriet burdett moulton

52 54 56 59 60 62

northern buildings Tracey Mactavish: Northern Detail Tracey Mactavish: Northern Firms:

Ferguson Simek Clark Pin/Taylor

Kobayashi Zedda Architects

Full Circle Architecture Petra Sattler-Smith: Kotlik, Alaska Steve Christer:Valhalla, Iceland Petur Armannsson: Bifrost, Nordudalur, Iceland KHRAS: Swimming pool at Nuuk, Greenland KHRAS: Nature Institute, Nuuk.

Michael Barton: Northern building perspectives

joe ferraro and bill brooks

david hernandez quintela 70ºN

northern technology stephen fancott and robert bromley

64 Mike Mense: Northern Architecture:

form folows latitude 66 Stephen Robinson: Building on permafrost 68 Bill Waechter: Drifting snow 73 Joseph Ferraro and William Brooks: Green at the South Pole 74 Don Taylor: Architecture of British Antarctic Survey Stations

the camera shy aleta fowler and boris

northern background 78 Stephanie White: Two good books michael barton don taylor bill waechter On Site review 11

Spring 2004 3

a

s Governor General, my going to the North draws attention to the fact that: a) it exists, b) it is extremely important for Canadians to realize that they are a Northern country. Otherwise, you pretend that the greater part of your country is not there and you live in denial about your real identity.

We are a northern people. I want us to think of how we relate to the countries that share the same latitudes as we do — latitude, because of the effect it has on climate and character.

Longitude is for adventure and discovery, but latitude is for living.

On being a northern country an interview with Adrienne Clarkson, Governor General of Canada Tom Strickland

Tom Strickland: Awareness of the ‘other’, in this case the North, in narrative, place and culture is something that was emphasized during the State Visit to the circumpolar countries. Openness to this diversity has important implications for architecture. In Canada the value of this diversity has yet to be translated to urban and rural planning which are still influenced by the South. Canada has opened its political culture to diversity with the creation of Nunavut, however, at this place in our history does Canadian culture truly reflect the North?

Adrienne Clarkson: With Nunavut as the newest territory, Iyujivik in northern Quebec with its distinct identity, the Northwest Territories and Yukon we have an identity and a diversity which is not Southern and never has been. The North its always been our frontier. It is the place where we push boundaries.

Tom Strickland: Is the North the frontier in other circumpolar countries or did you find places in which the North is an integrated part of their national identity?

Adrienne Clarkson: In the three countries that we went to, Russia, Finland and Iceland, the North plays a different kind of role. Russia’s North is Siberia which has, for two to three hundred years, been a place of exile. For example, in 1826 the Decembrists, who were an aristocratic group rebelling against the Czarists, were transported to Siberia where they lived for the rest of their lives. People stayed there because there wasn’t such a thing as coming back. There was no train that would take them back to Moscow or St. Petersburg, Novgorod or Kiev. The governor of Salekhard (a place in the Arctic Circle that we went to visit — an enormously booming gas town) was born there. His parents were in the Gulag that we had visited. When released they moved to the nearest little town. That’s the story of the habitation in the Russian North, people moved there against their will and had to stay —this creates a distinctive kind of society. With their wealth they have built very interesting buildings, in brick, in concrete block, even stone. We have not yet developed such a distinctive architecture. I think we could, the Nunavut Legislative Assembly is a very good start, as is the Legislative Assembly in Yellowknife.

We have to take into account the different temperatures in all our different Norths. What’s different about Northern Finland (we went right to the north to Inari which is the centre of Sámi culture) is that they have the Gulf Stream around the top of Finland. At the same latitude as Yellowknife, or even Tutoyaktuk, they can still grow wheat, they herd their reindeer and don’t actually live a totally nomadic life. They have trees that are anywhere from six to eight feet tall — our tree line is much farther south than that. So a different culture has evolved there, still a culture of the North, but not what we would call a First Nations culture.

Then there is Iceland, which is between 8º and 14ºC all year round. Iceland’s ability to survive as a society, from Viking times, is due to the Gulf Stream. They have very little snow compared to Ottawa or Montreal, very little snow. Instead they have hot springs and a different kind of feeling.

In Finland, you get wonderful architecture. In Rovaniemi you have the library of Alvar Alto which is a landmark building, just an extraordinary place. With our delegates we landed there to have a little tour fifteen 4

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minutes before we were to go on somewhere else. People were reading and the books could be taken off the shelf, it was a working, welcoming library. We need buildings like this ourselves. We need a concentrated attempt to make the North something different, for us. I think our architects that we went with, Saucier, Erickson, Shim and Sutcliff all realized this, meeting their counterparts in every place we went to.

Tom Strickland: Do you feel that a place like Finland has been more open to the North, culturally and politically, and as a result has allowed that frontier to become a part of them, their idea about democracy, their ideas about living, about building cities?

Adrienne Clarkson: I observe, as Governor-General, that when I travel in the North it is essentially, deeply Canadian, it is not a different country. I felt that from the first time I flew down the MacKenzie River in 1971. I felt it deeply. People there feel that they are Canadian, feel that they are part of Canada. We must make the South understand that. There is tremendous ignorance about the North, unfortunately, and sometimes a willful turning away from it. Often it’s as simple as feeling that it’s very expensive to go there. It’s not that expensive nor is it that far to places like Iqaluit — it’s only three and a half hours from Ottawa, but it doesn’t have its place in the imagination.

I think in terms of political culture the North is doing just fine. But you can’t import southern models of buildings to a northern place and expect them to work, it can’t be. We must depend upon architects, town planners and environmentalists to develop a model that will make our cities, our towns in the North speak to the place itself. I’m not an architect but I’m always interested in innovation and the way architects use different kinds of materials. In the last couple of Governor General’s Awards for Architecture, at least half of the architects are very concerned with having environmental buildings that don’t eat up energy, giving nothing back. I think that is the model we’re going to have to go to in the North.

Tom Strickland:Thank you for clearing up the idea that it is not as much a political issue as it is one of the imagination.

Adrienne Clarkson: Oh, I think that’s totally true. I think that sometimes people use the political question as an excuse for not dealing with where people are actually living, with how they make their dayto-day lives, how they make choices.You want to have a building which, although streamlined and not expensive, is a vernacular known to the North. You don’t want people to go into strange kinds of shapes but you want them to be able to use buildings to free themselves. If you’re concerned with the fact that a lot of kids leave school after grade 10, how can you make schools interesting and challenging so that there are spaces that people want to learn in. How do you develop facilities for sport? How do you deal with the fact that there is twilight for months at a time? How do you deal with the fact that there is daylight for three months of the year — all day long? Canada could be a leader in this — I think we have a wonderful body of architects, I watched their work even before I became Governor-General, when I did the prefaces for the awards and always looked at the finalists as well as the people who won. I think architecture is the way in which you can actually make it possible to live in our climate. That’s what I tried to get across in our

Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

mcpl cindy molyneaux

Nunavut Commissioner Peter Irniq performs an Inuit drum dance at a Quest for the Modern North seminar at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland. northern trips, that we share a climate with other countries, and what lessons they have learned we could learn. What lessons we have already implemented, they could implement. I think that our social and political constructs interpenetrate in that way.

Tom Strickland: Your point is very clear that the challenges in the North can be as pragmatic and everyday as the challenges of lighting. In meeting those challenges we will learn a lot about Canada as a northern country.

Adrienne Clarkson: What’s interesting is we talk all the time about being challenged in Canada, by our climate, our geography and the kind of nation that we are, which is an immigrant nation built on an aboriginal foundation. The North brings us back to our aboriginal foundation all the time. If the buildings all disappeared the Inuit could still live there as they have always lived there. Anyone who has been there the number of times I have been and seen somebody build an igloo out of a north-facing slope of snow in twenty minutes knows that they know something about shelter and design. The design of an igloo is utterly wonderful, done with one instrument, just the snow knife — it’s a marvel to behold.

If a blizzard is coming and there are two people hunting they can build that igloo and get out of the blizzard. We think of it as survival architecture, but it is actually highly sophisticated architecture, a perfect blend of function and necessity. We have to learn how to do that for the kind of constructions that we do now, using all the materials of the world, artificial or natural, that we have access to.

Tom Strickland: This is a key point — learning from the challenge of our climate rather than trying to resist it, or finding something other than it.

Adrienne Clarkson: We are very interested in this in our personal lives. We built an ecologically complete set of buildings on an island

in Georgian Bay where there is no electricity or sewage system. You do not have to have a septic tank that has to be pumped out by some boat going around doing the pumping. People say to me, ‘How do you do dishes?’ I say, ‘Well you do dishes by putting two large pasta pots on your stove, heating water and that will wash your dishes, surprisingly enough’. For general hot water we have a solar panel that pumps water to the sink and then we have an outdoor composting toilet, which makes wonderful compost within about three weeks. You can live like this. It’s not a hobby, it’s not a joke. In a strict environment where there is only two inches of top soil and you’ve got 116 trees and all of them could be blown over in a big west wind, you want to make sure that you are at one with whatever technologies you have that do not destroy the environment.

Tom Strickland: It’s a matter of making the effort.

Adrienne Clarkson: That’s right. In a situation like that you do have water, which is clean, all around you with a minimum amount of filtering, but the lesson is there which is to learn how to live in this environment.

Tom Strickland:Thank you very much Your Excellency.

Adrienne Clarkson: You’re very welcome Tom. It’s nice to talk to you and good luck with the magazine, it’s a good one.  Tom Strickland is an architect working in Calgary for Zeidler Carruthers. This interview took place in March 2004 in response to the Governor-General’s tour of the circumpolar region. Writers, artists, architects, musicians accompanied the Governor-General.

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Rae-Edzo, NT 1970

Canada North: new towns Tracey Mactavish

i

n the Canadian Arctic today most permanent communities are new towns. Before the 1950s settlements were trading posts and the seasonal camps of a nomadic culture. Camp sites were based on their proximity to water, prevailing winds, patterns of animal movement and their cultural significance as traditional gathering areas and places of exchange. Camp formation was often by family grouping. Shelters were oriented with their back to the wind, their face to the sun and the water’s edge near by.

After 1950, settlements as we now know them were created by the Government of Canada to simplify the administration of health, welfare and education services. Location was based on ease of access (by air or overland) and by terrain and soil conditions conducive to economical building services. Community form was the result of the systematic application of modern planning ideals; single linear lots sized for fire separation, detached dwellings and a gridiron layout underpinned by an engineering culture.

Federal and territorial government officials, consultants and specialists consulted the community which expressed health concerns but also spoke of a desire to stay near their fishing boats and of the significance of the geographic and historic location of Rae for the Dogrib people.

Nonetheless officials felt that they had received local endorsement to move the community, and the infrastructure of Edzo was constructed.

The majority of the population of Rae did not move to Edzo and remain, as they traditionally have, on the rocky point on Marion Lake.

Children were bussed to the new school in Edzo until a government freeze on infrastructure in Rae was lifted and education and health facilities were built to meet the needs of Rae residents. Today Rae-Edzo functions logistically as one hamlet, Edzo primarily as an enclave of nonnative teachers and government workers with a combined population of about 1860 people. Edzo is 24 kilometres down highway No. 3 from Rae (6 km by boat or ice road) on a water channel that connects Marion Lake to the North Arm of Great Slave Lake. In contrast to the suburban planning model applied to the design of Edzo and recent growth of Rae, smoke houses, lean-to structures and traditional lodges pop up in side yards between houses illustrating the human ability to improvise in foreign environments. With the recent signing of Dogrib Treaty 11 the town of Rae will continue to be the growing hub of Dogrib settlement.

Existing patterns of adaptation provide cues for new planning develop-

Tra c e y M a c t a v i s h

N-1995-002-4724 Fumoleau/NWT Archives

A number of relocation and new town projects from this period are comparable in their varied success and failure. The debris of northern development history, the constructed reality of these communities is our platform for change, evidence that the design of built form must understand and reflect the relationship of northern people to place.

Rae-Edzo are twin communities, their hyphenation the result of a relocation project initiated by the Government of Canada and inherited by the Government of the Northwest Territories in 1970. In the 1960s health problems and a number of deaths in Rae linked to poor sanitation caused alarm amongst government officials. Local papers portrayed the poor water quality, drainage and housing conditions of a northern ghetto. Action was taken to move the community to the Edzo site where soil was favourable for underground piping and drainage, and access to the main highway provided ease of servicing.

map from the Rae-Edzo community plan.

6

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Tra c e y M a c t a v i s h

UMA Engineering Ltd.

right above: Government row right: Chief Jimmy Bruno School in Edzo

Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

R e s o l u t e B a y , N e w To w n , C o r n w a l l i s I s l a n d , N W T, C a n a d a , a project brief

Resolute Bay, NU 1953 & 1973 In 1953 four Inuit families were relocated by the Government of Canada from Inukjuak on the east coast of Hudson’s Bay and from Pond Inlet on the northern tip of Baffin Island to the shore of Cornwallis Island. Resolute Bay at that time consisted of an air strip and a military base. Initially no effort was made by government to build infrastructure or housing.

The first Inuit settlement was located on the shore four miles south of the airport, segregated from the military base and built by the Inuit themselves with salvaged lumber. Government-sponsored housing was introduced in the late 1960s. A lifestyle developed that included both life on the land and sporadic wage employment at the base.

Petroleum and mineral exploration in the 1970s brought money and people to Resolute, promising growth and status as an arctic destination. In 1973 the Government of the Northwest Territories decided that a new town was needed for a projected population of 1200 people.

Community objectives, stated in the project brief, were for a wellequipped, socially integrated community with sufficient physical protection from the harsh climate.

Ralph Erskine, a Scottish architect based in Sweden and experienced in arctic community design, was hired to develop a town plan for Resolute.

Climate profiles for a number of sites were developed, examining solar radiation, temperature, wind, precipitation and existing patterns of snow drifting. Site and community form were analysed through extensive community consultation and, by consensus, the new site was located on the south face of Signal Hill up-slope from the town lake where increased sun and protection from the prevailing north wind were obvious advantages. Planned was a perimeter building of dwellings, hotel, town centre and nursing station with a commercial administration and recreation complex sitting at the highest elevation and sheltering interior clusters of single family houses from wind and snow drifting. Service access and industrial uses were delegated to the periphery.

Existing houses and structurally sound buildings were relocated to the new town site, but new construction was abandoned shortly after the first townhouses were completed. Resolute has not yet reached its projected population and the current community of approximately 200 sits on the south face of the hill loosely grouped in a semblance of the early vision.

For more on the 1953 high arctic relocation see Relocating Eden:The Image of Political Exile in the Canadian Arctic by Alan R. Marcus.

For more on the Resolute plan see Resolute Bay, New Town, Cornwallis Island, NWT, Canada, a project brief by Ralph Erskine Architect & Planner.

Tra c e y M a c t a v i s h

Tra c e y M a c t a v i s h

above: Erskine’s Town Plan below: the only part of the plan that was built, a townhouse row bottom: Resolute, 2003

ment.

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‘Aklavik to Be Moved’

23 December 1953, Edmonton Journal

After extensive evaluation of possible town sites East Three was selected on the east bank of the Mackenzie River 58km east of Aklavik, far from existing trap lines and the seasonal cariboo hunt. Half of the population of Aklavik relocated to this new site, which became Inuvik, now a thriving regional centre of 3500 people. The hamlet of Aklavik, with 750 residents, continues to exist in its original location with a traditional land-based economy.

The construction of Inuvik was viewed as a pilot study of what it would take to build a modern northern town with all of the amenities of a southern centre. Infrastructure was paramount, with the construction of roads, pilings for buildings and a network of above ground utilidors that connect every facility to an umbilical cord of building services. The utilidor reinforces the engineered character of the town in contrast to its natural surroundings and limits pedestrian movement and modification of the space between buildings. Little design attention has been given to building orientation, the creation of sheltered outdoor space or the establishment of a community centre. Built in just over five years, Inuvik’s boom town quality is not unique to the Canadian arctic. 

P i n / Ta y l o r a r c h i t e c t s

Of the projects here, Resolute Bay is the only community where all residents of the original settlement relocated. It has a small population, close proximity of the new settlement to the old and was formed by the extensive consultation process as to location and town form, led by an architect with skill in design and community planning. Members of the community see both good and bad in the siting, noting the muddy conditions in spring and the inability to sight whales from a location so

Inuvik utilidor, and other details

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N-1979-062:0134 Hunt/NWT Archives

Aklavik lies in the Mackenzie delta on the west channel of the Mackenzie River. Originally the settlement was the meeting place of the Gwich’in and local Inuvialuit and was a centre for the muskrat fur trade.

Silty soil, susceptibility to flooding, erosion of the river banks and the lack of suitable land for population expansion and for the development of an airstrip were characteristics that did not support the political vision for a northern administrative, education, transportation and shipping centre and that justified, for the Government of Canada, a new town site.

far into the bay. The success of Erskine’s plan, had the population arrived to support it, is debatable. Traditionally, the gathering of people into physical groupings is a natural process driven by common interest or advantage, where communities evolve over time as local priorities and objectives changed. Instant communities embody the thinking of a specific time period in their inability to respond to a human dimension that is not finite and that, in the case of the Aklavik and Rae-Edzo relocation projects, was originally ill-defined.

What the Resolute New Town project offers to future community development is the model of Erskine’s design approach. Currently the political and social climate is shifting as self-government and local control of infrastructure becomes reality for many communities. Opportunity exists to develop alternatives that are less foreign to a northern context, that are incremental, better suited to the environment and more supportive of the values of its people. Change requires leadership and courage at a community level supported by government and by design professionals. Planning and design of the recent past have muddied the palette, but the day will come when the fabric of our northern communities will reveal an essential, colourful understanding of the physical and social context of our northern realm. 

Tracey Mactavish developed this survey of Northern towns as part of a larger study (see pp 40-51, this issue), with the assistance of the Canada Council.

Spring 2004

Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

gavin renwick

The summer of 1990 was spent travelling through central Europe with an experimental architecture project called ‘Whaur Extremes Meet’.This involved constructing a ‘debating chamber’ in seven cities, most of which were in that immediate transitory state that follows revolution. For many people in locations such as Prague this structure became a utilitarian symbol performing part of their transformative activity.The intention of such architecture was not so much a question of liberating form as liberating people.

House, homeland, self-determination: the Gameti Ko project, NWT Gavin Renwick

j

oseph Beuys declared that culture relates to freedom because culture implies freedom. Vaclav Havel said that ‘because of the materialistic and science based nature of modern civilisation, culture … has been taken out of context, robbed of its broader and deeper meaning.’ There was a time when culture was scarcely ever mentioned as a separate sphere of human activity. The reason for this was simple: culture was part of daily life.’ 1 In the Northwest Territories there is a major change in the sociopolitical landscape. After years of negotiation the Dogrib Dene may soon have self-government and their land claim settled — an extraordinary event of international importance. On Dogrib land culture is part of daily life — life is woven into the fabric of the whole day.

On the land work is neither compressed into prescribed hours nor spatially isolated. The architecture of the bush does not spatially determine, or isolate, an activity.

This illustrates the dichotomy between the western idea of house (as a spatial unit in the built environment) and the Dogrib idea of home. In western convention a ‘house is a physical unit that defines and delineates space for the members of a household. It provides shelter and protection for domestic activities’. This prevents the idea of a house being anything other than ‘a territorial core, [rather than] a complex entity that defines and is defined by cultural, socio-demographic, psychological, political and economic factors’2 Within Dogrib culture it is an oral tradition that links archaeological and cultural landscapes. Land use and occupancy are inextricably linked. Home is not contained but lived, and understood, as an expansive experience. Gameti elder, Romie Wetrade, says ‘When we say home it is as if the land is that home. This is why we worked hard and took care of our home.’

In the relationship between camp and land, spatial prepositions like in or out are superfluous, as both camp and land mean home. You are always on the land. Such a geographically expansive, domestic intimacy is not locked into a fixed place and illustrates the inextricable link between hearth and cosmos, home and world.

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Architecture has been a tool of assimilation in the Canadian North where the global shift from self-reliance to dependence on culturally inappropriate, and geographically distant, industrial processes has been particularly concentrated. Many people in the north have experienced ‘all or most of the variety of forms that we label modernisation’3 in less than a single lifetime. In 1970 the territorial government started construction of a new town, Edzo, on Dogrib land.4 The intention was improvement, in government terms; in this case, the relocation of Rae, the largest Dogrib Dene community, away from the shores of Marion Lake to a land-bound township linked to the main north-south highway. Conceived by a town planner from the south it had neatly rowed houses, cul-de-sacs, and open plan park areas. It was to be the showpiece of the north. Public officials, many of whom had technical backgrounds themselves and none of whom were Dogrib, were impressed.

Everyone had the best of intentions.5 One engineer subsequently criticised the applied science that underpinned Edzo, particularly the assumed superiority over indigenous knowledge and lifestyle. Although Rae did have infrastructural problems connected with a growing population, scant regard was paid to its historic resonance and sense of place. The reasons why a community might want to stay there were denied and a new town was built, even though ‘the public health and other related problems in Rae could have been solved at a substantially lower cost than that required to build Edzo’.6 In Rae the original self-built log cabins were right on the lake and in kinship groups facing their particular region of Dogrib territory — the cabins did not segregate either home from homeland. Hunters still occupy these houses. Marion Lake itself gives direct access for canoe or sledge, boat or skidoo to the linked lakes and portages of the Idaa Trail — the historic highway across Dogrib land connecting the Great Slave and Great Bear Lakes. Here the traditionally expansive idea of home is sustained, the cabins conceived spatially and strategically in relation to homeland and family.

Gameti Ko is now a community-based incorporated society with a board of three elders, two youth and two councillors. Tony Rabesca, responsible for community wellness, is the Gameti-based coordinator.

Gavin Renwick is the overall project coordinator. From the beginning the project has been wholly controlled and developed within the community. A workshop was recently held in Gameti, bringing together all interested parties and representatives from across the Dogrib homeland, to detail the project parameters and program. It was supported by two territorial government departments, Municipal and Community Affairs and the NWT Housing Corporation. The Diavik Communities Advisory Board also sponsored the event.

gavin renwick

For a decade the elders of Gameti, initially through the Dogrib Treaty 11 Traditional Knowledge Project, have documented traditional knowledge, skills and values. They feel it is now time to show how this knowledge is relevant to life in the twenty-first century — particularly to the Gameti youth — by working with their young people on a building project to renew the community. Chief Archie Wetrade says, ‘In Dogrib Ko means home, this project has been created to document our view of the land as home and develop this traditional knowledge into a modern structure that has the same values. This way we remain strong like two people — in our traditions and in the modern world.’

The project will train youth in research methods, design and construction, developing capacity and transferable skills. The elders of Gameti have promoted this project because of their belief in being strong like two people, thus working with and learning from the elders will be a part of the training process being developed in association with Aurora College.

The Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre is supporting an early phase of the project which aims to protect the built heritage of Gameti, in particular the remaining original cabins which will be designated as national heritage sites.  10

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Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

gavin renwick gavin renwick 1

Havel,Vaclav, 2004. ‘The Culture of Enterprise’ Walrus, Feb./Mar. 2004. p38 Lawrence, Roderick J, 1987. ‘What Makes a House a Home?’ Environment & Behavior, 19 (2) March 1987. pp154.

3 Lawrence, Roderick J ibid.

4 Pelto, Pertti. 1978. ‘Ecology, Delocalisation and Social Change’. Consequences of Economic Change in the Arctic. Boreal Institute for Northern Affairs/University of Alberta, Edmonton. p32.

5 Ironically, the planned community, now largely occupied by whites (a proportion of whom work at the Edzo based school), is named after a great Dogrib leader, while Rae, the place with a history of aboriginal occupancy, is named after a Scottish fur trader, 6 Gamble, Donald J. 1986. ‘Crushing of Cultures: Western Applied Science in Northern Societies’. Arctic, vol.39, No.1 (March 1986). p21.

7 Gamble, Donald J. 1986. ibid. p21.

gavin renwick

2

Gavin Renwick is an A.H.R.B. Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the School of Fine Art / Visual Research Centre, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, Scotland. A note from earlier this spring: ‘60 people have just arrived by skidoo from the community of Deline (Fort Franklin) to the North.

Together with the 100 or so who have arrived by plane that doubles the size of the population of Gameti. The next few days should be fun’.

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The Changing Nature of Banks Island: Northwest Territories

graham ashford

Graham Ashford

i

When they return to their houses in Sachs Harbour, the island’s only permanent settlement, the distinction between indoors and outside is blurred. Nature seems to spill through every doorway. In the distance sled dogs bark in the wind, skins are stretched to dry on outside walls, geese are plucked on the kitchen table, and polar bears are fleshed on a tarp on the living room floor. The smell of country food enriches the air. There is a strong sense of community and a deep respect for age and acquired wisdom.

n Canada’s High Arctic, Inuit hunters and trappers have a close relationship with the natural world. For countless generations they have crisscrossed the icy Beaufort waters in search of fish, game and geese.

At latitude 73Âş north they met the shores of most western island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and named it Ikahuk, place where one crosses over. It is a crossing made for the last 3,500 years as resourceful hunters have followed the seasons and the animals over the 70,028 square kilometers of what is now called Banks Island. Although the conditions are extreme, well-adapted wildlife flourishes on the tundra.

For those who are resourceful, food and clothing are all around.

On the surface it is a closely knit community responding, to the technologies, lifestyles and values of our modern age. Beneath the surface however, significant change is underway. The core of the island, centuries old frozen earth, is melting. Around the town of Sachs Harbour it is causing building foundations to shift. Doors are crooked, windows fail to shut properly, and drywall is cracked. Sections of roads have collapsed.

Near the steep shore coastal erosion is rapidly advancing as the banks collapse from melting permafrost and wave erosion. Families worry that their homes may not be habitable in coming years. Their concern is well founded, an entire inland lake recently drained into the ocean when its banks collapsed.

Much has changed in recent years, sod huts have been replaced with modern houses, dog teams with snowmobiles and all terrain vehicles.

Many houses have cable and internet service, yet the ancient elements of a life close to the land endure. Local people retain the traditional skills, knowledge and tastes of their ancestors. They travel widely over the island in pursuit of caribou, muskox, polar bears, fish, geese and other wildlife. They are accustomed to a migratory lifestyle where permanent structures are absent, and they create comfort and companionship on the land in canvas tent communities near their favorite fishing and hunting spots.

graham ashford

above: Roger Kuptana pulling in a net below: Sachs Harbour

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Sachs Harbour John Keogak, a longtime resident relates his concern: “I’d say 1987 we started noticing these mudslides, like pretty bad. Before it used to be a little sloughing from the snow left on the side of the banks. But now it’s the permafrost that’s coming down. And the ground being disturbed and more of the permafrost being exposed to the sun and the heat and the wind, now there’s more rain and the sun is shining all the time, warmer summer, earlier springs. Once this starts I don’t know what’s going to stop it. It doesn’t look good — for the community anyway. I think we’ll have to evacuate the community. Move somewhere else.”

The signs of climate change are indeed all around, bearing out the scientific prediction that the Earth would warm more rapidly at the poles.

Roger Kuptana, a local guide has seen it: “The freeze-ups are later. Like last year it must have been about a month and a half to two months later, freeze up. The winds are a lot stronger in the fall, like gale force winds. There is some thunderstorms, but I haven’t seen any this year.

Last year there might have been one or two. There are a few thunderstorms. They are quite unusual for up here.You’re out on the land and you hear the thunder and the muskox would jump and they wouldn’t know which way to go. Each time you hear a thunder they will run one way and then run back. They just don’t know what to do.”

John Keogak inspecting coastal permafrost melting

The multi-year sea-ice is smaller and now drifts far from the community in the summer, taking with it the seals upon which the community relies for food. In the winter the sea-ice is thin and broken, making travel dangerous for even the most experienced hunters. In the fall, storms have become frequent and severe. New species of birds such as barn swallows and robins are arriving on the island. In the nearby waters, salmon have been caught for the first time. On the land, an influx of flies and mosquitoes are making life difficult for humans and animals.

The traditional migration around the island has become more difficult in recent years as the earlier spring thaw saturates the ground with water, making skidoo travel difficult. Warmer weather has also resulted in the earlier breakup of many rivers over which the local people must travel.

The risk of being stranded by open water is significant.

As the warmer weather continues to alter the look and shape of what has always been familiar to them, the residents of Sachs Harbour wonder if they will be able to maintain their way of life. Rosemarie Kuptana puts it this way: “Who we are as Inuit are defined by a number of characteristics. Your culture, your language, your oral tradition, your geography, your laws, and when one of those traditional characteristics such as the ice going away and not coming back in the summertime, it affects what you eat. It affects your soul as a people. How can we prepare ourselves for such unpredictability? What will happen to us if we can no longer rely on our instincts and traditional wisdom?” 

graham ashford

For more information please see: http://www.iisd.org/climate/arctic/ sachs_harbour.asp

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Graham Ashford is an Associate with the International Institute for Sustainable Development where he is responsible for helping communities to develop innovative and sustainable responses to natural resource management issues. He has led projects to understand and communicate the impacts of climate change in Canada’s Arctic, integrate aboriginal values into land use decisions in Manitoba, and assist poor farmers to rehabilitate watersheds in southern India.

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Being Boreal: trembling sticks, skins and a flower Antonio Zedda

Dwellings were simple, seasonal and gave protection from the harsh climate. Due to the ephemeral nature of the structures and materials, no significant built artifacts remain. What we know of them is largely from documentation and photography undertaken by Europeans who explored the territory in the mid to late 1800s.

Yukon First Nations had, until the first Europeans arrived, lived for thousands of years within the boreal forest of Canada’s most westerly territory. Though the climate and terrain were severe, the environment provided the necessary amenities for survival. Most First Nations were nomadic. Athapaskan and Tlingit moved with the seasons to different locations where sources of food were known to exist.

Though First Nations typically followed their source of food and thus led a nomadic existence, it was not uncommon for permanent seasonal camps to be established, located on riverbanks (to harvest returning salmon), near migrating ungulates (caribou) or simply in areas where game was plentiful (moose, rabbit). The winter climate necessitated a more robust dwelling than was needed in the warmer seasons.

Tappan Adney, in The Klondike Stampede of 1897-98 (1900) describes in detail the built form of the Klondike River Valley’s Tr’ondek Hwech’in people. Though considered one of the few Yukon First Nations to establish more permanent settlements, they also provide an example of seasonal building types common

antonio zedda

In mid-March the Pasque Flower or Prairie Crocus, anemone patens, emerges from the snow . It comes from a hardy rootstock as a ball of fine woolly white hairs surrounding a hairy purple flower. The flower, a heliotrope, opens to catch the sun’s warmth during the day by following its arc across the sky. At night or during overcast weather it resumes its tight knit configuration of woolly hairs that trap warm air, reduce moisture loss and provide the insulation necessary to withstand cold evening temperatures. Meanwhile, as a means of protection from cold winter winds, a nearby willow (genus salix) blankets last year’s growth of tender shoots with a fur of fine white hairs.

antonio zedda

he ubiquitous and fast-growing Trembling Aspen, populus tremuloides, stands still through the winter solstice. Even with its relatively short lifespan, it is a key colonising species of the vast boreal forest that covers much of the circumpolar region. Derek Johnson (Plants of The Western Boreal Forest and Aspen Parkland,1996) looks closely at the Trembling Aspen to show how it copes in an extreme environment with long winters. The greenish white colour of the bark indicates a photosynthetic layer. In late winter, while the tree’s leaves have yet to emerge, the bark has already begun to absorb and convert the sun’s energy into nutrients providing the tree with a longer growing season than would otherwise be possible. And when finally exposed to the long hours of intense summer sun, the tree produces a white powdery substance that acts as a sunscreen to protect the photosynthetic bark.

antonio zedda

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antonio zedda

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A variation replaced hides with small diameter poles placed side by side to form leaning walls.

A more permanent structure used a rectangular or hexagonal shaped post and beam framework to support leaning walls made up of small diameter logs. The system allowed disassembly and transportation of the hides and perhaps the ridge beam, however the plentiful small diameter aspen and spruce trees were often cut on site.

We are surrounded by examples of survival in the most severe of climates. And lessons from nature are not alone as we can see in First Nations traditional dwellings. We can choose to continue along our current path that seems to direct us further away from these lessons, or we can engage with our diverse northern environments and run the risk of living more fully the ingenuity and beauty contained therein. 

Antonio Zedda is an architect and partner in Kobayashi + Zedda Architects.

He lives in Whitehorse,Yukon.The firm’s work can be viewed at www.kza.yk.ca

antonio zedda

When warmer spring weather arrived, the moss houses were vacated in favour of simpler and less permanent moveable stick and skin structures. These were spruce or aspen poles lashed together to form two tripods spaced two to four metres apart. One tripod support was taller than the other for water drainage.

A straight spruce or pine pole was laid on the two tripods making a ridge beam which supported tanned hides draped over it. If a larger structure was required, additional ridge beams would be added to new tripods.

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antonio zedda

throughout much of the Yukon.

Dwellings used boreal forest resources — trembling aspen, lodgepole pine and black spruce poles, spruce boughs, willow and alder stems, moss, caribou and moose hides, sinew and spruce root twine. Winter, or moss houses, provided shelter and warmth through their semi-subterranean configuration. A circular hole two to five metres in diameter was dug a half to one metre deep. Over this was assembled a framework of small diameter, bent willow or aspen poles tied together with sinew or split spruce root. The framework was covered by a patchwork of tanned hides with a central smoke hole and access openings. The final layer was a thick blanket of moss that provided an efficient insulating layer. The interior dirt floor and walls were covered with a layer of spruce boughs, hides and furs.

s the traditional knowledge and intimate understanding of the boreal forest ecosystem by the Tr’ondek Hwech’in and other First Nations of value to our modern and environmentally detached lifestyles?

Janine Benyus (Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, 2002) describes organisms able to adapt and survive in hostile natural environments.The Namibian beetle survives in the desert through an ingenious mechanism. It catches moisture from fog that rolls off the Atlantic by tilting its body and allowing the small peaks on its shell to scratch the incoming fog, harvesting the water. Once the water droplets grow to a sufficient size they succumb to gravity and roll along troughs that lead to the beetle’s mouth. Researchers have begun to reproduce the special textured surface for harvesting drinking water in arid regions of the world.

Spring 2004 15

l

iving in northern Norway means living in close connection with the elements of nature. It is so, whether you live in an urban situation or in the countryside, by the coast or interior. The extreme contrasts of the seasons —the beautiful dark light of December, the shining whiteness of March, the almost unbelivable greenness of summer, and the yellow celebration of autumn before the returning of the darkness — they affect us all.

The natural conditions are characterized by contrast and contradiction.

People here tend to find beauty and quality of life not in spite of the rain and the snow, the darkness and the cold, but because of it. Beauty in this context is more the fruit of intense contrasts than of gentle harmony. It is impossible not to be affected by it.

To live in such a landscape makes the experience a shared reference.

The celebration of the returning of the sun in the end of January, Sunday cross-country skiing in the mountains, hiking in the summer — it is a ritual and a shared experience.

This may open a different way of seeing and living, and a sensibility for the quality of the moment that includes the consciousness of change.

The grandeur of the landscape makes you aware of the context, and not merely the objects in it. The experience of not just looking at scenery, but seeing by taking part in the changing process of nature, leads us to focus on the essence, not the surface.

The most dramatic changes are the disappearing of the sun in November, the returning of the sun in January and the coming of the midnight sun in May. The first rays of the sun on the mountain-tops in late January, after it has been totally gone for two months, is a moment of shivering jo. Then, after just a few minutes, it’s gone again. It’s like a few harmonious chords on a piano. Such events are very emotional for everybody.

The Landscape and Architecture of 70ºN. Tromsø, Norway

The shifting of the elements in one week, one day, one minute, can be overwhelming. In spring trees turn green in two or three days.You can hear the grass growing on a summer morning. And then there is the silence and all the delicate and sublime colour-shiftings in the sky on a dark midwinter day.

And there is the snow, sometimes 2.5m deep on flat land. Maybe the snow is too often talked about as a problem —huge masses of packed snow make perfect playgrounds for children where new spaces can be created by accident and creativity.

Bjorn Otto Braaten

Traditional building culture

The old trading centre at Kjerringoy, Nordland

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Sami mountain-settlement,Tromsø

The story of traditional building culture in northern Norway is not a story of refined craftmanship. The detailing does not focus on the smooth surface, but on the connections. And the meaning of the building as object is nothing without understanding its natural and cultural context, which is the use and trading of the resources of the sea.

Many small places on this long and icefree coastline had their names on the maps of Europe long before Oslo, the capital of Norway. And still fishery provides one of the main incomes in our country. 150 years ago the typical tradesman of the north read his weekly newspapers from Paris, spoke Danish to his wife, and a mixture of the Russian and Norwegian with his businesspartner of the Pomor trade. The sad and beautiful novel Pan by Knut Hamsun is connected to this context (facing page, below).

Moving with their herds of reindeer from the interior where they spend the winter to the coast in the summer, some of the Sami still live in their traditional tents while on the move (above).

There is an intricate relationship between the many fireplaces (in Sami, arran) along the route, the landscape and the paths of the reindeer.

The nomadic sense of place is not defined by a physical man-made enclosure, but by fixed points in the surrounding landscape. It is not the tent that establishes the nomadic place, it is the fireplace.

The racks for drying fish that you can see in every place connected to the fisheries, is the ultimate contextual architectural expression of this area. They are open structures that can be extended when necessary.

Landscape, a living, construction and space are integrated through a very simple and precise form.

A different conception of place

Fishing racks,Tromsø

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New ways Through the last two decades there has been an interesting forum in Tromsø for planning and architectural design related to aspects of living in the north. Tromsø is a town situated close to 70ºN and about 500 km north of the Arctic circle.

Some of the best examples of contemporary work show the will to use architecture as a tool for discovering, uncovering and expressing the qualities of life, both individual and social, related to this special geographical and cultural context. Not as style, not houses as objects without context, but as relevant physical and poetic answers to the problems and potentials of our time. To do so —to see what is relevant, we must know what to look for, and have the skill and the urge to make the hidden possibilities of time and place visible through architecture. 

Competition project for a Church. 1997,Tromsø 70ºN architecture

The Loekken cabin.

2000,Tromsø Gisle Loekken, 70ºN

Bjorn Otto Braaten, is an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Fine arts, Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. He has spent 13 years in Tromsø, a Norwegian town situated 500 km north of the Arctic circle at 69.7ºN. From 1995-2000 he was a member of 70ºN arkitektur, a studio based on the idea of combining modern architecture with the potential of the specific geographical context on 70ºN.

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Finnish Wood Culture: innovation within a material palette Chris Allen

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he northern regions of the world are characterized by scarcity. For the northern builder, the material palette is extremely proscribed.

There are two radical responses to this situation: to develop building forms which are utterly unique, though often severely limited, or to impose an imported concept, rendering specific qualities of locale irrelevant. Within the creative tension between these two poles lies a middle course, in which an inventive, modern building culture responds authentically to its locale. If there is one northern culture which exemplifies such an approach, it is the Finns. And if there is a single building detail which demonstrates their approach, it is the use of forest thinnings.

While the country of Finland straddles the treeline, the cultural hearth of the Finnish speaking majority is the boreal forest. In this landscape of lakes and trees, a wood culture developed which was both spiritually and economically dependent on the forest. Buildings were crafted almost entirely from wood, to the point where an entire farmstead could be constructed from this one material, ridgepole to door hinges.

Woodlands were intensively managed to maximize output for both local use and export. A vital component of this management was thinning, or removing a percentage of the saplings to provide more space and light for the remaining trees to thrive. The thinning produced a constant supply of small dimension timber, which was put to numerous ingenious

uses, from fences to roof sheathing, gates, farm implements, drying racks, and the ubiquitous conical summer kitchens. In fact, traditional Finnish construction is characterized as much by the small dimensions, repetition and texture of saplings as it is by monolithic log walls.

As Finland began to industrialize in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the constraints which had created this sophisticated wood building culture loosened. However, at a time when many European architects were advocating a radical break with the past, Finland, in 1917, was gaining its independence from Russia. Architects such as Alvar Aalto embraced the tenets of functionalism, but would often include rustic references to Finnish folk culture in their designs. In the Villa Mairea, Aalto used unpeeled saplings as an undulating entrance screen, a vivid tactile contrast to the white rendered cubic volume of the house. Once inside, the screen was reinterpreted as highly polished turned poles which support the main stair. The surrounding forest is visible beyond this finely crafted screen, expanding the potential readings of the material; it is at once a folk-culture reference, a spatial device echoing the syncopated rhythms of a forest, and a tectonic contrast to more monolithic elements of the building.

The sapling screen was reinterpreted by Heikki and Kaija Siren in their

from left to right: Petajavasi forest Suerasaari wood door Petajavasi fence Seurasaari summer kitchen On Site review 11

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small chapel at Otaniemi. Here thin poles are again unpeeled but set horizontally into a rigid steel frame, setting up a dialogue between a precision of formal intent and a vibrating variability of the parts. The timber screens define a churchyard within the surrounding forest; interestingly, however, the churchyard itself is heavily planted with trees. The effect is not so much of a clearing in the forest, but of a particularly significant patch of the forest carefully demarcated. As is the case in the Villa Mairea, the use of a slightly rustic element encourages an ambiguity of reading which enables the screens to function as spatial divisions, while at the same time suggesting a continuity of forest space. Inside the chapel, the roof is formed by small dimension timbers made into a truss, a continuation of the additive, repetitive aesthetic of the screens.

This abstraction of the sapling into a small dimension wood element is a critical development in the reinterpretation of Finnish building culture.

It is clear that for Aalto there is a degree of interchangeability between an unpeeled sapling and a turned pole, and from there to milled slats, as used vertically on Saynatsalo town hall for sun shading. In the Finnish wood museum, Lusto, designed by Kaira-Lahdelma-Mahlamäki, this trajectory is carried even further, with the entire building being clad in larch slats, which are varied in spacing to achieve a subtle variety of effect. The tendency in traditional Finnish construction toward light timber elements, typically constructed from forest thinnings, here

Villa Mairea stair

achieves its apotheosis as the slatted screen. While this is not the first use of timber slats on a building, neither did the Finns invent the concept of the wood screen, I would argue that the contemporary fashion for slatted claddings and sunscreens grew out of a Nordic design tradition (particularly strong in Finland) with roots in traditional construction.

In ‘Toward a critical regionalism’ Kenneth Frampton wrote of an architecture of resistance, where ‘the tactile and the tectonic … withstand the relentless onslaught of global modernization’1. In Finland, timber construction has largely provided that counterpoint. While there is undoubtedly a nostalgic aspect to the use of timber in Finnish architecture, it should not be overemphasized. Finland remains to this day a forested country, in which one in five citizens owns a woodlot. The use of wood is an authentic response to life in a forested country, in which it is affordable, available and culturally resonant. The example of forest thinnings, and their abstraction into one of the dominant motifs of contemporary architecture, demonstrates how a northern culture can not only maintain its identity, but make meaningful contributions to an increasingly global architectural dialogue.  1

Villa Mairea entrance screen

Kenneth Frampton. ‘Toward a Critical Regionalism’ Labour,Work and Architecture. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2002. 77 - 89 (originally published in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture, 1983).

above: Otaniemi below: Otaniemi screen

9. Saynatsalo screen 10. Lusto screen

Chris Allen is an architect living in Penticton, BC. He recently traded big city life for the chance to develop an authentic building culture in the Okanagan.

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The west wing: Eskasoni, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia

richard kroeker

Florian Jungen

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f as Canadians our identity is tied to the landscape, then we remain remarkably naïve about vast portions of ourselves. For many of us the North floats adrift in our consciousness, a homogeneous white expanse only occasionally coming into focus as a source of social problems, threatened wilderness or economic opportunity. The politics of neglect and exploitation towards Canada’s colonies* extend to the less settled northern regions of various provinces as well as to native communities, either physically or psychologically isolated from the rest of the country.

We could consider the North as much a state of mind for Canadians as a precise geographic position, but a vague one none the less.

The West Wing is a project we built as students under Richard Kroeker on the Mi’kmaq reserve in Eskasoni, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia as part of the design/build component of Dalhousie University’s summer term. This studio addition is the Oval Office of elder Murdina Marshall’s house, where she gives counsel on spiritual matters to others in the community and which reduces the amount of time she has to spend travelling. The project continues a line of enquiry by Richard Kroeker which pursues a deeper understanding of Canada’s hinterlands and of the technological knowledge inherent in native cultural artefacts.

Under the guidance of Mi’kmaq elders, students carefully replicated the construction of a traditional birchbark canoe and of several bent sapling lodges, both of which are indigenous to this part of North America.

The birchbark canoe is the result of centuries of interaction between the wooded landscape of eastern Canada and the people moving along its shallow rivers and frequent portages. It makes use of sophisticated technological principles to produce an impeccably refined piece of Canadian design.

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We are only beginning to understand the complex relationship between the environment and our own society. The decline of the Atlantic salmon fishery, for example, and the many communities in which it plays a central role, is a result more of irresponsible forestry practices that disrupt hatching streams than of over-fishing. The forestry industry continues to put intensive demand on large trees to meet the needs of various international production industries. Small diameter trees — one of the most readily available and underused forest resources in Nova Scotia — are considered a nuisance to efficient harvesting. Starting from crude experiments bending trees in the forest with a winch and making use of indigenous concepts of material use, Kroeker sought to determine uses for these undervalued forest resources.

Over numerous experiments with the material, a configuration emerged that takes advantage of the structural resilience of the uninterrupted fibres in an unsawn trees. Two peeled spruce timbers (about 6” diameters and 15’ long) are bent and pinned at the ends to form a rigid banana truss. Webs made from off-cuts from the wood are attached at 2’ intervals with industrial stainless steel strapping. A series of improvements were made to connection details and to the manufacturing jig to increase the predictability of the truss’ geometry and performance.

Structural analysis and refinements were made by specialised engineers from Buro Happold. The West Wing makes clear the poetic potentials of the bentwood truss and its resonance in a native cultural context. A project for an early childhood development centre has been planned using the same structural system at a larger scale and projects with more mundane programs (a one car garage) have tested its viability as an alternative to current wood use practices.

Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

Richard Kroeker

John Henry Lafford combined traditional techniques and industrially produced materials in this new sweat lodge changing house.

For the construction of the West Wing, we harvested trees and manufactured trusses in Halifax using a plywood platform as a jig. The trusses were driven by van to Cape Breton and erected on an insulated 2x6 floor set on patio tiles. The trusses were secured with an initial layer of horizontal 1x3 t&g boards (acquired on discount from a local supplier) which became part of the interior finish. This layer was followed by two layers of 1 1/2” rigid insulation applied diagonally. The exterior was sheathed in shingles and copper clad window boxes punched through the skin to frame views of Bras d’Or Lake and surrounding forested hills.

As a result of its geometry and the successive layers of strapping, the studio essentially acts as a rigid shell structure where the trusses may even have become superfluous.

During construction we stayed on the reserve for a week in tents and trailers and returned occasionally on weekends during the fall to continue work. Murdina’s husband, Albert Marshall, built a concrete foundation for the connection from the studio to the house while we worked on other parts of the project. Every night Murdina cooked us dinner, where we met the constantly changing cast of characters that gather around her table. The people we met in Eskasoni shared their stories, an immense sense of humour and generosity in response to our interest in their way of life. It was a humbling experience to come to appreciate the depth of their traditions and the complexity of their relationship with the place we now claim as part of ourselves. 

*From the title of Kenneth Coates’ 1985 book Canada’s colonies: a history of the Yukon and Northwest Territories, Toronto: Lorimer.

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Florian Jungen is currently working as an intern at L’OEUF in Montreal on the renovation of a 1940’s veteran’s housing complex into subsidised co-op housing.

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ur purpose in this project is not to declare a deterministic model of the architectural development of housing in the circumpolar region, but from a study of housing’s historical development to adapt, for our own use, the most representative construction techniques and spatial organization of societies that survived the ice age. All this is seen from a ludic point of view where the human being takes any technology, and applies any techniques, to satisfy his pleasure and needs.

Polar cube: investigations from Mexico to the north Manoo

The external chamber, the first filter, is made with the structural system used in the wickiups of the Dakotas. A wood frame made out of thin poles tied together with leather ropes.

Small twigs placed within the frame, create a thick wall and at the same time storage and wind filter systems. Any remaining voids can change their position and size according to the season and needs.

The second chamber also can be transformed in size. It is lighter because it is covered with a skin, literally an animal skin mounted on a wood structure system used in the making of a lavvu, the tent of the Sami, found still in Nenets and Khants in Russia. The cover has two layers of skin, with a short outer layer that leaves a vent at soil level so air can circulate through the two layers and come out through a higher vent where the inner skin ends. There is a half cube that can be extruded so one can change the area of the second cube, adding or diminishing the area according to the desired temperature or activity to do in the interior.

The stove or heater has a chimney made out of stone that is a material that retains heat for longer periods of time, and this heat is transmitted to the holes that are located at the top of the chimney to store jorongos, keeping them warm while they are not worn.

Manoo is a studio in which all members are concerned with the body. In every exercise we investigate and experiment with composition systems related to the human body, speculating with every possible action generated by and for it. This time, with the polar cube, we propose maybe not a new, but a different way to perceive space and objects, from the material used to build to the accessories to be used in it.

In a very small area, without forgetting the human scale, spaces are generated. Performance depends on the perceptive skills of the inhabitant to make the most out of the spaces and the accessories. This statement could make us think that we are talking about dwelling in a machine, but we do not want it to be seen as an ‘artificial dwelling’ as we suppose Paul Shepheard might call it. It would be worth mentioning the difference that Kant makes between machine and organism, where for the former the parts are prefabricated and the whole is based on their organization, whereas for the latter, the parts and the whole evolve together.

In the bedroom we shall use leather and wool, two natural materials worn by two of the most intrepid explorers of the Antarctic, Captian Amudsen and Captain Scott. Mapping the body during sleep on a leather bed cover the fur is left untouched in the areas where the body makes contact, so it can be felt softer, smoother and warmer. The bed sheets are hand sewn with wool and the design is based on a diagram that shows the analysis of what parts of the body lose more heat during sleep, thus the different areas are sewn with several types of knots giving a particular characteristic of thickness, knots, and weight to keep a regular temperature while one sleeps.

Without attempting to be a machine or organism, we assume the polar cube has characteristics of both. In it, even though the parts are hand crafted, they generate a system, and are meant to evolve with the inhabitant, as a result of the interaction between them.

Inspired by the linear spatial order made by the several chambers of igloos, we also generate serial concentric chambers to attend the weather aspects such as wind, temperature and ice. These chambers have different characteristics

from the others, dimensions, openings, places, and materials in order to form filters — layers that act as screens for activities and temperature. The closest to the center is, the warmest and most private.

These are few examples of how we think the interaction between body and architecture can be represented. Without the intervention of the inhabitant the cube exists. But without the gesture of an accomplice requesting change, the cube is utterly mute, fading into nature.

David Hernandez Quintela is a member of Manoo, Mexico City.

The purpose of this experiment is to generate ideas that make us seek new uses and new process of understanding, and to make the act of dwelling a tectonic and interactive event with the participation of someone at the physical, mental and perceptive levels. 

gwen boyle

1989 June 15: It’s 2a.m. air is still, in the silence my boots crunch rocks and ice as I install a sculpture on an exposed cracked mesozoic rock. Holding the magnetic steel bar my hair starts to crackle with electricity. A faint electronic sound sings out from this magnetized steel bow. What’s happening— it’s responding to the — what? Out here on this seemingly empty tundra I was alone, excited, mystified and spooked— Installation complete and harmonics continue to resonate along the shore as if it were ‘tuning’ the shimmering sea ice. Can’t sleep, the sun is already high.

June 16: Announcement: ‘Art Opening Down by the Big Rock on the Beach, artist in attendance.’ Scientists from the camp came by, checked it out and toasted the invisible force with invisible drinks. The harmonics remain a mystery.

June 19: We land within seven degrees of the geomagnetic pole, and we have a couple of hours before the ice becomes unsafe. Out of this sea ice, the light is even more intense and pure, everything is sharp edged, even the ice crystals in the air. I’ve lost my sense of perspective,

Arc: an installation on Cornwallis Island. June 1989. what is far seems so near. The silence is silencing. I sit listening. In this light I see the Arctic’s long unbroken bow of time.

June 21: Summer solstice, I’m as close to the north pole ever I’ll be.

Lying on my back, I watch the day turn completely on its inclined axis toward the sun before I turn southward.

Arc is a magnetic sculpture which was installed on the tundra at approximately 7 degrees from the North Geomagnetic Pole during a twelve year peak period of intense solar flare activity. Predictably it responded by hunting and seeking the concentrated magnetic field lines.

Unpredictably, it responded with electronic sounds, which I later found to be similar to those transmitted back by Voyager in its orbit around Mars. This Arctic installation was dismantled Canada Day, July 1, 1989.

—taken from the Arc exhibition catalogue, OR Gallery,Vancouver, BC with the permission of the artist.

Tuning was an exhibition held at the Richmond Gallery October 1993.

Excerpts from an Arctic Journal

gwen boyle

Gwen Boyle

This installation (above) included a 50’x6” glass bar suspended by wire and steel, 16’ & 12’ simulated whale bones and the audio of the harmonics produced by Arc — the sound from the magnetised sculpture was taped on site by J.Vistig of Kaarvonen Films, and later filtered, mixed and re-recorded by Robert McNevin. 

Beginning her career as a visual artist in northern Canada, Gwen Boyle later studied sculpture at the Vancouver School of Art, graduating in 1974. For the past two decades her focus has been on installation works and site specific projects located in galleries, urban areas, parkland and in the arctic.

Her intent is to participate in a dialogue with nature and to employ elemental material specific to the site, drawing on its embedded memories of time, universal and human. This can be most clearly understood in her installation Arc, built on the continental ice shelf during a residency with the Polar Continental Research Station.

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Raven, by Andrew Raney from Salmon Arm, BC, in a sculpture garden designed by the teachers and students of the Fine Arts program of Nunatta College in Iqaluit.

The raven in the backyard

Green Jewel in a Frozen Crown: the Iqaluit Greenhouse project

Iqaluit is growing rapidly. Southern Canadians and Inuit from the surrounding Baffin communities are moving into the city in search of employment.

Since the formation of Nunavut in April 1999, a tremendous number of services and new buildings have been constructed in the capital but there is still a shortfall in leisure and recreational activities. Some of the existing clubs and facilities which were built many years ago now have full membership and a status that makes them difficult for new members to join.The greenhouse project could provide a leisure activity affordable to all residents.

It is the purpose of the Iqaluit Greenhouse Society to make an alternate recreational opportunity to sports that would cross cultural, social, gender and age boundaries.To this end the society has commissioned a feasibility study on the economic viability of a greenhouse in an arctic environment using twenty-first century alternate energies and technologies.

The Iqaluit Greenhouse Society is a diverse group of Iqaluit residents that includes students, elders, professionals, Inuit who have spent some of their lives living a traditional life style, long-term residents of Iqaluit and people who have recently arrived from southern Canadian cities. All have one thing in common, the desire to work with the soil.

Harriet Burdett Moulton

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ll people native to circumpolar regions feel they are living in the best part of the world — not harsh, cruel or difficult, it is home.

And as the earth’s population increases, people are pushed to the edges of livable space. Southerners that dared to venture into the circumpolar regions a few centuries ago on an advance and retreat basis are now there to stay, although they often long for the climes they left behind and often have little desire to go outdoors for long periods of time in the coldest season, preferring to bring ‘nature’ inside. Ever since houseplants were introduced to the Arctic they have been popular: Inuit people have a strong sense of humour, a highly developed sense of curiosity and enjoy the mysteries of indoor growing and how they can cozen Jack Frost. It is this sense of curiosity combined with the southerner’s need to have green plants in their environment that is one of the incentives to have a greenhouse in Iqaluit.

Although summer days are long and bright and many indigenous people spend their time out on the land which contributes to mental or spiritual well-being, it is during the dark winter days that the greenhouse will provide a welcome alternative to, and assist in the relief of, the Housebound Syndrome. It will be a welcoming beacon, calling people to it. In the dark season, with the facility nestled between two rolling hills above the community, with light spilling from the glass walls and roof, it will look like an amber diamond.

Greenhouses in the far north pose technical challenges that need northern solutions —Garry Loomis’s greenhouse in Norman Wells and the Inuvik greenhouse are evidence that such projects can be done.

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Although the land remains frozen for much of the year, the long summer daylight hours bring an incredible explosion of growth in just a few short months with cool weather crops such as cabbage or lettuce, using seedlings and other season extending techniques, with a composting program and raised beds for warm weather crops such as tomatoes and annual flowers. The one problem with this overabundance of sun is overheating greenhouses — such an oxymoron when used in conjunction with the word Arctic that it is often overlooked.

While simple technologies can provide satisfying results on a small scale, the challenge is to find ways to produce cost-effective crops that can reduce the high cost of food, increase self-sufficiency, and bring healthy variety to the northern diet. The Iqaluit Community Greenhouse Society wants to explore the potential of community gardening, experiment with produce and evaluate how effective and efficient their energy conserving technologies are before they attempt larger enterprises.

Simple things such as soil can be a problem in Iqaluit. There is very little overburden and it does not contain humus, except in limited quantities in selected riverbeds. Soil has to be transported to Iqaluit by sealift or made by mixing local sand with composted kitchen waste.

Both methods will be employed in the greenhouse. Initially soil will be imported and the society will work with the municipality on a green project whereby the municipality will collect organic waste and use the greenhouse to compost it. The finished product, humus, will be used in the greenhouse to augment the imported soil.

Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

The site

Northern tomatoes.

Potential types of alternate energy, such as wind turbines to power auxiliary lighting, solar photovoltaic panels to generate electricity and waste heat recovery from the local power generating plant will be used.

The recovered heat from the stack exhaust as well as that from the water cooling jacket on the generators can be piped to the greenhouse to reduce the high cost of heating the greenhouse.

The building will have two sections: a two-level hexagonal community centre, used throughout the year, will contain public meeting rooms, classrooms where students can incorporate technological knowledge with physical interaction; exhibition areas for weekend produce markets and a café; all an oasis of green foliage in the middle of an Arctic desert.

A polygonal skylight bringing light through the building to the first floor spotlights a central stage for performances and exhibits. The second floor lounge and meeting room overlooks the greenhouse though floorto-ceiling plate glass windows, visually taking the occupants to the jungle below. The greenhouse portion of the facility can be used seasonally or year-round with 102 4’ x 8’ elevated garden plots and separate plotting and germination rooms.

A greenhouse in Iqaluit can be a unique community focus, a location where the outdoors is brought indoors, an airy oasis of vegetation to relieve the severest of winter doldrums or SAD syndrome, a place to experiment with new plant varieties or environmental conditions, or just a place to get down and dirty away from the white vertigo. The rolling hills of Iqaluit will cup the greenhouse like a green jewel in a frozen crown. 

Harriet Burdett-Moulton is a native of Labrador who practised architecture for 13 years in Iqaluit, Nunavut. She was Project Architect on the new community plan for Little Sango Pond “Natuashish”, (relocation of Davis Inlet, Labrador) working through the planning process from 1994 until 1997. She has applied her education background to establishing construction-training programs for the Northwest Territorial Government. These programs were established to train Inuit, whose first language is Inuktitut She currently is working in Halifax Nova Scotia, specializing in environmentally sensitive designs.

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The Courage to Be Small Houseboat living in Yellowknife Bay, NWT Aleta Fowler

Summertime: the solar panels are lowered for the high sun angle; the truck is on shore & communting now done by canoe; the waterbox sits on deck until freeze-up; the wood is safely stored in cribs to keep it from getting rocked overboard during storms; and the house has been freshly painted.

Several of the 21 houseboats in Yellowknife Bay can be seen dotting the water in this aerial view.

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n a Super Size It world, even t-shirts seem to range from XL to 3XL. For houses, Kyoto appears to have done little to slow the explosion of house size and resultant household consumption. But far to one side of the bell curve, and far to the north, is an on-going experiment and experience in living: houseboats. Unlike our Southern counterparts, we really are free-floating in every sense of the word. We have no road access; no electrical, water or sewer services; no buses, police or mail delivery; no building codes; no mortgage availability. The lurking pitfalls of a super-sizing it attitude become manifest on houseboats with every fire log hauled, propane tank dragged, water bucket lugged and honey bucket bagged.

Houseboats take living off the land to a new dimension. We’ve added water! Instead of yards — expensive yards at $70,000 $100,000+ for a lot in Yellowknife (which are really just mosquito breeding grounds requiring maintenance, anyway) — we have decks. And while the floatation system is the most expensive component of the houseboat structure (over $20,000), when combined with a rigid wall structure (exterior walls are sheathed on both sides with plywood over heavy insulation), houseboats can withstand substantial water

This houseboat makes the most of outdoor space with both upstairs and downstairs decks.

This small houseboat is actually home to a family of four.

This larger houseboat has a generator-powered pump which moved water into a storage tank. An on-demand propane-fired water heater provides hot water for showers and dishes.The solar panels provide electricity for common household uses, as well as for the incinerating toilet

Another multiuse space, this area holds 12V deep cycle lead batteries (in white box at rear); an inverter; a main battery shut-off switch (red throw handle); an AC and a DC panel box; an LED current display monitor; the honey bucket (vented); and the wash basin - from low tech to high tech.

and ice movement.

In the North, where over half the land is water-logged and damage done by ground movement is common, this houseboat structure makes economic sense even on land. Perhaps as a result, houseboat communities are developing in more optimal locations which have naturally potable water, safer access and less risk of storm damage than on Great Slave Lake.

A typical winter day spent working on the wood pile. Note the solar panels are in the raised position to better capture scarce sunlight.The waterbox is set into the ice.The deck is cleared for use as a workspace. And the truck safely sits on the 6 ft. of winter ice - ready to be started anytime the generator is fired up.

Houseboats have ample decks which can be used as work or play spaces.

In Yellowknife Bay, 21 houseboats, ranging from less than 100 sq. ft. to about 1,000 sq. ft., and housing one to three people, are each custom-designed spaces reflecting a balance of spatial need with the effort needed to maintain this space. A sleeping area often replaces a bedroom; a toilet area replaces a washroom; shelves and hooks replace storage rooms.

Less, and simpler, square footage means less construction cost (approximately $60/sq. ft. versus $120/sq. ft. for conventional housing); less area to heat and light; and less space to clean!

Without conventional services (which add $47,000 to $80,000 to land costs on shore, houseboat living begins at the most basic level.

Nearly all of us use solar panels for power — there is not the wind regime for wind turbines.

Ravens that interrupt electrical service,Y2K and sunspot activity are not our concern. And we appreciate our independence from these annoyances and monthly bills! Propane and wood fulfill heat, cooking and lighting needs.

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The houseboat hulls employ large diameter (42 X 48 inch; 107 X 122 cm.) steel pipes from natural gas transmission lines, designed for 10,000 p.s.i.The walls of the pipes are .25 to .375 inches (.64 - .95 cm.).The load-carrying capacity of a vessel is fixed by the volume of its hull times 62.4 lbs/cu ft. Of the houseboats in the bay, an estimated total average weight for the vessel is approximately 75,000 lbs (34,000 kg).These are generally assembled in winter on the ice and can expect to withstand 2 - 3 storms per season with wind velocities of 60 - 90 kph lasting 18 - 36 hours.

Solar has been the way to go for houseboats.

Unfortunately, however, solar power is not enough to power a canoe, creatively rigged for moving day.

The specialized equipment which makes this possible (solar panels, inverter, generator, wood stove) is about double the cost of conventional appliances (furnace and hot water heater). But, at the end of the month, my utilities cost about $250, compared to about $966 for an average household in NWT or Nunavut.

There are behavioural changes, but my equipment paid for itself in less than a year.

On water, the biggest hurdle is getting and responsibly disposing of water. Conventional households in NWT and Nunavut pay an average of $409/month (42% of their utility bill for water and sewer services and about 125 times more than in southern Canada. Here, every drop of water is personally moved. Thus bath water becomes wash water for the floor; dish water becomes plant water. Where Health Canada recommends a minimum of 65 liters of water use per person per day, my daily bathing, cooking and cleaning only consumes about 20 liters of water (24 liters with laundry). Exciting new technologies in waste water cleansing and recycling may soon make this most challenging aspect of life easier.

Why do it? Houseboat life requires about four hours of labour each week over the course of a year, which can be at minus 40, with strong winds, in the dark, with numb fingers (one resident, when interviewed by Statistics Canada regarding her occupation stated it as hauling).

Glorious days do not mean sitting back and counting your blessings, they are optimal work days! There are substantial lifestyle adaptations and real, life-threatening risks of drowning, chainsaw accidents or fire. In the end, it’s the freedom from a super-size world. The silence.

Without looking up, you know whose dogs are barking and if they’re lonely, cold or just communing with the ravens. The independence.

Weather, marine law and our own abilities are all that govern us. But mostly, it’s the awareness of water, with its perils and moods. And if the super-size world gets too close for comfort, we can always move! 

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Although moored in place by substantial anchoring systems, houseboats are actually very easy to move. And although houseboats are not motorized, on a calm day, just pulling on an anchor line can swivel a houseboat. Here, a houseboat is being pushed about a kilometre to the government dock.

Various facts and figures for this article have come from a number of CMHC publications: Utility Costs in Northern Communities, 2004 On-Site Wastewater Reclamation Systems for the North, About Your House, #2, 2001 Northern Water and Sewer Infrastructure Cost Study, 2004 Alternative Home Energy Sources for the North, 2004 Northern Micro-System Water Reuse Technology Assessments, 2004 Case Studies of Potential Applications of Innovative Residential Water and Wastewater Technologies. January, 1999 Innovative Residential Water and Wastewater Management. September 1998 Evaluating the Performance of On-Site Sewage Disposal Systems, March 1998 An Application Guide for Water Reuse Systems, May 1997 Accelerating the Implementation of Innovative Water and Wastewater Treatment Management and Technology, Proceedings of the October 22, 1996 Workshop, CMHC National Office Ottawa Residential Water Conservation: A Review of Products, Processes and Practices. October 1991.

Spring 2004

other references: City of Yellowknife, On-Site Waste Water Recycling in Cold Regions, 2000 Northern communities have adopted a standard of 90 liters per person per day as a minimum potable water supply. See Johnson, Ken, Sewage Treatment Systems in the Canadian North:Technologies and Case Studies, Cryofront Journal of Cold Region Technology (cryofront@ shaw.ca)

Aleta Fowler was trained in both architecture and planning and works in ‘green community infrastructure’, most recently as the Northern Researcher for CMHC, and now as a Policy Advisor for Department of Indian and Northern Development. She lives off-grid on a houseboat with Boris.

Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

Bush Camp Byron White

Coastal BC and Vancouver Island, northern Alberta, northern Ontario, Quebec, north of Thomson Manitoba.

Never north of the tree line.

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modern tree-planting bush camp is a fascinating example of a micro-city that provides basic living (shelter and food) for more than 100 people for extended periods, in a close knit social environment. What makes these micro-urban systems equally interesting is their transportability; their ability to be disassembled, moved, and reconstructed within a minimal amount of time is essential in completing contracts that might cover 1000 km requiring multiple moves. Optimal site conditions require at least a hectare of level dry ground with a water source not further than 50 meters from the site. Logistics require close proximity to the work site. This might mean a campsite located hundreds of kilometers from the nearest road, where camp infrastructure, including all personnel, must be flown in by helicopter. Whether access is by helicopter or truck every piece of equipment that is brought in is chosen for its ability to be deconstructed and rebuilt quickly without complicated joinery.

Four people can assemble the basic structure of a camp in one day, complete with potable water, electricity, shelter, and food preparation facilities. The camp uses gas generators to power food storage, basic electrical appliances and lighting; propane provides power for stoves and heating systems.

With the exception of fuel and food bought in town, the camp is completely self-sufficient. It is constructed and equipped to store enough food and fuel for a seven-day period. In addition to basic living necessities of the administrative staff and workers, the camp has facilities for a certain level of comfort and recreation. Having a sheltered area to play cards, a stereo to listen to music and a tent to warm up or dry out wet clothes may not seem like necessities but are essential in maintaining camp moral and therefore contribute to worker productivity. These isolated living conditions are an example of how to live and operate with only the bare essentials of necessity and comfort. 

Byron White is a 4th year student at the University of Toronto, Bachelor of Arts in Architecture, who has worked at bush camps for the past seven years in Northern Ontario and Manitoba. He currently supervises one of these camps in Northern Ontario.

A typical structure primarily used for shelter during mealtimes. It is made of steel ribbing, assembled on site, with a polyurethane skin pulled over the frame and secured to it. On average this kind of shelter is 40’ long, 16’ wide, 8’ high and weighs about 200 lbs.Three people can construct one in about 2 hours. Smaller shelters are even more compact: the prospector tent, typically, is an elongated triangular form consisting of the polyurethane skin compactable to the size of a rolled sleeping bag. Structural elements are wooden poles, found on site, in three horizontal spans secured to an A-frame at either end; the tent is then hung from this support structure.

The portable latrines.These structures are much simpler in design with a plastic floor and ceiling held up by four 8’ long PVC pipes. Broken down these parts are stackable for easy transport. Food preparation is done either in a cook unit trailer when access to camp is by road, or by converted shelter tents with portable stoves where helicopters are used.

All members of the camp participate in minimizing personal equipment for ease of transport, keeping their personal gear confined to a single large pack holding their tents, clothes and sleeping bags — everything they need for four months in the bush.

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North or South, energy is the currency of life Wha Ti, Northwest Territories

The Northwest Territories are booming. Diamonds, oil and gas, gold, even bismuth — it is no surprise that recent estimates reveal that greenhouse gas emissions in the NWT have also soared, probably doubling from 1996 to 2001. We need to Robert G Bromley and Stephen Fancott reduce global emissions by 60% below 1990 levels to simply hold climate change to what is already unavoidable. Climate change is already measurable in the North; its effects appeared Whether residential, municipal or industrial, the built here first and with the greatest amplitude. Unfortunately, envienvironment has significant implications to greenhouse gas ronmental and socio-economic impacts will be borne by global emissions, with the potential to either exacerbate or resolve inhabitants who are least able to afford it. The promotion of some aspects of the dilemma. In at least one Dene community, massive emissions-generating development projects in the NWT aboriginal people are making clear connections between what and elsewhere can be justified only by ignoring these very real is happening to their environment, their health, and their local production costs. Aboriginal communities are being asked to economies. participate fully in these developments.

Aerial view of Wha Ti, Northwest Territories

Matthew Salkeld of EnergyWise Technologies installs a solar water heating system on the elders residence in Wha Ti.

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he Dogrib community of Wha Ti is located 140 km northwest of Yellowknife, NWT at Latitude 63Âş N. With 500 people and over 90% speaking their first language of Dogrib, Wha Ti is a fairly traditional Dene community. It is situated on a large lake (60 by 40 km), and is connected to the Mackenzie Highway by a winter road for about nine weeks in late winter each year. During this critical period annual supplies are trucked in. Like many remote northern communities, power is derived from diesel generators.

In 2002, Ecology North, an environmental organization, worked with the Charter Community of Wha Ti to recover some of the ecological sustainability of the past using old values, but in new ways. The Pembina Institute signed on to help with community energy planning, and the Arctic Energy Alliance to help with energy efficiency. Now 18 months into the two-year project, residents have learned that just about every aspect of daily life involves energy somehow. They are very concerned about environmental and health impacts from diesel exhaust, noise and spills associated with electricity generation and heating. They have learned that relying on imported products for energy and food means

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that associated jobs and economic benefits are captured elsewhere.

They have become committed to pursuing the means to have local control over such issues, and finding local answers that are both good for the land and people, and that are effective in real economic terms.

The project started with learning about the full costs and benefits of renewable energy such as solar, wind, biomass and run of the river hydroelectricity, and compared these costs to that of fossil fuel energy.

Young adults were trained to assess current patterns of energy use.

Going from house to house speaking in their own language, everyone learned a tremendous amount about electricity, energy conservation and energy efficiency. In Wha Ti, where a 100 watt incandescent bulb left on in a crawl space for 24/7, at $0.78 / kWh, cost over $680.00 per year in power charges, learning can be rapid! Young people and a community coordinator revisited houses, installing simple, energy-efficient, demonstration equipment such as insulation blankets for water heaters, aerators for water faucets, window film for winter and fluorescent light bulbs. Some elders, often with large extended families in their houses, began to report that their monthly energy bills were coming down.

Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

Elders discuss sustainable community energy issues in Wha Ti.

Local renewable energy revealed opportunities for the displacement of oil-generated electricity. Solar water heaters were one, and in June 2003 with support from the government of the NWT, one was installed at the Elders Residential Complex, and another on the house of an elder with ten occupants using a high volume of water. At this latitude, passive solar can still save 25-50% of space heating costs compared to houses built without regard to solar gain. Thus, recommendations on planning lot orientations and construction of houses is being made to the community and the local housing authority. Many residents in Wha Ti heat their homes, or supplement conventional fuel oil furnaces, with wood stoves. Opportunities for increasing the efficiency of the stoves have been identified, including a replacement program with EPA-approved models including pellet stoves and the increased use of dry wood over green wood.

This past fall the Arctic Energy Alliance assessed nine houses using Natural Resource Canada’s Energy Efficiency EnerGuide. The new houses in Wha Ti scored well, averaging 74.6 (EnerGuide scale: 66 to 74 equals typical new house and 75 to 79 equals an energy efficient new house).

The project’s Community Coordinator Sonny Zoe has insulated this hot water tank.

Older houses are more problematic, with longer term paybacks for energy upgrades, however, new house replacement costs are very high, requiring significant capital investment. Paying high operating costs are sometimes systemically more palatable than are new capital investments.

Water and sewage services is the next step in community energy planning. In energy terms, these costs are often greater than space heating, even in this cold, sub-arctic environment. We will focus on reducing water consumption, recycling water, on-site sewage treatment and reducing sewage volumes.

The biggest opportunity for increased efficiency and replacement of fossil fuel with renewable energy is development of run of the river hydroelectricity. About 20 km from Wha Ti, on the La Martre River, is a dramatic twin falls with a series of steep rapids. A 1980s pre-feasibility study found that for a ‘large’ (32MW) project, a mile-long dam, several coffer dams, considerable storage, and a large (currently non-existent) market would be needed. After many workshops and discussions the community decided to pursue the feasibility of a 1.2 MW run of the

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Aerial view of the twin falls and beginning of rapids on the La Martre River. below: Wha Ti First Nation Chief Charlie Jim Nitsiza discusses run of the river hydroelectric development with elders.

river hydroelectric development. A project at this smaller scale, if proven economical enough, would meet community energy demand for power, space heating and local economic development for at least a 20-year period with minimal environmental impact. The Wha Ti are building a business case for the project, completing a life-cycle costing and assessing market and revenue aspects of the project.

The people of Wha Ti are approaching the new century with global awareness and local action to ensure a sound future for their children.

It is not easy, as conventional forces are rarely open to change, and some authorities find it difficult to accept the idea that there is more than one way to go forward. Consumers are strongly influenced by messages based upon immediate commercial profit and the length of political terms, rather than by the logic of full costing that includes both social and environmental costs and benefits of alternatives. Though alternatives often require higher initial investment, total lifetime costs are much reduced. With new understanding comes new commitments, and the Wha Ti Community Council is bringing much energy to meet old issues in new and innovative ways. ď §ď źď Ł

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Stephen Fancott, Architect, Energy Manager for Arctic Energy Alliance, low energy house builder and visual artist, believes that an aware, kind and functional mind can cause personal and local changes that will render perverse technologies obsolete.

Robert Bromley, Project Director for Ecology North, is an indigeous Yellowknifer, a biologist and environmentalist focussed on doing things that are good for the earth, people and local economies.

Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

a northern residential neighborhood responds to encircling development in Yellowknife, NWT

simon taylor

For a few more dollars…

Simon Taylor

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he glacial action of Yellowknife’s suburban development grinds past my very eyes every morning, effortlessly removing segments of my neighborhood piece by piece, leaving only small remnants to signify what was once there. One such sign is my ten-year-old daughter’s bus stop, located on the opposite side of 43rd street from Trail’s End Trailer park where I live. This street used to serve only Trail’s End, however, the City of Yellowknife has converted it into the main access road for the City’s new Niven Lake high-end residential development. For years the road was dormant, as Niven Lake did not immediately attract the requisite number of buyers; in the last three years an economic boom and new development have changed the once vacant road into a fast and heavily traveled main artery. Contractors and suppliers travel to and from their building sites in one direction and new residents leave or return from work in the other. The speed and frequency of travel has increased exponentially. The bus stop that was once safely part of the neighborhood is gone.

The impact of the large Niven Lake development on the existing adjacent residential areas is obviously not considered as significant in the long term planning of this area of Yellowknife. Perhaps this is because any problems are ‘offset’ by the inevitable increase in land prices, with the expectation that the adjacent residents will elect to make fast property sale profits or construct larger suburban houses, slowly replacing the trailers and upgrading the quality and image of the area.

This is not in fact what is actually happening. Rather than sell their properties, the residents of this trailer park have instead started to spruce them up, while keeping the trailers as the fundamental form on each property. Renovations range from house painting to large additions. Aside from my own addition, architects were not used in the development of the designs and City planning rules are minimal for this area (with the exception of the maximum height 7.5m versus 10m for most other residential areas). Despite this, and the fact that each

project was undertaken separately, each project seems to have followed a similar approach, leaving the street quality of the trailer court largely unchanged, further defining the neighborhood against the imposition of the new developments.

The new additions increase the interior space of each residence, provide work space and perhaps gain access to views across Yellowknife Old Town and Yellowknife Bay. The trailers are a hodge-podge of old single- and double-wides and old mining camp trailers. Their construction is not really geared for northern winter conditions, with badly built windows, no entrance vestibules and thinly insulated walls, roofs and floors. Most trailers are not located on rock and they have to be re-leveled every few years else they take on the appearance and feel that they are sinking. In addition, their interior spaces are often small with narrow corridors and poor access to natural light; they are difficult to heat and most have wood stoves. This said, they are inexpensive relative to conventional housing — the big selling point for most of the fiscally responsible residents of Trail’s End. In Yellowknife, residential options are rental apartments, wood frame houses and trailers. With the recent economic boom, apartment rental rates have skyrocketed as have residential construction costs. A two-bedroom apartment rents for approximately $1500 per month and residential construction cost almost $200/square foot. Trailers on the other hand are relatively inexpensive — ranging from $100,000 to $250,000 (including property).

Trail’s End, for the most part, contains middle income professionals not interested in assuming three-quarters of a million dollar mortgages. The new additions all take advantage of the by-law height limitations, adding second storeys or lookouts that include large and strategically located windows, providing real estate ‘lake-view’ credentials. With a maximum investment of between ten to fifty thousand dollars for new additions, the residents have almost doubled their living space while maintaining minimum mortgage payments.

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simon taylor

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Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

simon taylor

There is a rather macabre joke in the Northwest Territories. When the Department of Transportation is concerned about the safety of the only road between Yellowknife and the south (approximately 1000km to the next town), they put up more signs and lower the speed limit, rather than fix the road. In the rush to achieve progress as a City,Yellowknife’s current development plans brush aside all that stands in its way. The new additions and renovations in Trail’s End, despite each project’s independence from the others, have together formed an arguably cohesive statement. While not very delicate, the new addition projects are signs that can be read by speeding vehicles. Construction that says that we will not be bought out or sold out — at least not yet, not until the asking price goes a little higher! 

simon taylor

Each project has set the two-story portion of the addition at the back, away from the street. Trail’s End has a densely packed yet irregular street-scape; the trailers are all different makes, perpendicular to the street, with twenty feet between them and in varying proximity to the road. Most trailers do not have driveways resulting in cars parked haphazardly on the road, a non-paved one-way street where vehicular traffic is very slow and the Trail’s End residents all meet. The new additions have not diminished this quality and indeed have further insulated Trail’s End by visually blocking out the new developments.

facing page: the addition is still under construction (when I find the time to build) and houses a bedroom for the my one year old and a computer room for my ten year old.

Simon Taylor lives in Yellowknife, is a partner with Pin/Taylor Architects and currently serves as the Vice-President of the Northwest Territories Association of Architects.

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Northern Dwelling Tracey Mactavish

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R2000 houses, Iqaluit #396 3 bedroom Rankin Inlet 1986 2 bedroom duplex Work/live lofts, Whitehorse, Kobyashi Zedda Architects, image by KZA ‘Type L’ 3 bedroom Houseboat,Yellowknife 1975 Weber 4 bedroom Row housing, Cambridge Bay Row housing, Iqaluit #396 #4 log Iqaluit #396 3 bedroom

Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

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drawings by the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation unless noted otherwise photos by Tracey Mactavish unless noted otherwise this survey prepared with the assistance of the Canada Council 25 Seniors housing facility, Gino Pin Architect, Rae 26 3 bedroom, Ferguson Simek Clark 27 Row housing,Yellowknife 28 #455 #5 3 bedroom 29 Cambridge Bay 30 1985 3 bedroom 31 1980 Woolfenden 4 bedroom, Woolfenden Group Architects 32 Apartment complex, Rankin Inlet 33 1980 Demo house 34 Rae 35 3 bedroom, Ferguson Simek Clark 36 Dettah 37 1979 2 bedroom duplex, Number Ten Architectural Group

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Iqaluit #168 3 bedroom N’dilo Row housing, Cambridge Bay 1980 Woolfenden 4 bedroom, Woolfenden Group Architects Iqaluit 1980 Demo house 3 bedroom ‘above the tree line’ series, Cambridge Bay 1979 2 bedroom duplex, Number Ten Architectural Group Yellowknife #168 3 bedroom ‘white row’ Iqaluit Ordish Anderson house, Kobyashi Zedda Architects, image by KZA

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The physical and social requirements of the Canadian North for sensitive architecture are the most demanding in our nation, with the least forgiving physical environment. Climate, frozen ground, remoteness and the specifics of aboriginal culture with a very recent nomadic past create a different architectural playing field from that ‘south of 60’.

Northern Detail Tracey Mactavish

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orthern detail is defined through four concepts: daylight harvesting, relationship to the ground, cultural significance and response to the land. These concepts can be found in existing buildings but the subtlety of their impact on habitation is difficult to define.

Interior hall, Nunuvut Legislative Building

Iqaluit, Nunavut

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ferguson simek clark

passion for the people and landscape of the Canadian arctic inspirit this project, dedicated to polar issues of building and architecture specific to place.The development of the Canadian content for this issue was awarded a grant in Assistance to Practitioners, Critics and Curators of Architecture by the Canada Council for the Arts.This support has enabled boundaries to be expanded and for images of our own northern region to be brought into the context of countries of similar latitudes and into the mainstream of architectural discussion. On the world’s architectural periphery, the Poles have escaped critical discussion since the frontier pressures of the 1970’s. Technical and social experiments litter the North’s landscapes, yet the built fabric depicted in these pages often reveals modern places of their own telling. Building on the very tip of the world, we are reminded that architecture is shelter and the successful weaving of human habitation with its environment —TM

Daylight Harvesting

Relationship to the ground

A day in Yellowknife (62º north latitude) has 20.7 hours of light in June and only 5 hours in December; Resolute Bay (74º north) has a three month summer where the sun never sets and three months of complete winter darkness. The lengthening or shortening of daylight in the north is really swift. In Resolute Bay it will extend or retract by about an hour a week. Summer sun is low in the sky, with maximum solar altitudes of 51º in Yellowknife and 39º in Resolute. This horizontal source of light and warmth brings light deep into buildings through south facing windows, and also results in overheating during the intense summer period, extreme glare, and north facing surfaces perpetually in cold and shadow.

A building’s relationship to the ground affects accessibility and articulates the psychological connection of people to landscape. A large percentage of northern building stock sits on wood or steel piles, space frames or pads and wedges. The floor is lifted off of the ground so that air can circulate between the heated building and the permafrost in the soil below.

However, this creates a separation between the act of dwelling and life on the land, a condition foreign to northern life. An alternative to piles that allows building access to remain at grade is a thermosyphon system which is a passive ground loop charged with liquid CO2.

This evaporates as heat is drawn from the surrounding soil and rises into vertical radiator fins that when exposed to a cooler exterior air temperature causes the gas to condense, releasing absorbed heat to the atmosphere and maintaining frozen ground conditions. A temperature differential is required for thermosyphons to operate — they remain dormant otherwise.

With a lack of balance in dealing with seasonal extremes, user-installed aluminum foil on south facing windows and blinds that are drawn during summer months, both responses to the unrelenting daylight, are a common sight in northern communities. South facing exterior areas rarely take advantage of the vertical surfaces of buildings that absorb heat and then re-radiate it. Life in the north revolves around the seasons and, ultimately, the arrival and departure of the sun. Allowing the sun to penetrate northern buildings, to warm exterior surfaces and play a role in the daily life of a building is critical. Type, location and angle of glass, building orientation, and the use of natural, passive and user-controlled shading devices are the palette used to balance day lighting with heat gain and glare with an unhindered visual connection to the landscape.

Although typically considered a technical issue, the foundation of a building and the relationship of the floor surface to exterior grade is very much about people and the functional fluidity of inside and outside activity.

Daylight hours and altitude taken from Harold Strub’s Bare Poles; Building Design for High Latitudes, Appendix A 2.31, p165-166.

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Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

The architects here influence by example; they have made the north their home and are accountable to it.

Northern detail continues to evolve.

Thule dwelling reconstruction, Resolute Bay, NWT

Northern Firms

Rae, Northwest Territories

Tracey Mactavish he northern territories of Canada do not abound with successful design and planning.

In fact, much of the building stock exasperates the natural condition into a state of human distress. Reasons for this are many but combine a frontier mentality of fast and cheap with a history of temporary structures. Lack of innovation has been perpetuated by an in/ out mentality of southern consultants and by builders whose priority is maximum square footage and minimum dollars, not the human and environmental components of building.

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Cultural Significance

Response to the Land

A large component of Northern life remains integrally connected to the seasons and the movement of wildlife while being increasingly influenced by southern ideals and ways of living. The snowmobile, cold porch, kitchen and television are all in competition.

The Land of the North is fragile, yet unforgiving. Sensitive architecture aligns itself with the land in contour and natural features, in wind and in solar exposure. Settlements often follow the shore line, a reflection of a life dependent on water for transport and food.

Above the tree line, extreme temperatures are compounded by wind that both drives snow into crevices and piles it high, making physical movement around a building and throughout a community difficult. Each building constructed impacts the microclimate that surrounds it. Elements in the landscape such as fencing and play equipment have impact on wind, sun exposure, snow drifting and patterns of travel by foot or snowmobile. How a building responds to the land in all of its elements, to topography, and to the water’s edge can reinforce or negate its northerness.

Attitudes surrounding building and community must change to include more appropriate long term solutions. Whether the North will always be remote is a question. Regardless, it is only the voice of the people of the North demanding difference in architecture, that will make the long tired practice of frontier building obsolete.

Defining northern detail breaks down context into understandable components. Collectively, the details meld into an unassuming confidence of a building that is of its own environment.

Tracey Mactavish, a native of rural Alberta, holds a Master of Architecture degree from the Technical University of Nova Scotia and began her career in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories with Pin / Matthews Architects. She now works in Vancouver with Marceau Evans Architects in remote communities of northern British Columbia and Vancouver Island.

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The feeling of enclosure created by a building, its connection to the land and the grouping of related buildings and houses based on kinship groupings are architectural responses that are intimately tied to culture. Reference to spiritual elements of legend are often found in the landscape, their importance influencing orientation to the water, to mountains, to sources of livelihood. Designs that successfully respond to local culture through materiality, orientation and form allow people to identify with place, to see themselves in the fabric of their surroundings, as the built environment becomes more akin to everyday behavior.

A recent increased energy in contemporary northern architectural practice indicates that priorities are shifting to fully engage the user group and the landscape. Out of mediocrity emerge projects that in contrast, demonstrate a mature understanding of technology, culture, environment and climate. The projects shown in the following pages are the product of designers who have made the north their home and are accountable to it, providing design solutions that are sensitive to the human and environmental context through the development of building program, materiality and spatial execution.

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Ferguson Simek Clark Ferguson Simek Clark Architects and Engineers have designed much of the fabric of the Canadian north since the mid-1970s and maintain architectural and engineering offices across the northern Territories. A recent FSC project designed by Rod Kirkwood demands notice for its use of daylight to create and define architecture.

Sir John Franklin High School Addition & Renovation (2001),Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. 62ยบ north.

Kirkwood takes a tanker of a school building constructed in phases from 1957-1975 and lifts planes, cuts slices and strategically inserts daylight into gathering and circulation areas.

With 750 students, Sir John is also the residence of the Northern Arts and Cultural Centre (NACC), the main venue for a thriving theatre community. The town square acts as a gathering area for students and as the lobby for NACC during theatre events. The sloped facets of the underside of its ceiling were conceptualized as a clock that indicates time of day by reflecting low northern winter light down into the facility while keeping the heat of direct summer sun out.

Northern design philosophy has evolved where the exterior elements of a site offer more than cold temperatures to be avoided; where daylight and connection to the immediate surround add value to the architecture and definition of space.

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Daylight is used as a point of orientation in a facility that originally consisted of a maze of circulation. Spatial importance is also identified with daylight.You are naturally drawn to the library, town square and study area emphasised by light. Small, secluded areas of solace are also articulated with day light. Views expand out to Great Slave Lake and to trees and rock of the site. Interior glazing is used throughout, transferring natural light into interior spaces and providing views of activities in adjacent spaces.

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circulation spaces are flooded with daylight

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street entry face

side yard of the school with the top of the ‘town square’ showing at the corner

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Pin/Taylor Pin / Taylor Architects, formerly Pin/Matthews, consists of Gino Pin a resident of NWT since 1971 and Simon Taylor, a partner since 2002.

Key to their design philosophy is the creation of buildings that merge with their surroundings — low in profile and subtle in texture.

Community involvement in defining a project from conception through to construction has resulted consistently in projects that reflect their users.

St. Patrick’s High School Addition (1993) with Graham Edmunds Architects, and Weledeh Elementary and Middle School (2001),Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. 62º north.

above: the courtyard between St Pat’s and the Weledeh school left: the exterior of St Pat’s, showing the aluminum wall tiles below: the Weledeh music room

St. Patrick’s High School is well known for ‘the rock’, a natural auditorium of andesite that has become the focus of student activity. The entire school sits on a massive rock outcrop, and is modulated to follow the changing elevation of the site. A bridge connects the ‘pod’, a small art centre and daycare, to the main building, framing an entry to the school courtyard from the street. Trees hug the building and high level windows and skylights bring daylight deep into the interior. Metal cladding, chosen for its durability, overlaps in small fish scales, changing colour with the changing angles of the sun through the day and with the seasons.

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The Weledeh School completes the site, adding 5000m2 to the existing St. Patrick’s school, and enclosing the exterior courtyard framed by the original massing of St. Patrick’s. The combination of the three schools has created a series of interior spatial events where opportunities to gather, hang out, read and eat lunch are articulated by cascades of daylight.

Each school has an independent visual identity and share a common gymnasium. The planning of the entire campus as an extension of the landscape, and the inclusion of a south-facing courtyard are a good example of successful integration of building and landscape in a northern context.

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Kiilinik High School (2002), Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. 69ºnorth.

The form and orientation of the Kiilinik High School was developed through extensive studies of sun, wind and drifting snow, and by a desire to reduce the perceived mass of the 4000m2 footprint in a small community of 1600 people. The slab on grade and thermosyphon foundation preserve accessibility and maintain an immediate connection to the landscape.

Diffuse continuous perimeter day lighting casts reflected light off the snow across the ceiling, deep into interior spaces. Skylights bring daylight into the centre of the building.

left: wall detail below: the Kiilinik High School library

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There are no corridors — all spaces open onto general break-out spaces and an informal performance area. Extensive interior glazing allows an open view of activities, much like surveying the unobstructed horizon of the land above the tree line. A cultural heritage centre shares the library, and with the gymnasium, language/cultural area and informal stage, all create a cultural node for the community.

The mass of the building is set back from the road, with a south facing gravel forecourt to the building. Its air-foil form and interior open planning are modulated by subtleties of light, and by intimate space defined without walled enclosure.

Kiilinik High School, Cambridge Bay, Nunavut

The NWT Legislative Building floats behind spruce and jack pine, absorbed by the landscape. Sensitively sited on the edge of Frame Lake, one enters the building at grade over a small plaza suspended over peat and muskeg below. Southern daylight floods the entry hall creating dramatic contrasts of light and shadow. Diffuse perimeter daylight filters into the Chamber, the circular form of the consensus political system. Offices look to the lake with long views of water, trees and rock.

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The Northwest Territories Legislative Building (1993) with Ferguson Simek Clark Engineers and Architects in joint venture with Matsuzaki Wright Architects, associate architects,Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, 62ºnorth

Zinc, a material found in the north is used as cladding, cast panels and in interior details.

The Legislative building respects the terrain, the sky and the sun, showing by example that buildings influenced by site and context lead to a modest presence that can speak powerfully of place.

the Northwest Territories Legislative Building on Frame Lake

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Kobayashi Zedda Architects Kobayashi Zedda Architects, previously Florian Maurer Architect Ltd, has developed a Yukon architecture by creating buildings that are different in texture from the architecture of the central and eastern arctic. They have been recognized for their work with First Nations and their insistence on energy efficiency in northern climates. Tony Zedda speaks of their work as building ‘in the land’ and notes that ‘you can’t just go somewhere and do good architecture— that the subtleties of a place are only understood from living in and engaging with a place’.

Teslin Tlingit Cultural Centre (2001), Teslin,Yukon. 60°north.

below: ramp that links the Cultural Centra entrance to the landscape. bottom: view from the Great Hall of the Teslin Tlingit Cultural Centre

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Moving through the building, one arrives at a gentle exterior ramp that extends along the building façade, sloping with the landscape towards the lake. Exterior decks extend the floor plane beyond the building envelope, emphasising the natural surround and the priority of activities that bridge both the exterior and interior. The cultural centre is a modest building that expresses reverence for its context and its people. It is an example of treading lightly in concept and in built reality.

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The Teslin Tlingit Cultural Centre is sited adjacent to Teslin Lake, an important fishing resource for the community. The axis of the Great Hall is aligned with the Three Aces, mountains that guided the Tlingit people in their migration inland from the west coast 250 years ago. The juxtaposition of forms, drawing from traditional lean-to structures and post and beam construction techniques, reinforce the line of passage through the site. A linear path lined with totems leads to a large outdoor carving area.

Mayo Replacement School (2002), Mayo,Yukon. 63°north.

The 3,300 m2 wood frame school serves an isolated community of 500, home to the Na Cho Nyak Dun First Nation, 400 km north of Whitehorse. The design became a focus for the community, with an arm of Yukon College and a community-funded enlargement of the gymnasium incorporated into the program.

The entry and central space of the school parallel Centre Street, both a view and gesture towards the banks of the Stewart River. It is the functional and symbolic centre of the community. top: sunshade details of the Mayo Replacement School

kobayashi zedda architects

Attention to the complexity of day lighting is a key factor in all KZA projects. Mayo is an example of controlled southern exposure, combining a connection to the landscape with naturally lit surfaces and spaces. Balanced light is achieved with light entering spaces from more than one direction. Glare and heat gain are mitigated by exterior sun screens.

middle: fish trap, picture from the Dawson archives

Tr’ondek Hwech’in Cultural Centre (1998), Florian Maurer Architect.

Dawson City,Yukon. 64°north.

The Tr’ondek Hwech’in Cultural Centre is made culturally significant through its materiality.

Small scale texture, most often in wood, recalls the human hands that built it.Vernacular shed roofs refer to pre-settlement structures; fish drying frames, caches and lean-to shelters.

Maurer comments, ‘We wanted to translate the fleeting structures of a nomadic people into a permanent, contemporary buildng without being literal. We studied these artifacts, then forgot them, letting their spirit come out freely in the design’.

Dawson Museum Photo #984R.27.1.60

bottom: Tr’ondek Hwech’in Cultural Centre on the banks of the Yukon River

Siting of the building on the bank of the Yukon River acknowledges a people historically dependent on the river for transport and food. It links historic Dawson City to the river, disconnected since the late 1990s by the construction of a river dyke. The contrast of the building’s image and siting to the fabric of historic Dawson emphasizes its connection to the land and the traditional values of the Han people.

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Constructed on piles, the grade is ramped up to the entry, technically eliminating a concealed space between the insulated floor and natural grade, while also providing a natural transition between inside and out. Theatre seating slopes with the natural grade of the dyke.

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Full Circle Architecture Full Circle Architecture is a small firm in the eastern arctic founded by Keith Irving in 1989. Speaking of design in northern environments, Keith comments that good architecture ‘is the product of a good architect and a good architectural process, with the key being taking the time to understand the context’. A desire to have a greater impact at a local community level, beyond being an architect, Keith Irving joined the planning committee of Iqaluit City Council and later, as a city councillor, was an advocate for the Iqaluit General Plan.

Nunavut Legislative Building (1999) with Arcop Group in joint venture, Iqaluit, Nunavut. 63°north.

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The exterior of the building is described by Bruce Allan of Arcop as ‘softened down’, its form and orientation aligned with the wind and snow. Dark blue wood siding creates a contrast to the brown and white landscape, while aluminum joints recall blocks of snow and ice. The original design included ramped earth approaches to the entries, but the built reality is a cascade of galvanized steel stairs. In the context of its environment, this building significantly expresses the culture of Nunavut in aligning itself with the environment.

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The Nunavut Legislative Building is the temporary home of the Government of Nunavut.

Located at Four Corners, the primary intersection of the city, it illustrates a transparent system of governance. The chamber faces the street with a full wall of glass, providing views into the working of the assembly as well as views out to the street and the people that it governs. Public viewing is on the same level as the chamber. Symbolic reference to the qamutiik, the traditional sled, at the entries to the building and in the interior bridges continue to the chamber with the creation of a glulam whalebone structure over the Assembly space.

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opposite top: bridge across the interior entry lobby opposite bottom: Nunavut Legislative Building, view from the street this page: top: door handles to the Chamber middle: exterior entry details, Nunavut Legislative Building bottom: the Chamber of the Nunavut Legislative Building, Iqaluit, Nunavut above: the Sijjanga District of Iqaluit

Iqaluit General Plan The population of Iqaluit has increased from 4,500 to 6,200 in the last five years as it grows into its role as capital of Nunavut. The most significant feature of the Iqaluit General Plan is the preservation, despite growth, of traditional land use areas by creating the Sijjanga District Overlay. Sijjanga refers to the beach and waterfront area. It is a zone of interface between the modern ways of community and the life on the land — a cultural and social focal point of the coastal lifestyle.1 The intent of the Overlay is to protect views, access, and traditional uses by limiting the type and scale of development in the area. The 100 foot strip along the shoreline has been given Commissioner’s Land status. Snowmobile and walking trails are planned and preserved. Natural rock outcrops are highlighted as features to be built around rather than through or over.

This formalization of an Arctic way of life recognizes the importance of maintaining the traditional role of the shore as a working zone.

The initiative of Iqaluit to create thoughtful legislation to guide and control growth is a model for community planning in northern regions. 

City of Iqaluit General Plan, FoTenn Consultants Inc. Urban Planners By-law 571 June 2003 p 11

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Teaching tradition: a new school in Kotlik, Alaska Petra Sattler-Smith

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otlik is located on the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta, surrounded by thousands of unnamed rivers and lakes in a coastal wetland region.

There are no trees on the horizon to stop the polar winds during the winter, and every summer breath is mosquito laden.

The native community of 600 is as remote as the climate is extreme.

400 air miles from Anchorage, Kotlik is only accessible by air or water.

The Yukon River functions as a main street, allowing travel to other villages by boat in the summer and via snow machine in the winter.

Boardwalks keep your feet dry within the village, cars and streets have no use here.

The form of the school reinterprets the qasgiq, a traditional Yupik communal dwelling where children were educated by elders and community gatherings brightened up the long, cold winter nights. It was a classroom, guest house, sweat lodge and place to play games, dance and celebrate.

The qasgiq was the social and ceremonial center of village life1.

The layout of the new kindergarten to grade 12 replacement school emphasizes the importance of a qasgiq-like place within a modern educational environment.Community functions (gym, multi-purpose room, kitchen and library) are combined into one central volume.The separate classroom domain is organized in a linear additive way, reflecting an openness to the world 2. .

A pathway system flows through the facility, carving out places for informal exchange leading to the qasgiq where weddings, funerals and potlatch take place. A drying rack outside the cultural room incorporates traditional elements for integration in today’s education. The low and long entry into to the high volume space is reminiscent of traditional, regional dwelling forms. Like a Kevin Lynch node, it is a primary visible junction in the facility.

The school is visible from the next village 35 miles away. The silhouette shows clarity and simplicity of form against the sky. Metal roof and siding reflect a utilitarian approach to materials and use, anchored in the traditional spirit of rural Alaska. Several smaller spaces push past this simple metal skin, reaching out into the community to the landscape beyond. The form of the school responds to the primal qualities of the surrounding land. In this treeless arctic tundra environment, architectural space as a physical counterpart can be as powerful as the surrounding nature.  1 2

Ann Fienup-Riordon, Hunting Tradition in a Changing World.

Christian Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Space & Architecture.

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kevin g smith

A south facing bridge within the pathway links this centre with the classrooms, allowing a long view of the horizontal landscape and a reflective connection between the two functions.

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School on a barge.

Petra Sattler- Smith, partner at mayer sattler- smith designed this project under Koonce Pfeffer Bettis.

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Valhalla: on the edge in Iceland Steve Christer

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eykjavík is a pleasant city, about 120,000, yet with all the functions and amenities required to fulfil its capital status. The relative wealth of the country has enabled it to offer these services with a quality and abundance only achieved by much larger cities. However outside of the chaotically quaint centre the reality of explosive growth is revealed in the sprawling suburbs and industrial districts. A buoyant economy and cheap plentiful land has fuelled a building boom that reeks of opportunity and expedience with only a cursory nod to the surrounding ring of mountains. Environmentally conscious thinking is advertised by fourwheel drive jeeps racing past the hydrogen gas station.

Thankfully Reykjavík is small. Houses, sheds and fast food outlets disappear as the road from the city rises slowly, heading inland. Initially the land is green with occasional trees and great white shrink-wrapped fodder bales. The largest buildings are greenhouses run on geothermal heat and hydroelectric light. The road continues upwards in a series of short rises, and with each rise the surface of the earth is stripped back a bit more, vegetation clustering around waterlogged marshlands with swans moving serenely between the reeds. Rocks break the surface, lichen and moss relieve the withered grass. The horizon is snow-capped.

After only half an hour of driving, a long lake-filled valley is revealed at a turn in the road. It was created in prehistory as the North American

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and European tectonic plates violently separated. Without trees or man-made objects it is scaleless and its colour appears unnatural in its pristine naturalness. It has a majestic quality that did not escape the first settlers of the island as they established the world’s first parliament here over a millennium ago. Our generation will hopefully respond by registering it as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The road dips onto the upper shelf of the valley and the lake falls from view. A rough track cuts across the fragile land leading to a place where the earth appears to crack open, where huge blocks of lava rock are torn and skewed. This is the rift valley’s edge and the track lurches down towards the lakeshore. Here the slanting, broken basalt is covered in a thin carpet of mosses, lichens and gnarled birch interspersed by the most beautiful tiny flowers set in a 360º panorama.

So close to the modern comforts of Reykjavik yet secluded and in contact with the very essence of nature, this is an extraordinary site for a vacation residence. Yet this very beauty is the greatest architectural challenge — creating a place without destroying the place. Perhaps the strongest metaphor for our approach is how when a stone is thrown in the lake the multitude ripples enlarge and then gradually subside to reveal the reflection of the glacier again. 

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his summer residence within walking distance of the site of the world’s first parliament overlooks the lake of Thingvallavatn. The fractured lava surface of the ground is coated in a thin film of moss, lichen and other minimal vegetation which imperceptibly changes colour during the year, an effect magnified by the scale and remoteness of the setting. In this extraordinary context the twisted form of the house half hovers and half perches not unlike the broken rock of the site. A fragility and perilousness is underwritten by the weathered fir-clad walls and rock-strewn roof. In this awe inspiring yet inhospitable land the iroko-lined interior provides a safe and comfortable refuge with a sequence of framed views capturing the distant horizons.

Architects: Studio Granda, March 2003 Structural and Mechanical Engineers :Vidsj¡ Electrical engineers: Verkfraedistofan Johanns Indridasonar

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Steve Christer is a partner in Studio Granda, Reykjavik, Iceland.

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Bifröst Business School is located in a large lava field in Borgarfjordur, a grand flat-bottomed valley rising from the head of Borgarfjord in western Iceland. The location is remote and virtually uninhabited; the nearest town is 40 km distant and the campus is 120 km from the capital, Reykjavik.

The growth of the school has required the removal of some of the lava field. The lava was carefully removed and stored during construction and then reinstalled on the roof so the moss can continue to grow peacefully. The special characteristics of the site have been used in the natural ventilation system and heating is provided by locally supplied geothermal power. Although electrical power is hydro-generated its use is minimised by precise fenestration and generous roof lighting. These simple devices hopefully reflect the clarity and precision of the school pedagogy that uses the state-of-the-art technology to teach modern management techniques in an idyllic setting.

Studio Granda, March 2003

Bifröst School of Business: Nordurdalur, Iceland Studio Granda, Architects Petur H. Armannsson

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‘Iceland is not scenic in the conventional European sense of the word — rather it is a landscape devoid of scenery. Its quality of hardness and permanence intercut with effervescent elements has a parallel in the work of Studio Granda.’ (Sheila O’Donnell and John Toumey. In the Nature of Things, Studio Granda.

Exhibition Catalogue, Reykjavik Art Museum, 1995)

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he campus of the Bifröst School of Business is situated in Nordurdalur Valley in west-Iceland, about 60 miles north of Reykjavik.

Surrounded by mountains of various shapes and heights, the campus is located at the edge of a vast lava field covered by gray moss and birch scrub, with colourful volcanic craters in the background. Nearby is a salmon-fishing river with tourist-attracting waterfalls and the main road that connects northern Iceland with Reykjavik in the south.

The original building at Bifröst was designed and built as a restaurant and roadway hotel to plans made in 1945 by architects Gísli Halldórsson and Sigvaldi Thordarson. The property had been bought by the Federation of Icelandic Co-operatives (SIS) and the first phase of the hotel, the restaurant wing, was started in 1951. It functioned as a restaurant and SIS community centre until 1955, when the SIS business trade school was moved to Bifröst from Reykjavik. A two-story hotel wing was completed that same year and used as a student dormitory in the winter. In 1958 apartments for teachers and a gymnasium were added.

The Bifröst campus is a well-preserved example of 1950’s Icelandic architecture, traditional in overall form with influences from post-war modern architecture evident in plan and detail. An important feature of the original buildings are massive retaining walls covered with black lava stone, framing the entrance loggia and garden terrace and connecting the buildings to the surrounding landscape. In sharp contrast with

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the dark color of the lava are the white and yellow exterior walls, roofs of corrugated steel painted in red, white window frames and panels of dark brown wood veneer. This combination of materials and colors has become the hallmark of the place and has been respected by more recent buildings on campus.

In 1988, Bifröst became a specialized business school at the university level. In 2001 three architectural offices submitted proposals for an extension to the original school building to house a lecture hall, administrative and faculty offices and reception, the first phase in a major redevelopment of the campus. Studio Granda was chosen for its innovative solution which was compact in scale, economical and respectful of the original buildings.

Studio Granda was founded 1987 by Margrét Hardardóttir and Steve Christer to realize their first-prize competition project for Reykjavik City Hall (1988-92). The encounter of the urban order of the city and the natural order of the lake, the building broke away from traditional symbolic and typological notions of a town hall. Instead, it draws inspiration from Icelandic nature in material and detail, seen in the entrance rock-wall covered with green moss with dripping water. Studio Granda has continued to work with elements of nature relocated to the city, from the lava-rock roof terrace at the Supreme Court of Iceland (1992) to the parking garage at Kringlan shopping center in Reykjavik (1998)

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sigurgeir sigurjonsson

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sigurgeir sigurjonsson

sigurgeir sigurjonsson

that was conceived more as a man-made landscape than a building. In 1993 Studio Granda defined their architecture as the emotional substitute of landscape in the present-day urban environment: ‘Cities are built testimonies to man’s will to move beyond the limitations of nature, they are purpose made machines to service ever increasing needs and expectations which cannot be provided by a bush or a rock.Within this built environment architecture has become the new landscape, a datum against which everyday judgments are made. As the singular most powerful factor influencing the lives of city dwellers, architecture has become a synthetic substitute for the stability of, say, a mountain and in that role must provide humankind with an equivalent sense of security.’ (A+U, April 1993) Bifröst is Studio Granda’s first public project in Iceland outside the urban and suburban areas of Reykjavik. Here the challenge was not to bring nature into the building but to create a dense, urban place of intense activity in midst of a virgin landscape. The currently completed building is the first phase in a new spine of buildings that extends linearly in both directions behind the original building. Future buildings will be linked by a hallway, with the rooms facing open courtyards off the hallway, each one a distinct color.

The new addition is intended to be the heart of the school, a place where all its activities are brought together. It is compact in form and highly efficient in the use of space; circulation spaces are low and intimate, with carefully placed skylights that give a sense of place. A double-height assembly room with sliding walls on two sides offers a range of alternative spatial arrangements with adjacent spaces on both levels. This flexibility is a further development of Studio Granda’s multi-purpose space in the renovation of Reykjavik Art Museum (2000) with its sophisticated system of barn-door openings to the outside. In Bifröst, the architects were able to shape the assembly room at will, free of the orthogonal constraints of an existing building. When the projection screen of the lecture room is pulled up, a large window appears framing a view of the landscape. To the side, a small window down by the floor offers a different view of nature, contained and intimate. Next to the auditorium is the new main entrance to the school with adjacent reception and administrative offices. The work-space is open, to accommodate future rearrangements. On the floor above are faculty workspaces, meeting rooms and reading areas.

The exterior is modest with white, cubic forms blending in with the existing structures. One piece stands out — the auditorium is clad with corrugated copper, marking the new entry. On the other side of the building, facing west, is the former service yard, taking on the role of an academic quadrangle, with the main circulation spine of the school running along one side. A small, boxy building marks another side of the space. Painted bright red inside, the box holds the school café and at night, the local pub. Like Studio Granda’s Supreme Courts in Reykjavik, the flat roofs at Bifröst are covered with slabs of lava.

Studio Granda is currently developing a strategic framework for future expansion of the Bifröst campus into the surrounding area. This involves challenging questions on how to set a pattern for urbanization in a natural setting, taking into account the particular visual characteristics of Icelandic landscape. The results could be interesting, since the visual and architectural relationship between built form and landscape in Iceland has previously not been addressed so directly in the early stages of a new settlement. Many issues need to be dealt with — the danger of suburban sprawl, uncontrolled residential subdivisions on nearby land and commercial strip development along the main road. With a rapid increase in tourism, Icelanders must accommodate new development while preserving the visual quality and uniqueness of their natural landscape. The strategy of Studio Granda views buildings as landscape, and nature as part of the architect’s palette of materials. This carries an important message about the value of creative thinking in defining the relationship between the natural and the man-made, and the possible role of architecture as a mediator between the opposing poles of conservation and development. The transformation of Bifröst could become an example that proves that point and sets the standard. 

Petur H. Armannsson, architect, born 1961 in Iceland. Graduated from the University of Toronto in 1986. Post-graduate studies at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1988-90.

Director of the Architecture Department of Reykjavik Art Museum since 1993. Author of writings and exhibitions on 20th century architecture in Iceland.Visiting Professor in Design Theory at the Iceland Academy of Arts in Reykjavik.

Malik Swimming Hall: Nuuk, Greenland KHRAS arkitektur

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his swimming hall was built on a site near the coast in the Nuussuaq quarter of Nuuk, with a view of Malenbugt Bay and the Malenefjeldet Mountains.

The main entrance is in the northern corner of the building, on the lee side of the prevailing southwest winds. Windows facing the bay bring sunlight deep into the building and snow and the ice-covered bay reflect light in under the roof. Indirect lighting comes from a band of skylights.

The swimming hall facades are sided with pine boards stained blue-black.

The building’s bearing and bracing wall is in-situ cast concrete. The roof consists of arched laminated wood beams, supported across the pool room by laminated wooden columns. The roof is based on a warm construction of corrugated steel panels with exterior mineral wool insulation and rolled roofing. The façades are sided with pine boards, stained a blue-black. The glass facades have low-energy thermal glazing with a standard mullion system of salt-water-resistant aluminum. The horizontal band on the wooden facades is also of untreated aluminum. The ceramic tiles on the floors and walls and furnishings in stainless steel and teak underscore a robustness that meets the extremely hard use conditions and the high hygienic requirements.

The roof ’s wave-shaped beams and column trees are of laminated wood.

The outdoor temperature in the arctic area can fall to -25ºC. The double glass façade prevents condensation and reduces heat loss, in that dry heated air is injected from openings at the base of the wall cavity and rises to the top of the façade construction.

In this cavity, which is lit from below by fluorescent lighting, a group of dancers performed at the opening in September 2003.

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level 1

level 2

level 3

The building lies along the direction of the prevailing winds to minimize air resistance and heat loss. During the winter, the cold winds blow from the north, thus the building turns its back and the narrow end in this direction, while the large glass areas face south, east and west.

Greenland’s Nature Institute Siaqqinneq, Nuuk KHRAS arkitektur

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reenland Home Rule put its Pinngortilaleriffik (Greenland’s Nature Institute) on a rock plateau in the Siaqqinneq area outside of Nuuk. The building is a framework for the institute’s work with Greenland’s environment.

Nuuk’s landmark can be seen, the Sermitsiaq mountain in the background.

The oblong, 2,000 sq.m building consists of two north/south wings parallel to the harsh prevailing winds from the south-south east and the north-north west and is organized around a continuous central space with two entrances — a distinctive public entrance and a delivery entrance for the workshops and laboratories.

Interior walls, deck and façade columns are concrete, cast in place with local aggregate material. Exterior walls are clad in untreated Canadian cedar. Roofing on the outer blocks is grey rolled-roofing, while the raised roof above the center space is covered with aluminum panels.

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Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

South face, susmmer

Exterior daylight access

below: The lap sided facades are covered with Canadian cedar, which is untreated due to its natural impregnation qualities.The windows and fresh air vents are of untreated aluminum.

The primary organization of the building, with the heavy supporting structure on the inside and a light outer wall construction supports passive solar heating. Natural air circulation in the high centre space improves the natural ventilation of the offices which all open on to this space. The large meeting room, canteen and library have high ceilings eliminating the need for mechanical ventilation and are naturally ventilated in the same way as the offices.

The library and leader’s office is on the top floor in direct connection with the central space. On the lowest level there are exhibition spaces combined with a corridor leading to the institute’s workshops and laboratories. This location allows combining exhibitions with laboratory activities.

In the large windowed space housing the canteen, artist Aka Hoegh did a large-scale runic carving directly on the concrete walls.This work is titled Stromninger (Currents).The carving influences the atmosphere of the room with varying intensity depending on the pulse of the season.

In the interior, simple materials ease cleaning and maintenance. The flooring in the central space is concrete pavers. In the offices, meeting rooms and library, the floors are beech strip-flooring, while there are tile floors in the sorting room, laboratories and workshops. All materials were chosen on the basis of environmental considerations.

Art and architecture are integrated, as painter and sculptor Niels Guttormsen chose a color palette inspired by the Greenland landscape and the geology, flora and fauna. Therefore, the niches on one side of the central space are painted in tones ranging from a soft ice green to cold ice blue. On the other side warm organic tones were employed. The doors in the central space have the purple saxifrage red, and the indigo of the blue whale.  Ove Neumann is a partner in KHRarchitects on leave for two years, as technical director in Nuuk Municipality, Greenland — ‘a challenging offer, I could not refuse after 8 years of practicing in arctic design and construction development’. KHRASarkitektur is based in Denmark.

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Northern Building Perspectives: from concrete to green Michael L. Barton

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Moving to the Yukon in 1990, I found the same kind of problems. This time the government of Yukon asked me to write a new set of architectural design guidelines. Merely producing another set of jurisdictional standards, was not going to cut it, so I took the state of the art mandate and the research for it seriously and published the guidelines in 1991, incorporating a Green approach in 1992.

michael barton

hen I first moved to northern Canada in the mid-eighties there were a number of old military buildings and off the shelf designs from the south being used for schools, offices, community centres and nursing stations. The school in Tuktoyaktuk, built right on the coast of the Beaufort sea, was the same building that could be seen all over southern B.C. At this time there was a recognition of the various social problems that were evident in northern communities. The government of the Northwest Territories initiated large, comprehensive and expensive building programmes to address both suitability and social fit. However, the primary factor in these projects was speed, followed closely by cost.

Innovative or creative thinking was quickly brushed aside. The driver was brutal economics.

the central system: how it all fits together

Much of what is thought to be innovative is actually old, and can be reduced to four basic components, the site, sun, microclimate and the user group. These can each be found in recent northern-appropriate; climate-sensitive buildings. The considerations are elementary: building orientation, sun paths, daylighting and shading, helio-morphic form generation, topographical use of the site, photovoltaic systems, microhydro systems and water recycling. Northern building is increasingly Green.

All WCA forums are held mid-winter in an interesting winter city.

Bratsk was certainly one of the most interesting, especially from a western-circumpolar perspective. It is a homogeneous city that originally housed workers who laboured on a large dam, finished in1955, and which supplies power for all of eastern Siberia. Many workers were political prisoners from the Stalin era. In 1995, Bratsk had much brutal concrete with a surprising amount of planning and landscaping. The large apartment slabs had landscaped parkways between them, with roads and paths on each side of the park. It was a quiet city with few cars. Although there was public transportation, many people walked considerable distances — scores of walkers could be seen at all hours of the day.

Other technological differences were seen. Much Russian construction uses prefabricated concrete and cinder block panels. Window technology did not (in the mid-90s) use double or triple glazing units, rather they installed a standard single pane window on the inner and outer skins of the envelope.

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michael barton

In 1995 I went to the International Winter Cities Association Forum, in Bratsk, Siberia. The theme was Children and the North. I used my experiences in planning and designing for children, (in schools, hospitals, clinics, and the urban habitat), with northern-appropriate criteria to develop an ecological model: Place Experience for Child-Sensitive Northern Habitats. The model is a dynamic one and recognizes dualisms found in the north such as dark-light, indoor-outdoor, warm-cold, retractingexpanding, close-far, free-constrained, young-old, culture-environment.

Children playing in the parkland between apartment blocks in Bratsk, Siberia.

Architects and engineers in the Canadian north, have been to Russia and Siberia, to help with northern-appropriate design. There is a mini subdivision that uses timber frame construction with rigid insulation systems, incorporating coincident air-vapour barriers, in the Yakutsk region of Siberia designed by Ferguson Simek Clark architects and engineers, and built by Canadian building contractors.

In just twenty years I have seen a huge change in northern construction, from cast-off has-been buildings to e-green projects that promote non-toxic, recycled, indigenous, low embodied energy building practices which support and encourage low life-cycle cost and ecological balance.

We are in an innovative and exciting new era. 

Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

michael barton

michael barton michael barton

top: Bratsk, Siberia above: Siberian north. Apartment blocks, dating from the 1950s, Bratsk right: Yukon north. Mixed use building, Whitehorse by Florian Maurer Architect.

Michael L. Barton is a consulting architect with the Energy Solutions Centre, in Whitehorse,Yukon, an organization that helps, steers, or initiates, e-green planning and design for various innovative, creative, and exciting projects. Current projects include a Co-op housing project; which will eventually become a small eco-village; an eco-resort; a cultural centre; seniors housing; and the Athletes Village for the Canada Winter Games, (2007).

We are planning to recycle, and even re-locate, the residential units as affordable housing in Yukon communities after the Games.We think this is a pretty green idea.

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NORTHERN Architecture: form follows latitude Mike Mense

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Site characteristics, program requirements, owner preferences, architect enthusiasms and contractor skills all contribute to the individuation of a piece of architecture. It must, though, spring from richer soil than that.

Because of its social nature, those of us who had nothing to do with its creation must also recognize it as our own (or not our own if we are from another place). Architecture becomes recognizable to us when it lives the same life we live, especially when it responds intelligently to our shared environment.

What are the environmental peculiarities of the north? What do those peculiarities tell us about how to make architecture in the north? Are there general truths about how a building will look if it is built appropriately for the north? YES.  NORTHERN architecture should be compact with a large ratio of volume to surface area. This reduces the cost of heating and minimizes the discomfort created by radiation-based heat-sucking exterior surfaces. (I write this in a room where the interior temperature is 21ºC, exterior temperature is -12º and the cold exterior surfaces can see my feet and hands. Even the most insulated walls and roofs are much cooler than our skin when outside temperatures get below zero. Our exposed skin can’t help but radiate warmth to those surfaces and that makes us uncomfortable.)

NORTHERN buildings should have ‘small feet’. Foundations in the north are terribly expensive and vulnerable to the misbehavior of freezing ground. Touch the ground as little as possible. Cantilevers and outwardly leaning exterior walls are arguably NORTHERN. Having small feet also argues for a plan with a large ratio of area to perimeter. It is the perimeter foundations that are troublesome. Interior foundations, cozy in the warmth of the building are no different in Mexico City than in Whitehorse (except in permafrost areas, but that is a different story).

A NORTHERN building has a compact plan.

A multistory building is an appropriate NORTHERN characteristic. It has relatively small feet and it has a higher ratio of volume to surface area. A ceiling/floor is not the same as a ceiling/roof.

A NORTHERN building would be a cube if the only issue were energy efficiency. It might even be a sphere (think igloo), but Buckminster Fuller, bless his heart, showed us what goes wrong when the engineering takes inappropriate predominance over the programming. The sun matters most in the winter and the sun is only in the south in the winter.

The building must show its biggest face to the south. That would argue for a triangular plan. A triangular plan has no north face but east and west faces are more available to non-summer sun than northeast and northwest faces. A rectangle extended east to west is the most appropriate NORTHERN plan.

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mike mense

rchitecture is a social function and therefore its identity must have social legitimacy. A specific piece of architecture needs its own identity, its own look, and must communicate with everyone who walks by. We want a building to be an individual, but we also want to recognize it. We want to feel like we belong to it and it belongs to us.

A NORTHERN building should have a shed roof with the peak running east to west at the south wall. This is another way to make the south wall the biggest. This means the roof drains on the north in the shade.

This means there are no valleys. Valleys are almost impossible to ventilate and collect drifting snow. This results in melting snow that builds glaciers. Glaciers damage roofs and are dangerous when they finally break off. Hip roofs are particularly inappropriate in the north. They drain everywhere equally and more often than not include valleys.

Being outside in many northern climates is iffy even during the summer.

It is often necessary to double the sun to make a warm outdoor space.

Sun doubling occurs when the sun hits a person directly and also hits a person after bouncing off a south wall. Tall south walls increase the opportunities for sun doubling. The advantages of tall south walls do not end here. Snow gets melted and the ground gets dryer and warmer sooner in the spring. Playgrounds and gardens result. Tall south walls also increase the possibility for high windows. Low angle sun through high south windows can penetrate deep into the northern portions of a building. Roof glass, on the other hand, melts snow, builds glaciers and is typically much more exposed to cold outer space than it is to the warming, energizing sun. Skylights are a dud in the north.

NORTHERN buildings may feature east-west symmetry, though more careful study of programmatic and site-specific issues will usually make this go away. They will never feature north-south symmetry. Large spaces, open space and spaces in which the dominant activity is sitting should always be on the south. Support space, small, enclosed spaces and spaces in which you stand can be on the north. The sun can see through and over the southern spaces.

NORTHERN buildings should have on-grade entries inspired by the wisdom of the traditional igloo. Exterior stairs are too often dangerously covered with snow and ice. Exterior, ‘cold’ foundations are the most expensive and the most likely to misbehave. Floors of entries, whenever possible, should always be the lowest of the floors. Cold air let in by an opened door is trapped in the entry instead of pouring through the entire building. Entries where people wait to be let in need a roof overhang (supported on a cantilever). Roof overhangs on the south side stop the sun. Entries should be on the east or west where very low morning and evening sun angles can sneak in under the overhangs.

Have you ever seen antennas in a remote northern location all quietly searching for the equator? Or consistently deformed trees on a windswept coast? These are places that speak loudly of their place and their history. A community of architecture with big, window filled, south faces, small north faces, compact perimeters and on grade entries might someday speak to us just as loudly about a sustainable human presence in the north. 

Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

tara richardson, mmensearchitects

tara richardson, mmensearchitects

tara richardson, mmensearchitects

mike mense kobayashi zedda architects

Mike Mense has practiced in Anchorage as mmenseArchitects since 1979. mmenseArchitects is five people who try to apply design to everything they can, from houses and offices to furniture and graphics. The firm has won numerous awards for architecture and urban design including a 1996 AIA National Honor Award for Urban Design.

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Building on frozen ground: infrastructure in northern environments Stephen Robinson The present distribution of permafrost in Canada.

Excess ice forms up to 80% of the volume of the upper 10m of ground in a meat locker excavated in permafrost at Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories.

The darker layers are nearly pure ice, while the lighter bands are sand.

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ermafrost, the presence of perennially frozen ground often in the near subsurface, covers more than 20% of the world’s land s surface, and about 50% of Canada. In southern permafrost regions (the discontinuous permafrost zone) near Thompson, Manitoba and Yellowknife, permafrost is sporadic, most often associated with a thick cover of organic material. Moving further north into the continuous permafrost zone, as in Iqaluit or Inuvik, permafrost begins to underly a greater proportion of the land, until virtually all of the terrain is frozen, often to depths of several hundred metres.

Early settlers in Dawson City and Fairbanks built their structures directly upon the ground, and soon found their buildings shifting as the ground beneath melted. Subsequent measures that deal with permafrost rely on the continued stability of frozen ground. The potential for a warming climate in the near future may have important repercussions — many structures have been planned to last many years on permafrost.

Permafrost is most difficult to deal with when it contains significant quantities of ice that freezes and unfreezes. Changes in volume associated with phase change in soils leads to the two basic rules to building upon permafrost. If you have permafrost, you want to preserve it. If a site doesn’t have permafrost, you don’t want to develop it. Many finegrained silt and clay soils in permafrost areas actually contain more ice when frozen than they could water when unfrozen. Freezing here can lead to a heaving of the ground,with significant implications for structural integrity. The melting of such thaw sensitive soils means a dramatic decrease in volume and structural integrity. In extreme cases, such as the subsurface conditions at Tuktoyaktuk, nearly pure ice lenses can occupy 80% of the upper 10m of ground. Spatial variability in the ice content of frozen ground leads to differential ground subsidence upon thawing. Bedrock, containing virtually no pore ice, has few permafrostrelated difficulties.

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In some communities where permafrost may be thin and warm, site clearing may allow permafrost to melt prior to construction, although the complete melting process may take several years. Alternatively, the excavation of thin permafrost and the replacement of the soil with sand or gravel can speed up the site preparation time. In the case of small projects, such as individual houses, patches of potentially unstable ground may simply be avoided, or construction may take place upon gravel pads that aim to keep summer thaw within the pad. Large projects, such as airports, schools, and industrial and municipal buildings, and linear structures such as roads and pipelines, may not have the luxury of complete avoidance of such ground.

The construction of buildings upon piles is the most commonly used construction technique to avoid thawing the permafrost. The gap between the soil and building is usually a minimum of 1 metre, which allows the dissipation of heat from the building without warming the ground. Additionally, the ground is shaded from the summer sun and a lack of snow insulation under the building keeps the ground frozen.

Piles (iron or treated wooden poles) must be set at least 5m deep into permafrost. In the case of wooden piles, if the summer thaw progresses below the level of treated portion, the wood can start to rot if drainage is impeded. This is currently a concern in Inuvik.

Adjustable screw jacks as the foundations of smaller buildings is becoming more common in northern communities. The police station in Tuktoyaktuk uses a triodetic foundation system that provides stability and adjustability, while at the same time keeping the gap between the building and soil.

Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

Relatively small, lightweight buildings in permafrost areas can be constructed with adjustable screw jacks to compensate for differential ground thaw.

Thermosyphons passively preserve, and can even create, permafrost, although it is an expensive undertaking. Thermosyphons use cold winter air and convection of a liquid or liquid and gas, commonly ammonia, to preserve permafrost. Currently they cool a roadbed in Yellowknife, are underneath a large industrial building in Norman Wells, and create permafrost in a tailings impoundment dam at the Ekati Mine north of Yellowknife. The Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline uses thermosyphons along much of its length. Several large, heavy buildings, such as the oil storage tanks at Norman Wells, are constructed on a ventilated gravel pad.

Thermosyphons act to preserve permafrost underneath this large industrial building in Norman Wells, allowing for the structure to be placed in direct contact with the ground.

stephen robinson

stephen robinson

Early construction in northern communities often followed southern building practices. If the buildings were constructed directly on ice-rich soil, warming of the ground often resulted in collapse. Photo from Norman Wells, Northwest Territories in 1953, courtesy of the National Research Council of Canada, Division of Building Research.

Engineering and design in northern regions have come a long way since the early days of simply transplanting southern techniques to permafrost regions. However, with the threat of a warming climate, it is possible that the stability of frozen ground cannot be assumed into the future.

Warming ground temperatures have already been noted in Alaska, Siberia and northern Canada. Although the permafrost regions of Canada are not densely populated, their economic importance has increased significantly in the last few decades, especially as strategic areas for natural resources. New construction and design techniques will have to be adapted to reflect the increased instability of the permafrost regime upon which northern infrastructure depends. ď §ď źď Ł

Stephen Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Geology at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. He holds a PhD from McGill University, and has conducted permafrost research in the Canadian Arctic since 1990. He can be reached at srobinson@stlawu.edu

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Nature’s Polar Design Challenge: Drifting Snow Bill Waechter

bill waechter

Snow Misconception - A popular belief is that snow can drift across great distances... ‘from one community to the next’, some will say. The reality is that it does not. Snow will sublimate (evaporate) and erode as it is blown about and will ‘disappear’ within a 5 to 6 km journey.

Aerial view of snow drifting conditions in a typical polar community.

The drift patterns shown in the aerial photo demonstrate the importance of addressing the effects of wind blown snow in subdivision planning and street orientation. Imagine the challenges if a street was located immediately downwind of the first row of houses. Streets must remain unobstructed throughout the year for emergency and service vehicles (water, sewage, heating fuel). Building-lined streets perpendicular to the wind produce more snow drift related problems for traffic than do streets parallel with the prevailing winds.

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lowing snow in Arctic and Antarctic regions presents a design challenge unique to these extreme cold areas. More temperate regions have periodic thaws throughout the winter that generally keep overall accumulations of snow on roads and around structures at a tolerable level. In polar regions snow typically stays for seven to nine months, even from one year to the next. Severe and ever-present, drifting snow is a major factor in the design of subdivisions, roads and buildings.

Several planning-related solutions are available to reduce snow clearing costs. Eventually houses will be placed on the windward side of perimeter streets; however development controls can dictate that these houses be constructed last, or at least not first. Current site planning practice locates building service connections (water, sewage, heating fuel oil) on the same side of every house on the street; site planning could encourage designs where service connections on adjacent homes face one another. Presently, snow must be cleared from the service area on each property, whereas adjacent service connections would reduce snow removal to one service area between every other house along a street.

bill waechter

bill waechter

The aerial photograph above provides an excellent overview of drifting conditions in a typical polar community. The prevailing wind flows from the top left of the photo to the bottom right. The first row of houses on the windward side of the community (top left) disrupted the approaching wind flow and caused numerous large snow drifts to form.

Moving further into the community, towards the bottom right of the photo, fewer drifts are visible. The first row of houses initially encountered by the wind is effectively a snow fence for the rest of the community. The photographs below (Baker Lake, NU) illustrate the severity of drift conditions typically encountered around the first row of houses on the windward side of a community.

Drifting between the first and second row of windward houses in Baker Lake, Nunuvut. Wind is from the left.

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The same houses without snow.

Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

bill waechter

bill waechter

Porous skirt at the foundation. The downwind drift sits away from the building face. Wind is from the right.

Construction of a 5.5m high snow fence at Baker Lake, Nunuvut.

bill waechter

Street and subdivision planning can reduce, but not solve snowdrift problems in Arctic communities. Since the mid-eighties, RWDI has been involved in the planning and design of snow fences to protect entire Arctic communities and subdivisions. The snow fences typically seen along highways in more temperate regions are about 1m high, whereas these Arctic monsters range from 3m to nearly 6m in height (above) and are upwards of several kilometres in length. Arctic community snow fences are currently used in the Alaskan communities of Kaktovik, Point Hope, Wainwright, Barrow and Atqasook, and in the Nunavut communities of Baker Lake, Chesterfield Inlet, Cambridge Bay and Rankin Inlet. The aerial photo of Baker Lake (below) shows the snow collection capabilities of Arctic snow fencing. Over 1.5 km of Arctic snow fencing has been constructed in Baker Lake and has significantly reduced drifting problems in the community. The snow fence shown is 5.5m high and collects a drift nearly 7m in depth.

A solid skirt at the foundation. The downwind drift is pressed against the building face. Wind is from the right.

bill waechter

Drift control measures such as snow fencing and subdivision layout are large scale solutions. On a smaller scale it is necessary to consider the orientation and design of individual buildings. In most Arctic regions, buildings must be thermally isolated from the ground to avoid thawing the underlying permafrost, which would result in foundation settlement problems. Buildings are typically constructed on steel pipe piles with a 500 - 800mm air space separating the underside of the building from the ground surface. The perimeter opening of this air space is typically skirted with wire mesh, plywood or siding. The snow drift performance of buildings changes drastically according to the porosity of the foundation skirt.

These two pictures illustrate snowdrift conditions downwind of a building with an open (porous) wire mesh foundation skirt and a building with a solid (non-porous) plywood skirt. The porous skirt (above, top) allows wind to flow under the building, which blows the snow away from the downwind building face (an ideal location for a wind sheltered, drift-free entrance). Conversely with a solid skirt (above), a downwind drift forms against the building face blocking doors and windows. The performance of the air space underneath a building, in terms of drift formation, depends on the height of the air space, the building’s exposure to the wind. severity of drifting conditions expected, the local terrain, the presence of exposed understructure and floor area. Wind exposure and a clean path under the building are perhaps the most important details as field observations indicate that even small gaps work.

Aerial view of the 5.5m high snow fence under construction at Baker Lake. The recently completed sections have no drifts.

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bill waechter

Snow drift challenged garage doors.

When a solid foundation skirt is used on a building, or when a building, such as a garage, is placed on grade the placement of doors is critical, as large drifts will form against the downwind façade (above). Site constraints or viewing requirements may not permit adjusting the building’s orientation or relocating doors in order to avoid the drift prone façade.

Wind deflectors are solutions for this problem and have been used on many buildings in the Arctic. The two pictures below illustrate the basic concept and application of a wind deflector. It is designed to project above the roof surface to capture the wind flowing over the roof and redirect it down a building’s wind-sheltered but drift prone façade. The redirected wind flow scours snow away from the entrance.

From day one respect the fact that snow drifting will occur. Where there is a choice, select a site or building location on a site where upwind snow collection already occurs due to the terrain or existing buildings, and where existing drifts or those created can be accommodated. Develop a building orientation and site access in the schematic or concept design stage that take advantage of wind scour and drift patterns associated with a porous or solid skirted foundation. Finally, fine tune the detailed design (roof configuration, entry design, wind deflectors) to avoid local drifting or utilize wind flows to alter drift location.

Wind deflector captures roof level winds and scours snow from the entrance.

Wind deflector above Health Centre entrance in Clyde River, Nunuvut. Without it, the entrance would have a drift similar to the one by the flag pole.

bill waechter

The adage that you can’t fight nature is very true. The various planning and design measures presented have been developed to work with and accept nature’s drifting snow challenges rather than conquer them.

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USAF MSgt/Thomas Cook and National Science Foundation (Oct. 31, 2002)

The new Amundsen-Scott Science Station under construction at the South Pole, Antarctica. Wind is from the left.

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he new Science Facility under construction at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station (above) is a recent example of an elevated building in an extreme polar region that was designed with snow drift effects in mind. The existing station’s dome and metal arch sheds were constructed on-grade in 1975. The dome, seen behind the new station in Figure 8, is nearly buried under snow while most of the arch sheds already are. The new elevated facility includes a 5m open air space between the snow surface and the underside of the building. Its support structure facilitates raising the building whenever the permanent snow cover around the building has significantly increased in depth. When complete, the building will be comprised of a row of two C-shaped modules linked with a two storey bridge (in plan view, think of one C above another with a link between). The building row is oriented perpendicular to the prevailing winds, which seems contrary to popular thinking with regards to snow design. However, this orientation maximized the building’s exposure to the wind, which is essential for drift control with a raised building. Whereas, orienting the row of C-shaped buildings with the wind significantly reduces the wind exposure of the

downwind modules. Wind flow under these modules would have been reduced and caused early burial of the downwind modules in snow.

The leading edge of the building’s façade will be chamferred at the bottom to improve wind flow aerodynamics under the structure. The construction stage of the building shown above has not reached a point where the cladding or the chamferred features have been installed. 

Photographs of the new and existing stations can be found in The Antarctic Sun Newspaper web site (www.polar.org/antsun/) and following the link The Antarctic Photo Library. A review of the various snowdrift features and the studies undertaken during the development of this unique polar building has been published in the Proceedings of the 10th International ASCE Conference on Cold Regions Engineering - Putting Research into Practice. 1999 —

1. Brooks, Willam D. Elevated Station Design for the New South Pole Redevelopment Project at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

2. Waechter, Bill F. and Williams, Colin J. Snowdrift Design Guidance For The New South Pole Station.

Bill Waechter, an Associate and Project Director with Rowan Williams Davies & Irwin Inc. (RWDI) Consulting Engineers (Guelph, ON), has spent 26 years assessing wind and drifting snow conditions for planners, engineers and architects. He has consulted on drifting snow conditions in temperate, Arctic and Antarctic regions and has traveled to over 35 communities ‘North of 60’.

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Designing Green at the South Pole

National Science Founmdation US Antarctic Program

Joseph J Ferraro and William D Brooks

The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is located on the polar plateau at an elevation of 2,835m above sea level, within one hundred metres of the geographic South pole.

Quadrants were developed to determine the best site for the station. A: operations sector, B: clean air sector, C: quiet sector, D: downwind sector.

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CFD Analysis indicating the windward and leeward snow drift patterns.

uilt in 1956, rebuilt in 1975 with a dramatic 51m diameter geodesic dome, Amundsen-Scott is undergoing its second significant reconstruction and modernization. Currently in the second of five construction phases, Amundsen-Scott is scheduled to be complete and operational in 2007. To extend the station’s useful life, to minimize the operational energy it consumes and to provide a healthy habitat for its occupants, the new station incorporates a number of sustainable design strategies, many uniquely suited to the climatic conditions of the polar plateau, that could set the standard for future development on the continent.

The program calls for over 6,000 square metres of living, recreational, scientific, medical and administrative support spaces. The above-surface portion of the station would be a complete habitat for a winter-over population of 50, a summer population of up to 150, and would be connected to below-surface support spaces including a one-megawatt power plant, bulk storage facilities, fuel storage facilities and a heavy equipment garage/shop (see plan above).

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The above-surface and below-surface facilities at the South Pole Station.

rowin williams davies and irwin

ferraro choi

Conventional construction drifts over with snow and becomes buried.

The above surface habitat of Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

The unique sustainable aspects of Amundsen-Scott were developed in response to four critical design objectives: 1. to minimize the impact to the South Pole environment 2. to ensure a station useful life of 25 years or more 3. to maximize energy efficiency 4. to provide a high quality indoor environment Amundsen-Scott Station conducts research in aeronomy, astrophysics, glaciology, climatology, and seismology. For building development that would not compromise the station’s scientific mission, the site analysis reviewed the station components in relation to climate, the airstrip, the effects of snowdrifting, the annual migration of the polar ice cap (10m/ year) and the existing science sectors surrounding the site. The best site for the new station was in quadrant A. Development here would avoid wind borne contaminants that could affect atmospheric research, it was sufficiently far from seismic research, did not pose height problems for balloon experiments, facilitated easy access to the airstrip and localized snowdrifting to designated undeveloped areas.

Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

ferraro choi

Flyover of the station The greatest challenge to sustainable facilities at Amundsen-Scott has been the annual snow deposit and drifting. Conventional structures built on-grade at the South Pole are covered by winter snowdrifts after only one or two seasons. The drifted structures are further buried by the typical annual snowfall of 20-30 cm. As there is no thaw cycle at the Pole, they eventually become too deeply buried to practically excavate or even access. The buried structures deform under the ever-increasing weight of the snow and must be abandoned.

The new design for the habitat portion of Amundsen-Scott has overcome this historical dilemma with an elevated, linear complex of two interconnected C-shaped buildings that are configured and oriented to control snow drifting.

The snow drifting design evolved from a series of predictive studies at the Canadian based research facility of Rowan Williams Davies & Irwin (see Bill Waechter’s article on page 71) including water flume and wind tunnel testing, computational fluid dynamics, and finite area element computer modeling techniques. Two buildings are connected and sit 3m above the surface with the long axis of the complex perpendicular to the prevailing winter winds. The windward face of each building and the connecting link is chamfered to smoothly channel the wind beneath the complex. Forced to accelerate, the wind carries the snow well past the buildings where it is deposited in long leeward drifts. A windward drift also forms just in front of the station as a result of momentary turbulence where the wind encounters the building face. Over time, the leeward and windward deposits will tend to accumulate around the ends of the station in a rough crater shape.

Eventually, the surrounding snow field will build to a height where it will prevent the wind from channelling beneath the station. When this happens, the station can be jacked and raised approximately 4m. The

cycle of effective drifting mitigation will resume. The initial cycle has been extended by building the station on a compacted snow berm that is itself 2m higher than grade. Studies indicate that when all factors are considered, the station’s ability to control drifting could continue until the windward drift approaches the height of the building’s mid-section — it may not be necessary to raise the building for well beyond 25 years.

This new generation of sustainable building design met the National Science Foundation’s goals to protect and sustain the pristine polar plateau research environment, providing both environmental and energy efficient aspects and a higher margin of safety for the station’s occupants.

Besides reducing future construction activity, the design redirects valuable fuel supplies from snow plowing to the direct support of science programs. It also gives station personnel a higher quality of life, living and working above the snow surface.

When this project design started, the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) rating system had not been established. However, when the project is completed in 2007, it could be considered for a Gold certification. In its unique location and with other project constraints, it also might be the basis for a new division of LEED criteria and a standard for new Antarctic building design for all Antarctic Treaty nations. 

Joe Ferraro, AIA is a founding principal at Ferraro Choi. He is a graduate of Pratt Institute and has been working on Antarctic projects for over twenty years. He is also a LEED accredited professional.

Bill Brooks, AIA is a principal at Ferraro Choi and is Director of Architecture at the firm. Bill is a graduate of the University of Hawaii and is the project manager for the firm’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station project.

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Design factors peculiar to the Antarctic region: Fire escape doors need to open inwards, because there is a high likelihood that the door may be drifted up with snow on the outside, preventing it from opening.

british antarctic sur vey

Snow build up and drift patterns are critical — placing a large building in the wrong place or in the wrong orientation to the wind direction, can lead to significant snow management problems.

There is daylight round the clock during midAustral summer, darkness round the clock during mid-winter.

The sun shines in the Northern sky, therefore solar gain is from this direction, unlike in the northern hemisphere.

The Architecture of British Antarctic Survey Stations

Materials transported to Antarctica through the tropics are exposed to high temperatures and very high relative humidity. Paints and glues are especially affected by this fluctuation. Consideration of this in the design process should minimise problems in transit.

D J Taylor

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he British Antarctic Survey (BAS) is a component body of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and is responsible for all the scientific research that is carried out in the Antarctic on behalf of the British Government. To support the research, BAS maintains five permanent research stations in Antarctica and sub-Antarctica.

The design of the British stations in the Antarctic is managed by the Building Services Section (BSS), an in-house team of designers, engineers and surveyors. Much of the detailed design work is let to contractors, under design and build contracts, but this is still monitored and co-ordinated by the BSS. The buildings built by and for BAS in Antarctica tend to be aesthetically simple but functional, unlikely to win any architectural design awards, and described in the British press as ‘frankly, ugly’! This is probably fair comment, although they have never been intended to look pretty. The extreme conditions and remote sites demand designs which are fully functional, easy to transport and erect, but strong, and weather-tight. The criteria are very different indeed to those for buildings in more temperate latitudes.

Buildings of modular design ease shipment to Antarctica.

The buildings must be simple to construct in a harsh environment and not require the use of specialist tools or intricate processes. All systems must be suitable for use by personnel wearing polar clothing.

The buildings and the mechanical and electrical services must be easy to maintain at a low year-on cost, while providing a safe and comfortable living/working environment.

It is important that all buildings are sealed.

Snow blowing at high wind speeds can literally pass through the eye of a needle. It is not impossible to find a one cubic metre pile of snow inside a door, that has blown in through the key-hole during a blizzard.

All BAS structures and facilities are designed to give a minimum life span of 20 years.

Summer-only BAS personnel travel to the Antarctic in November or December, returning to the UK in March or early April. Construction projects either need to be programmed to complete in one season, or be planned in distinct phases. 

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Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

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Rothera.The Bonner Laboratory Since 1975 Rothera has developed in an ad hoc fashion. Buildings are now reaching the end of their design life, or are no longer fit for purpose due to changing needs or not meeting the relevant regulations. BAS is planning a full redevelopment of Rothera Station over the next few years.

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Signy Island is a small sub-Antarctic island, 6.5 km long and less than 5 km wide. There is permanent ice cover over a large part of the island, which rises to 288 m. In the summer, extensive areas of moss and some grasses are exposed, and there are numerous freshwater pools and lakes.

Signy station was established in 1947 primarily as a meteorological station. It was then developed in 1963 into a major biological station with new living accommodation, laboratories and diving facilities, together with a launch and inflatable craft for work at sea. Signy was the centre of BAS biological science until 1995, when the marine component was transferred to Rothera. In 1995-96 the station was rebuilt for the third time for a new role as a summer only station supporting studies in terrestrial and freshwater biology. The new main building, Sørlle House, has living accommodation, laboratories and offices.

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Halley Halley is the UK’s most isolated station and is afloat on an ice shelf on the mainland of Antarctica.The relief of Halley is a major undertaking with supplies being landed twice a year by ship onto the ice shelf and then towed on sledges by Sno-cats to Halley, 12 km distant from the ice edge. The station operates throughout the year with a maximum population of 65 in the summer and an average of 15 over winter.

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Halley I to Halley IV were built directly on the snow and allowed to go below the surface as snow accumulated. They were each abandoned within ten years, having been crushed by the overlying ice. Halley V is the fifth station to be built on the Brunt Ice Shelf.The first was established for the International Geophysical Year (IGY) in 1957-58, and named after the astronomer Edmond Halley.

Halley V contains a mix of building technologies.

Three buildings are located on platforms on steel legs, which are jacked up annually to keep them clear of the accumulated snowfall. An accommodation building and a garage weighing over 50 tons are mounted on skis and towed each year to a new position. Halley V is now very close to the area that may be at risk of ice shelf calving, so its replacement, Halley VI, may be located in a different area to the previous bases to give an extended life span. The design for the new station is likely to be a competition, administered by the RIBA and, if affordable, be the first to be of a radical new form. The construction phase for this station is planned to be over two Austral summers, 2006/7 and 2007/8.

[Halley IV under construction.]

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Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

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Bird Island, King Edward Point, South Georgia In spite of the development work carried out at Bird Island in the mid-nineties, the buildings are a mixture of add-ons and lean-tos, and BAS plans to build a new station building next Austral summer to replace all the various huts and extensions.

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On 22 March 2001 the new BAS applied fisheries research station at King Edward Point, South Georgia was opened.

The opening of the purpose built laboratory and accommodation facilities, which coincides with the withdrawal of the small British garrison from South Georgia, marks the return of biological research to King Edward Point after an absence of nearly 20 years following the Falklands conflict in 1982. BAS scientists are undertaking a programme of scientific research at the new facility under contract to the Government of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (GSGSSI), which is aimed at providing sound scientific advice to assist in the sustainable management of the valuable commercial fisheries around the island.

Don Taylor has been the Head of Building Services for the British Antarctic Survey for the last ten years.Though a structural engineer by qualification, he has spent most of his career to date as a project manager, in contracting, consulting, and the public service.

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rideau hall

The Canadian Rangers assert Canada’s sovereignty in isolated but strategically vital areas of the North. As a part-time reservist patrol the Canadian Rangers perform a variety of annual duties to ensure that there is a visible presence in some of the most remote regions of the country.

Governor General Adrienne Clarkson presents Honory Iitogitok with his Canadian Decoration for dedicated service with the Canadian Rangers. Rankin Inlet, May 8, 2002.

Two good books and a website Stephanie White

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an one turn an interest in the north into a contribution to the north? In terms of building and construction issues, keeping in mind the housing crisis across the north, I called up the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the National Research Council in Ottawa to see what new research or projects were going on.

Jean-Marc Lamothe, of the Institute for Research in Construction, National Research Council outlined their model of innovation clusters for new research. An innovation cluster is defined by public and private sector partnerships and networks in a significant concentration of innovative companies around a nucleus of research and design facilities.

Among other things, IRC will explore the possibility of a communitybased cluster to develop sustainable northern communities, based in the North, in partnership with northern and federal organizations. The first step is a forum in May, in Whitehorse, followed by a feasibility study to see if it makes sense to invest and develop a northern innovation cluster devoted to some construction aspects.

Clearly one must be in the north to be involved. The old model of living in the urbanised south and working on behalf of the north determined, and was determined by, a relationship between the federal government which maintained sovereignty over Canada’s north (its waterways and its resources) and a Canadian culture which sees The North as a distant colony upon which we can project ideas, myths, experiments in living.

The north, to many Canadians, is the clean splinter of ice in our collective character that distinguishes us from the indulgent climate to the south. Its value to many of us is notional.

Sherrill Grace explores this in Canada and the Idea of North, showing how the North is visualised, articulated, written about; how it is narrated and by whom. The north is a Canadian reflex — its presence has shaped Canada in ways far beyond its geophysical mass. Grace’s premise is that ‘no matter who, when, or where we are, we are shaped by, haunted by ideas of North, and we are constantly imagining and constructing Canada-as-North, as much so when we resist our nordicity as when we embrace it’. The north of the mind is constructed as a series of icons, of potential futures. It acts as a mental safety valve for the clumsy squandering of resources in urban Canada. Adrienne Clarkson in a BBC interview with John Simpson said ‘it’s knowing that the north is there, that is Canada’.

This powerful and figmental north is actually marginalised by Harold Strub in Bare Poles. Building design for high latitudes. Here the north is a land with a geophysical history, with a global context to its inhabitation, its climate, its rocks, lichens and foxes, its thousand year old artifacts lying on its surface. This is not only an extensive manual on how to build in the north, it is also a significant discussion of how the north works. The fault lines of language, European contact, dependence and globalism impinge on every aspect of Northern life. Strub details windows, Inuit humour, a rocky parallelogram that is a city lot, the sound and optical qualities of arctic air, the owls, the ravens — if I keep writing sentences that are lists it is because this book is so intense, so rich it cannot be reduced even in a review. Strub discusses everything, from autochthonous culture to the longevity of factory errors in prefabricated buildngs.

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Strub says at one point (p14), Northern Canada is a Third World country in everything but name. It is underdeveloped. It is rich in non-renewable resources but unable to exploit them because of high development costs and low international commodity prices. It has a system of highways inadequate to the task of shipping goods to markets. It has native culture in collision with imported culture. It has an immature political system. It has high unemployment and lacks a stable pool of entrepreneurial and technical skills. It is short of capital investment.

Like other third worlds, Canada’s north suffers from polemical and inappropriate interference in the running of its affairs. Real sovereignty in the north is the climate and the indigenous people whose long struggle to regain self-determination has had to combat both romantic conceptions of the North and the ambivalent self-interest of the federal government, which has militarised it while reluctantly moving slowly through the land claims negotiations. 

Harold Strub. Bare Poles. Building design for high latitudes.

Carleton Library Series, McGillQueens University Press, 2001

Sherrill E Grace.

Canada and the Idea of North. McGill-Queens University Press, 2001

www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/aboutUs/ corporatereports/vision2006/ vision2006_pillars_e.html)

Stephanie White is editor of On Site review and usually writes about bridges on this page. But books are bridges, here from south to north and back again.

Architecture of the Circumpolar Region

in this issue: mayo dawson city cambridge bay nordurdalur rae-edzo otaniemi rothera mexico city antarctica

iqualuit bank’s island whitehorse eskasoni bratsk nuuk reykjavik tromsø yellowknife

aleta fowler

bay south georgia resolute bay signy island wha ti gameti kotlik anchorage teslin

front cover: top: the first sun in reykjavik (see bjorn otto braaten, p 18) below: inland permafrost meltingbanks island, nwt (see graham ashford, p 14)

Boris at waterbox: The waterbox is a heavily insulated box which sets 4 feet into the ice. Placed shortly after freeze-up in early November, it substantially slows the freezing process allowing the houseboat community easier access to water until break-up in late May. Pictured on a typical minus 46 C day, an ice chisel (or a needle bar) is used to break the ice, and a shovel used to clear out the large pieces before buckets can be filled. (see Aleta Fowler on page 30)