Gosia Grzesikowska
ICE 1
Ice to the rescue. 2018/2019
2018/2019
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Gosia Grzesikowska
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ICE 2
Ice to the rescue. 2018/2019
2018/2019
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Gosia Grzesikowska
references
Ice to the rescue. 2018/2019
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ICE 3
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ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Index
5
introduction 15
interviews
73
bibliography
introduction
ICE 6
2018/2019
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS 2018/2019
Gosia Grzesikowska
An aerial view of the Alaska village of Shaktoolik, Sept. 14, 2016. Laid out on a narrow spit of sand between the Tagoomenik River and the Bering Sea, the village is facing an imminent threat from increased flooding and erosion, signs of a changing climate. (Josh Ice to the rescue. Haner/The New York Times)
Gosia Grzesikowska
ICE 7
Ice to the rescue. 2018/2019
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The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
2018/2019
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Shaktoolik, Alaska resident Edgar Jackson, who says he would head upriver in his crabbing boat if a flood threatens the village, Sept. 15, 2016.
Ice to the rescue.
https://www.arctictoday.com/a-wrenching-choice-for-alaska-towns-in-the-path-of-climate-change/
ICE 8
2018/2019
Gosia Grzesikowska
A large puddle in a low spot on a road in the Alaska village of Shaktoolik, Sept. 14, 2016.
2018/2019
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Raymond Hunt, left, and Everson Paniptchuk, 17, begin to cut up a freshly-caught beluga whale in the Alaska village of Shaktoolik, Sept. 17, 2016.
Ice to the rescue.
ICE 9
2018/2019
Gosia Grzesikowska
Homes, storage sheds and small boats in the Alaska village of Shaktoolik, Sept. 14, 2016.
https://www.arctictoday.com/a-wrenching-choice-for-alaska-towns-in-the-path-of-climate-change/
ICE 10
2018/2019
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS 2018/2019
Gosia Grzesikowska
An aerial bird’s eye view of homes on the ocean’s edge in the Alaska village of Shaktoolik, Sept. 17, 2016. Laid out on a narrow spit of sand between the Tagoomenik River and the Bering Sea, the village is facing an imminent threat from increased flooding and erosion, signs of a changing climate. (Josh Haner/The New York Times) Ice to the rescue.
Gosia Grzesikowska
ICE 11
Ice to the rescue. 2018/2019
2018/2019
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
interviews
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/29/science/alaska-global-warming.html
SHAKTOOLIK, Alaska — In the dream, a storm came and Betsy Bekoalok watched the river rise on one side of the village and the ocean on the other, the water swallowing up the brightly colored houses, the fishing boats and the four-wheelers, the school and the clinic. She dived into the floodwaters, frantically searching for her son. Bodies drifted past her in the half-darkness. When she finally found the boy, he, too, was lifeless. “I picked him up and brought him back from the ocean’s bottom,” Ms. Bekoalok remembered. The Inupiat people who for centuries have hunted and fished on Alaska’s western coast believe that some dreams are portents of things to come.
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A Wrenching Choice for Alaska Towns in the Path of Climate Change
But here in Shaktoolik, one need not be a prophet to predict flooding, especially during the fall storms.
Shaktoolik
Shaktoolik river
Tagoomenik River
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Kivalina Area of detail
Alaska
Anchorage
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Norton Sound
Laid out on a narrow spit of sand between the Tagoomenik River and the Bering Sea, the village of 250 or so people is facing an imminent threat from increased flooding and erosion, signs of a changing climate. With its proximity to the Arctic, Alaska is warming about twice as fast as the rest of the United States and the state is heading for the warmest year on record. The government has identified at least 31 Alaskan towns and cities at imminent risk of destruction, with Shaktoolik ranking among the top four. Some villages, climate change experts predict, will be uninhabitable by 2050, their residents joining a flow of climate refugees around the globe, in Bolivia, China, Niger and other countries. These endangered Alaskan communities face a choice. They could move to higher ground, a wrenching prospect that for a small village could cost as much as $200 million. Or they could stand their ground and hope to find money to fortify their buildings and shore up their coastline.
But, after years of meetings that led nowhere and pleas for government financing that remained unmet, Shaktoolik has decided it will “stay and defend,” at least for the time being, the mayor, Eugene Asicksik, said. “We are doing things on our own,” he said.
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Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
At least two villages farther up the western coast, Shishmaref and Kivalina, have voted to relocate when and if they can find a suitable site and the money to do so. A third, Newtok, in the soggy Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta farther south, has taken the first steps toward a move.
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The Next Big Storm The tiny Cessna carrying two visitors touches down lightly on the thin gravel strip that in Shaktoolik serves as an airport. It is mid-September, and with the commercial fishing season over, the village is preparing for winter. Moose meat simmers on the stove in the house of Matilda Hardy, president of the Native Village of Shaktoolik Council. Jean Mute, the pastor’s wife, stoops to pick cranberries for preserves in a field just outside town. By the river, a fisherman works on his boat, preparing it to hunt beluga whales in the shallow waters of the Norton Sound. In the evening, a boy outside the snack shop where children drink fruit slushies and munch on Kit-Kat bars proudly holds up a fat goose he shot in the day’s hunting expedition. The ocean is calm, but bad weather is already on people’s minds. “I’m wondering what our fall storms will bring,” Ms. Hardy says. As of late November, there had been one high tide, but no severe storm. In Shaktoolik, as in other villages around the state, residents say winter is arriving later than before and rushing prematurely into spring, a shift scientists tie to climate change. With rising ocean temperatures, the offshore ice and slush that normally buffer the village from storm surges and powerful ocean waves are decreasing. Last winter, for the first time elders here can remember, there was no offshore ice at all. The battering delivered by the storms has eaten away at the land around the village, which occupies 1.1 square miles on a three-mile strip of land. According to one estimate, that strip is losing an average of 38,000 square feet — or almost an acre — a year. Flooding from the ocean and the swollen river waters has become so severe that the last big storm came close to turning Shaktoolik into an island.
To Stay or to Go? As Shaktoolik and other threatened villages have discovered, both staying and moving have their perils.
Save place during severe storms
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“That was pretty scary,” said Agnes Takak, the administrative assistant for the village’s school. “It seemed like the waves would wash right over and cover us, but thankfully they didn’t.”
Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
The process of relocation can take years or even decades. In the meantime, residents still need to send their children to school, go to the doctor when they are sick, have functioning water lines and fuel tanks and a safe place to go when a severe storm comes.
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But few government agencies are willing to invest in maintaining villages that are menaced by erosion and flooding, especially when the communities are planning to pull up stakes and go elsewhere. “It’s a real Catch-22 situation,” said Sally Cox, the state’s coordinator for the native villages. Even announcing the intention to relocate can scuttle a community’s request for financing. Some years ago, when Shaktoolik indicated on a grant proposal that it was hoping to move, it lost funds for its clinic, said Isabel Jackson, the city clerk.
Escape route
Shaktoolik’s leaders have identified a potential relocation site 11 miles southeast, near the foothills. But some residents say they fear that their culture, dependent on fishing and hunting, will suffer if they move. And Edgar Jackson Sr., a former mayor, said that the government turned down applications for money to build a road that would serve both as a way to get building materials to their new home and as an evacuation route. Residents currently have no reliable way to escape quickly in an emergency.
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“We called it an ‘evacuation’ road, a ‘relocation’ road,” Mr. Jackson said. “The state and federal government didn’t like those two words.”
Tight Vote Decides Village’s Fate Shaktoolik — the name means “scattered things” in a native language — has been forced to move twice before in its history. The Eskimo tribes that traveled from the north into the region in the mid-1800s found an Eden of berry fields, tundra where moose and herds of caribou grazed and waters where salmon, seals and beluga flourished. By the early 1900s, they had settled into a site six miles up the Shaktoolik River. But in the 1930s, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, responsible for providing educational services to Native Americans, built a two-room schoolhouse on the coastal sand spit, and the residents were compelled to move there if their children were to go to school. The “old site,” as village residents call it, was where many elders in Shaktoolik grew up; the skeletal remains of the buildings are still standing, a ghost town that sits three miles from the village. But that location, chosen by the federal government, put Shaktoolik at the mercy of the fierce storms that barreled into the sound from the Aleutian Islands.
No airport
After a series of close calls in the 1960s — one severe storm destroyed boats and left the airport littered with driftwood, making it impossible for planes to land — another move seemed inevitable.
At a series of three public meetings, the residents debated the choices. Mr. Jackson, who was mayor at the time, recalled that he and his wife were in favor of moving to higher ground. ”That would have solved our problems,” he said. “But majority ruled. We were short three votes.”
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Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
Two new sites were proposed, one on higher ground near the foothills, the other the spot the village now occupies.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Tight Vote Decides Village’s Fate Shaktoolik — the name means “scattered things” in a native language — has been forced to move twice before in its history. The Eskimo tribes that traveled from the north into the region in the mid-1800s found an Eden of berry fields, tundra where moose and herds of caribou grazed and waters where salmon, seals and beluga flourished. By the early 1900s, they had settled into a site six miles up the Shaktoolik River. But in the 1930s, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, responsible for providing educational services to Native Americans, built a two-room schoolhouse on the coastal sand spit, and the residents were compelled to move there if their children were to go to school. The “old site,” as village residents call it, was where many elders in Shaktoolik grew up; the skeletal remains of the buildings are still standing, a ghost town that sits three miles from the village. But that location, chosen by the federal government, put Shaktoolik at the mercy of the fierce storms that barreled into the sound from the Aleutian Islands. After a series of close calls in the 1960s — one severe storm destroyed boats and left the airport littered with driftwood, making it impossible for planes to land — another move seemed inevitable. Two new sites were proposed, one on higher ground near the foothills, the other the spot the village now occupies. At a series of three public meetings, the residents debated the choices. Mr. Jackson, who was mayor at the time, recalled that he and his wife were in favor of moving to higher ground. ”That would have solved our problems,” he said. “But majority ruled. We were short three votes.”
Fall storms come at night
When the fall storms come, they almost always come at night, the waves hurling giant driftwood logs onto the beach like toothpicks, the river rising, the wind shaking the windows of the houses that sit in two orderly rows along Shaktoolik’s single road.
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An Undeniable Link
Children who in summer play outside long after dark hunker down with their parents, listening to the CB radio announcements that serve as the village’s central form of communication. Big storms on Alaska’s west coast are different from those that threaten Miami or New Orleans. They can carry the force of a Category 1 hurricane, but their diameter is five to 10 times greater, meaning that they affect a larger area and last longer, said Robert E. Jensen, research hydraulic engineer at the Army Corps of Engineers Research and Development Center.
Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
“They’re huge,” he said.
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The loss of sea ice, said David Atkinson, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, is “undeniably linked” to a warming climate, as is the rising level of the sea as a result of melting glaciers, the increased volume of water lending even more strength to the ocean’s assault.
No offshore ice - no protection
Fifty years ago, when the beach was a quarter of a mile away, the increasing violence of the ocean might not have bothered Shaktoolik’s residents. But now the sea is almost at their doorsteps. Stopgaps, Not Solutions At one time, Ms. Hardy, the council president, could see the beach from her window. Now she looks out instead on a berm, a mile-long, seven-foot-high mound of driftwood and gravel built by the village as a barrier against an angry ocean. Two state engineers came up with the idea, but they ran out of money before they produced a design. Mayor Asicksik decided to go ahead anyway. Local men hauled the gravel from the mouth of the river in old military trucks bought for $9,000 each and finished the project in less than four months.
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Some residents here say that the storms are becoming more frequent and more intense, although scientists do not have data to confirm this. But there is no question that higher ocean temperatures have resulted in less offshore ice, allowing storm surges and waves to hit with greater force and bringing more flooding and erosion.
Berm - a barrier against an angry ocean.
Residents here are proud of the berm: It is a symbol of their determination to fix their own problems without help from the government. But most also realize that the makeshift barricade is only a stopgap; some question whether it will last even through one big storm. “It hasn’t been tested yet,” Ms. Hardy said. 2018/2019
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Shaktoolik faces other threats that will be difficult or impossible to ward off without assistance.
Problems: Fuel tanks Airport Drinking water supply
could lose 45 acres by 2057
The land continues to disintegrate. The Army Corps of Engineers assessment, while cautioning that its conclusions were based on limited data, estimated that the spit that Shaktoolik sits on could lose 45 acres by 2057, with rising water threatening fuel tanks, commercial buildings and the air strip. But the most urgent challenge is keeping village residents safe in the event of a disaster. Shaktoolik’s current emergency plan calls for people to gather inside the school. But the school building, which sits on the ocean side of the road, is itself likely to be flooded and is not large enough to comfortably accommodate everyone, even if it stays dry.
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Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
Erosion is threatening the village’s fuel tanks, its airport and its drinking water supply, which is pumped from the Tagoomenik River. The boundary between river and sea has been so thinned by erosion in some spots that salt water from the ocean, normally a benign source of sustenance, briefly overtopped the bank and poured into the river during a recent storm.
Even the airport is risky. Carven Scott, Alaska regional director for the National Weather Service, who recently visited Shaktoolik, said that after Hurricane Irene hit the East Coast in 2011, the service conducted an assessment for future storms and concluded that the several million people who lived in vulnerable areas of the Northeast could be evacuated in about 12 hours. A similar evacuation in Shaktoolik, Mr. Scott said, might take five days. With bad weather conditions and low light, “the chances are we could not get a sizable aircraft in there far enough in advance to evacuate,” he said. “You’d have to take people out in groups of 10 or less.” Yet if it is to stay put, the village must find a way to prevent loss of life, if not the loss of property. “They do not want to move and I have to accept that,” said David Williams, a project engineer for the Alaska division of the Corps of Engineers and a member of an interagency group that is helping endangered villages plan for the future.
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Some families have said that in a severe storm they would flee up the Shaktoolik River. They keep their boats stocked with supplies. But the river, Mayor Asicksik and others said, would almost certainly be ice-filled and treacherous, and any attempt to escape would likely end in a search and rescue operation.
No escape!
But if they want to live here
“But if they want to live here,” Mr. Williams said, “they have to have a way to get out of Dodge when getting out is required.” A $100 Million Wish List
The estimated price tag for these improvements? Well over $100 million, according to Shaktoolik’s recently completed strategic management plan. And while state and federal agencies will finance some routine work, it will not even be close to what is needed. No one knows where the additional money will come from. Despite years of government reports calling for action, sporadic bursts of financing and a visit to the region by President Obama last year, the hundreds of millions of dollars it would take for Alaska’s threatened villages to stay where they are — or to move elsewhere — have not materialized.
Wish list: an evacuation road; improvements to the water system and the fuel tank farm; increased fortification of the berm; floodlights and lighted buoys for the river; a new health clinic; 2018/2019
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Kirby Sookiayak, the village’s community coordinator, sits in his office and ticks off the community’s wish list: an evacuation road; improvements to the water system and the fuel tank farm; increased fortification of the berm; floodlights and lighted buoys for the river; a new health clinic; a fortified shelter for residents in a storm.
a fortified shelter for residents in a storm
In Kivalina and Shishmaref, the Corps of Engineers was able to build sturdy rock revetments to armor the villages, authorized by Congress in 2005 to do so at federal expense. But the law was rescinded four years later, and the corps can do nothing more without the villages coming up with matching funds of their own. The state of Alaska — which in the past provided some funds to Newtok, allowing the Yupik community to begin its move across the river to safety — is in a fiscal crisis, its economic health tied to oil revenues. And a federal lawsuit filed by one village against oil and coal companies, seeking relocation money as compensation for their air pollution, went nowhere.
Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
Kivalina Shishmaref
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Perhaps the largest potential contribution is the $400 million allocated for relocating threatened villages in the Obama administration’s proposed 2017 budget. But with a new administration, the fate of that allocation is at best uncertain.
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A large puddle in a low spot on a road in the Alaska village of Shaktoolik, Sept. 14, 2016.
Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
2018/2019
“I wish they’d come and spend one day in one of our storms,” Axel Jackson, who sits on the village council, said of politicians in Washington. The federal government spends billions on wars in foreign countries, he said. ”But they still treat us like we’re a third world country.”
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ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Shaktoolik is scheduled to receive $1 million from the Denali Commission, an independent federal agency created in 1998 to help provide services to rural Alaskan communities. But the money will not go far: some will help pay for a new design to fortify the berm, while the rest is intended to help protect the village’s fuel tank storage.
https://savingplaces.org/stories/fighting-the-rising-tide-in-shaktoolik-alaska
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Fighting The Rising Tide In Shaktoolik, Alaska
Shaktoolik at sunset. The town is battling erosion from storm surges that damage homes, buildings, and infrastructure.
That vibrancy is clear from the end of the village’s small gravel air strip, where two massive wind turbines dance constantly in the gusts. Houses line either side of the village’s only road, painted in vivid shades of turquoise, green, red, blue, and purple. The expansive landscape of the Tagoomenik River to the east and Norton Sound to the west bookends the view. And further down the road, beyond the modern school building and city council office that anchor the village, kids play outside on trampolines and sip on neon slushies bought from the community center as their parents head out on four-wheelers to pick berries on the tundra. The second thing you notice about Shaktoolik is its driftwood. The village’s westward beach is covered with hundreds of dried, paling logs, washed ashore from the mouth of the Yukon Delta further south. The wood is a beautiful and somewhat odd sight, given that the nearest trees to the village itself are miles away in the foothills.
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The first thing you notice about Shaktoolik is its vibrancy.
Driftwood piles up on the edge of Shaktoolik’s gravel berm.
“A lot of erosion, yeah, that’s no secret, this village is eroding,” Gary Bekoalok tells us, pouring a cup of coffee from a thermos. Gary has taken us upriver by boat to see the full extent of Shaktoolik’s exposure to flooding. He’s brought us first to his cabin, which he built from reclaimed wood from the village dump. In the quiet of his camp, Gary thinks about what’s next for his village: “One day we will have a catastrophic event, just a matter of time.”
Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
But what makes for a nice addition to the beach during calm summer days causes problems for Shaktoolik when the fall storms roll through. As storm surges batter the beach, water drives logs up the shore, eroding the sand and damaging homes, buildings, and critical infrastructure such as the diesel tank farm.
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As a construction worker, Gary knows the dangers of building a village atop narrow silt between two bodies of water. He reflects, “If we had a flooding event that sustained its force and the high water saturated the ground, that’s all you need to say.”
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A small village of 260 people, Shaktoolik sits on a 1-mile sand and gravel spit and faces danger of complete inundation from both sides. As log-filled waves chip away at its western shoreline and threaten to wash over the village, the river system on its eastern front swells with intense rainfall. When both happen simultaneously, Shaktoolik becomes a temporary island, stranding its residents and requiring evacuation to the elevated school building or an airlift to another settlement. The Army Corps of Engineers has identified Shaktoolik as one of Alaska’s villages in most imminent danger of becoming uninhabitable. A 50-year storm event will drown the community.
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Still, despite this vulnerability, Shaktoolik feels active and resilient. Walking past the brightly colored houses, it is difficult to grasp that this community faces dire risk of irreparable harm. There is hope here. Much of that hope emanates from Shaktoolik’s mayor, Eugene Asicksik. Every community in Alaska has its champions, but Eugene seems to live and breathe this role. He’s helped to build a community center, brought clean energy to the village, and over the past year has led the community in constructing a self-financed berm of gravel and driftwood to protect the village from storm surges and help stave off erosion.
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Gary Bekoalok at his cabin upriver from Shaktoolik.
Eugene has the tendency to check in daily, pulling up on his four-wheeler to say hi. Over the course of these check-ins, it becomes clear that his philosophy is one of self-help. “If the village wants something, it has to come from the village. There needs to be blood, sweat, and tears,” he says. Eugene walks us through a long list of community-driven improvement projects. “This community put in our own water and sewer,” he tells us, “and we’ve got windmills with 200 kilowatts generating capacity.” Eugene understands the importance of working with the government. As Shaktoolik’s “politician,” he is constantly working alongside governmental agencies. But he also recognizes that the disconnect between a remote Native community and officials in Anchorage or D.C. can be a costly one. “The government comes in here and has preconceived ideas and plans and their own workers, with no community engagement. But there’s always another way to solve a problem and get other benefits,” he says.
“We’ve been having meetings about this [erosion] thing and outside agencies have been studying this thing for so long we’re just kind of resigned to another planning session,” Fred tells us. “They’ve already spent God knows how many hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on these types of meetings, these types of planning sessions when that money could have gone for more infrastructure like building a sea wall or starting a road or a bridge or at least the first three miles [of one]. It is frustrating having these meetings after meetings after meetings and nothing gets done. And so the last couple of years the city has taken it on as its own to actually start doing something, which is the berm that you see out there.”
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Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
Shaktoolik has clearly built up its internal problem-solving capacity. And it’s this capacity that led the Shaktoolik Native Corporation to construct the berm for protection against the storms. But for that story, Eugene sends us to the second story of the Native Corporation’s grocery store to meet the Corporation’s manager, Fred Sagoonick.
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A fall storm in 2013 pushes driftwood up to the edges of houses in the village. This storm occurred before the village had constructed its protective gravel berm.
The berm is the only defense the community has. As with other communities in Alaska, Shaktoolik used to be protected from the power of fall storms by miles of shore ice. But higher temperatures have meant this ice isn’t forming—and last winter the village had no ice at all. With the ice gone, the berm is the only thing that stands between the village and the waves of driftwood.
Evacuation road
The high gravel mound, which runs the length of the village, will help buy Shaktoolik time, but it ultimately won’t be enough to save it. The Village Corporation’s next big project is to somehow finance a 15-mile road to the foothills that would serve as a route both for evacuating and for eventually relocating the village.
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“We know that sooner or later we will have to move. We’re fighting against the rising tide,” Fred tells us.
Residents dry silver salmon outdoors on wooden drying racks.
About two miles down the road from the edge of Shaktoolik’s current town site sits an array of abandoned wooden buildings. Beach erosion has crept up to these buildings over the years, and some of them now teeter over the sand. This is what residents commonly refer to as Old Site—where the Bureau of Indian Affairs school was built. This was the location of Shaktoolik for some thirty years, before storm damage and erosion forced the community to move up the road to the current location. Even on a calm day, wandering around the tall grass at Old Site leaves you with an odd feeling. Two miles up the road, a vibrant community is building new infrastructure and thinking about the future. Yet Old Site is a reminder that there is a limit to even the most resilient community’s ability to adapt
Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
Shaktoolik’s inevitable move won’t be its first. Back at Gary’s cabin, he explains how Shaktoolik has moved before. “Before Old Site, the village was right back here, about two miles that way,” he says, pointing back through some woods. “So the government built that school down [at Old Site], and the village moved down there, and from there they moved to the site we now occupy. So in 100 years we’ve moved twice already—pretty well experienced,” he laughs.
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Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
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No one in Shaktoolik denies this vulnerability. Pulling out several maps of the village, Fred Sagoonick points out just how much erosion Shaktoolik has already experienced. “We have storm surges during these major fall storms that are easily 10 to 12 feet above normal,” he says, “and we’ve been lucky, call it divine providence, we’ve been spared maybe three for four storms. But one of these days it will go over, not a doubt about it, not in my mind.”
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As Eugene reminds us, a big storm can leave the village with no escape route, especially if both the river and Norton Sound flood. “Whatever you see back there up to the tree line,” Eugene says, gesturing to the foothills, miles in the distance, “all of that is under water. It turns into a big bay.”
https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/enabling-families-adapt-climate-change-independently/
The edges of our country are eroding, raising difficult questions about adaptation, relocation, and what it means to be an American experiencing climate change today. To connect the shared experiences of Americans facing these dramatic transformations, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has partnered with Victoria Herrmann as she travels around the U.S. and its territories interviewing communities directly affected by shoreline erosion and climate change. The commentary was originally published on April 25, 2017. The Arctic is warming at almost twice the global average rate, making the effects of climate change far more intense and rapid there than in any other ecosystem in the world. Extreme air and water temperature increases are exacerbating coastal erosion, forest fires, and storm surges that threaten the physical, economic, and cultural safety of settlements across the region. Further inland, thawing permafrost is compromising the stability of transportation, sanitation, and public service infrastructure.
Shaktoolik Unalakleet
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A Wrenching Choice for Alaska Towns in the Path of Climate Change
In Alaska, climate change–induced flooding and shoreline erosion already affect more than 180 villages, and 31 of them face an imminent threat of becoming uninhabitable. Two of the villages included in the America’s Eroding Edges project—Shaktoolik and Unalakleet— are among the most impacted communities in the state.
As a result, most coastal communities must rely on ad hoc federal and state grants, attempting to rebuild and relocate in bits and pieces before an emergency evacuation becomes necessary. In the absence of adequate funding for relocation, communities have taken climate change adaptation into their own hands. A Community Response to Imminent Threat Among the more than 200 community-based interviews I have conducted from American Samoa to Alaska, the village of Shaktoolik stands out. The view from town—across the tundra, toward the distant foothills—is striking. In summer the landscape is dotted with generous berry bushes ripe for collecting and an expansive river system full of salmon. The main street of the village is lined with brightly painted houses, anchored by a state-of-the-art school building and a bustling community center complete with slushy machine and pool table. And the roughly 250 people that call the village home are warm and welcoming—you can’t walk for five minutes without someone stopping you to say hello. Shaktoolik stands out because it is a strong community—a critical feature of success in local climate change planning.
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As they stand today, federal relief programs focus on rebuilding in place after sudden natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy—not on supporting the relocation of towns facing slow-onset disasters like gradual inundation. While the federal government has taken some steps to provide adaptation-specific support, they currently fall short of any real impact. In September 2015, during the first presidential visit to the Arctic, President Obama pledged $2 million to help with voluntary climate-induced relocation efforts in Alaska. Unfortunately, that amount covers less than 2 percent of the cost of relocating just one town, which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (CoE) estimates to be between $80 and $250 million.
Today the CoE again identifies Shaktoolik as a site of extreme eroding and with immediate need of relocation; it is one of only four villages in the entire state of Alaska to receive that label. While the land may not be strong, the community is. In every interview I conducted in Shaktoolik, residents—whether leaders, elders, hunters, or school teachers—identified the same values and goals in their fight against climate change: protection in place now, establishment of an evacuation road, and a path toward eventual relocation to the foothills. The cost estimates of relocating Shaktoolik into the foothills exceed $290 million. Lacking government support from either the state or national level, residents have taken the community’s safety into their own hands.
Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
Shaktoolik is located on a barrier spit between the Norton Sound and Shaktoolik River in Western Alaska. Originally a reindeer-herding community located six miles upriver, the village moved to the mouth of the river in 1933 for easier barge access and moved again in 1967 due to severe erosion and storm winds. “So, in 100 years we’ve moved twice already,” Gary Bekoalok, a lifelong resident of Shaktoolik, explained to us over coffee at his fishing camp up the river. He had taken us upstream by boat to see the full extent of the village’s exposure to flooding. In spite of these moves, he explained, the village has an immense connection to the land. When we asked whether the community would relocate to a larger settlement like Nome or Kotzebue after an emergency evacuation, Gary shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think people are too attached to the land. Even if we move off the [current] site, we’re still at the land.” Part of that connection to the land lies in just how far back the village’s history stretches, he told us. “The people have a lot of ties with the land historically. I know Shaktoolik is … the second old[est] occupied village in Alaska. When I say the people have a long history with the land, that’s what I mean. So even if we move down to the foothills, we’ll be on the land of our ancestors—our historical ties are still there.”
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Relocation Road: Simple Infrastructure for Resilience About a 20-minute flight southeast of Shaktoolik lies the village of Unalakleet, a largely Native community with a population of fewer than 700. The village is bordered by the Norton Sound and the Unalakleet River. With trees, tundra, and hills behind it, Unalakleet is known across the region for its rich salmon and king crab harvests. Like Shaktoolik, Unalakleet faces extreme erosion and flooding from more intense storms and an absence of ice to buffer surges. To alleviate the erosion trend, the town has armored its shoreline with rocks and a gabion wall—a wire box filled with smaller rocks—over the past several years. While that sea wall has reduced inundation, another adaptation initiative is doing much more than mitigating flooding hazards in the short term—it’s building community resilience by providing a tool for residents to relocate from the bottom up.
Gabion wall
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
After years of bureaucratic inaction, the mayor of Shaktoolik, Eugene Asicksik, and other community members built a coastal berm to protect the community. The berm, funded with money raised locally by the Norton Sound Economic Development Corporation, uses a four-foot pile of driftwood covered with gravel to protect houses from the Norton Sound’s storm surges. The widespread support for the berm is evident not only from interview answers but also from residents’ commitment to build and upkeep the barrier. When we visited the village in August, machines were humming along the beach, reinforcing the barrier with gravel. This upkeep, which is entirely locally sourced, locally funded, and reliant on local labor, represents universal, across-the-board support that is made possible by broad social cohesion—itself an effective tool in protecting communities from the effects of climate change.
In Alaska roads are difficult to come by. There is no state road system, and the vast majority of rural communities rely on propeller planes or snowmobiles for transportation between villages. While Unalakleet is not connected to any other settlement, a 15-mile road —originally built by the U.S. Air Force for access to an early-warning radar station during the Cold War—does lead to the hills behind town. Decades after being decommissioned in 1973, that road is now providing a unique strategy for adapting to shoreline erosion and sea level rise.
Wind Farm 2018/2019
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In 2009 Unalakleet sold land in the foothills, freeing uphill areas along the road for the construction of new homes and subdivisions at a higher elevation. Thanks to the road, families are able to relocate further inland on their own timelines, without having to wait for a federally funded wholesale move. The road has also enabled the town to develop new infrastructure uphill, including a new tank farm for fuel, a dump, and a gravel pit. New houses on the hillside have their own wells and septic tanks but still have access to the electricity grid, about 25 percent of which is powered by a wind farm. The wind farm was a community-driven infrastructure project that began with a 2008 application to the state of Alaska’s Renewable Energy Fund for $4 million. The farm has now grown to six turbines and has saved the village tens of thousands of dollars since the first turbine was installed. The self-relocation is not without its drawbacks. Hillside residents still need to commute one to four miles into town for school, work, and other basic services that are located in a less vulnerable part of the shoreline site and, therefore, are unlikely to be relocated inland in the near future. Four miles is an expensive drive when gas can cost up to $7 per gallon. And some community members, accustomed to open areas and coastal landscapes, feel uneasy surrounded by the trees uphill. Still, the road allows the town to organically grow and adapt to a rapidly changing environment without waiting for external funding. This may become especially important in the event of flooding or a particularly intense storm, when newly constructed uphill homes can serve as temporary shelters for those who live along the coastline below. Unalakleet is now one of the more resilient communities labeled in imminent danger in Alaska. Threats to the low-laying portions of the community, which include erosion and storm surges, will pose an ongoing concern, but armoring the shoreline while simultaneously encouraging development to organically move uphill offers much-needed flexibility when adapting to the physical effects of climate change.
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Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
Rather than planning for large-scale projects that require significant federal funding, Shaktoolik and Unalakleet are now empowering their residents to act on the local level. Strong, socially cohesive communities not only shape and support sustainable neighborhoods but they also empower local leaders to effectively adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change
https://savingplaces.org/stories/when-the-seawall-breaks-climate-change-in-teller-alaska
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
When The Seawall Breaks: Climate Change In Teller, Alaska
There are three gravel roads that run out of Nome, each riddled with the ruins of Alaska’s gold rush.
About a two-hour drive from Nome, (if you can resist stopping to watch the roaming musk oxen), Teller embodies the overlapping histories of Alaska Native communities, gold rush era fortune-seekers, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the pressures of rapid environmental change. “There were thousands of gold miners here,” Blanche Okbaok-Garnie, Teller’s mayor, says of the gold boom days of the early 1900s. “Teller became Teller in 1900, and before that it was Libbyville,” she says, recounting the history of the village’s evolution from reindeer herding outpost to large gold mining community. Today, the village’s population has dwindled to about 280 Inupiat residents—the area’s original inhabitants—who continue the subsistence way of life that was central to the Teller area long before white settlers arrived in Alaska.
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To the east, the Nome-Council Highway passes the last rest stop of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race and snakes around a rusting train that’s slowly sinking into waterlogged permafrost. To the north, the Nome-Taylor Highway runs about 65 miles to Pilgrim Hot Springs. And to the west is Teller.
Teller’s history goes beyond the boom and bust of gold in Alaska, however. In the 1970s, Blanche tells us, Teller came under the BIA policy of forcing Alaska Native children to either attend school or be taken away from their parents. While Teller had a school, not every community in the area did. This meant that communities without schools were forced to disband, and co-locate with those that had them. This is how Teller became home not only to the community of Teller, but also the community of Mary’s Igloo, a village some 40 miles up the Kuzitrin River. This partly explains the large group of 13 people, representing two different village governments, native corporations, and native government bodies, who have gathered in the community hall to meet us. When it comes to climate change, Teller faces similar threats to those faced by other Alaska Native villages. Nathan Topkok, a member of the traditional council for Mary’s Igloo, starts the meeting by explaining how increasing air and water temperatures make fishing and snowmobile travel over tundra difficult and dangerous. “Ice fishers go through the ice now, they can’t walk on it. Normally we can go fishing before Thanksgiving, but last year we couldn’t,” he says.
For Blanche, the most dramatic environmental change requires a short walk from the community center up a hill overlooking Port Clarence Bay, where the village cemetery sits. There, thawing permafrost is making the bluff more susceptible to erosion from wind and storm surges. “My uncle is buried on the back side of the cemetery next to the sea,” she says, “and [his grave] was sticking out of the ground from erosion. So we were going to get permission from the court to dig him up and move him where he is less likely to just fall into the sea.”
Iceof to thearerescue. The shifting of grave markers, many which now precariously close to the edge of the
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Gosia Grzesikowska
Another resident, Tanya Ablowalak, chimes in to say that it’s fall-time storms that pose the biggest challenge as they wash through the town’s corroded seawall. “Instead of every 20 years,” she describes, “we have a flood—we have high water warnings every single fall now.”
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The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
bluff, is unsettling. And it is indicative of the broader environmental challenges the community has been facing for years.
Over the past three decades, Teller has been forced to relocate both their airport and landfill four miles uphill to escape intense erosion along the village’s low-lying spit, a narrow strip of gravel jutting out from the center of town. Not only have these municipal services been displaced, but the village itself has been cleaved in two. In 1974, an extreme flood forced the village to evacuate to higher ground two miles inland. They built emergency housing there, intended at the time to be temporary. But as flooding of the lower village became increasingly common, these temporary homes became permanent. The Coyote Creek Subdivision, locally known as the New Site, is now home to 33 permanent homes, all of which remain without sewer service today.
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“It was only designed to last ten years and it’s overfilled now,” Blanche says. Now, when it rains, she tells us, “it drains into our only drinking water . . . It should have never been built on top of the hill and draining down on the berries that we eat. The greens that we eat, the only clean fresh water source is right there.” When asked if there has been any effort to mitigate these issues, she responds, “Only studies.”
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The flooding and erosion that stretched Teller out has had other environmental consequences as well. The landfill that was once at the base of the village now sits uphill from it.
The lack of real federal or state action to address a growing number of environmental challenges in Teller is unsurprising. Building costs in Alaska dwarf anything seen in the Lower 48, and with 31 Alaska Native villages currently at imminent risk from erosion, resources are scarce. Teller, like other communities in Alaska, is attempting to protect against the increasingly frequent flooding. Today, a small, rusted sea wall is all that separates the town from the water.
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Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
“Years ago, they threw a bunch of stuff down here, whatever they had, trucks and the equipment to help break some of the waves,” Blanche explains as she points down to rusted out machinery.
Teller is in a precarious position. Though it faces a number of imminent threats, it is not among the four villages in Alaska that have been identified as requiring immediate relocation. This means that many of the problems the village faces, it faces off the radar, on its own. The best strategy, at least for patching the sea wall, may be for residents to once again band together as they did in the 1970s. But the splitting of the community has made full community cooperation a challenge. And without sufficient resources or outside support to implement new infrastructure projects, there is little to galvanize support for such action.
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“Usually we don’t talk openly,” Blanche observes after the meeting. “We don’t share stories like we did today. People were so willing to talk to you, but they won’t talk to each other.”
Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
In 2011, a storm washed out a central portion of the wall, allowing water to flood into the community. Blanche explains, “Water rushes in every year and goes into the roads and into the sewage lagoon up here.”
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Walking along the sea wall, you can see three generations of defense. Furthest out is the first community-led effort of armoring the coast with whatever heavy machinery they could find. About ten years later, residents again created their own defense through a wall of old oil drums filled with gravel. Both the first and second generation of seawall are now corroded and washing out. Dotted among the rusted metal, wood beams and wire caging also provide a stronger, but sporadic barrier.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/us/shishmaref-alaska-elocate-vote-climate-change.html
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
When The Seawall Breaks: Climate Change In Teller, Alaska
An abandoned house at the west end of Shishmaref, Alaska, that slid during a storm in 2005. Residents have voted in favor of relocating the community to the mainland. / Diana Haecker
2018/2019
In the unofficial results of an election on Tuesday in the village, Shishmaref, residents voted 89 to 78 to leave. The plan would move the village, which is 120 miles north of Nome, to one of two sites on the mainland about five miles away, officials said. But the village needs an estimated $180 million from a patchwork of sources to complete the move, according to a 2004 estimate. Shishmaref is an Inupiat community of about 600 people on Sarichef, an island north of the Bering Strait that is about one-quarter mile wide and two and a half miles long. It has been grappling for decades with the loss of buildings and infrastructure caused by storm surges, and it has shrunk over the past 40 years — more than 200 feet of the shore has been eaten away since 1969, according to a relocation study published in February.
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Residents of a small Alaskan village voted this week to relocate their entire community from a barrier island that has been steadily disappearing because of erosion and flooding attributed to climate change.
Esau Sinnok 18, supports relocating but said some locals were resistant to uprooting from a place that has been inhabited for 400 years. / HelenMarie Bessi Sinnok
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Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
Efforts to move the town in 1973 and 2002 were derailed by several issues, including attachment to a school built in 1977 and concerns about the long-term viability of alternate sites. Officials spent more than $27 million from 2005 to 2009 on coastal protection measures that had a life expectancy of 15 years, according to the relocation study.
Many of those villages have 10 to 20 years before their streets, schools and homes become uninhabitable, and at least 12 have decided to relocate at least in part, the institute said. One of them, Newtok, has already started moving its 300 residents and is in the “pioneering stage,” with just a few homes and roads built at the new location, said Sally Russell Cox, an Alaska state planner. The new site, about 12 miles away in southwest Alaska, will not have working power, water treatment or a sewage lagoon for years, according to Alaska Public Media.
Boats off the coast of Shishmaref. Some residents expressed concern about two potential relocation sites on the mainland because they lacked access for barges / HelenMarie Bessi Sinnok
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
As many as 200 million people could be displaced by 2050 because of climate change, according to a study for the British government. In Alaska, 31 villages face “imminent threat of destruction” from erosion and flooding, according to the Arctic Institute, a nonprofit group in Washington that studies issues affecting the Arctic.
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ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS 2018/2019
Shishmaref is not alone in facing a move because of the effects of climate change. In January, the federal government allocated $48 million to relocate Isle de Jean Charles, La., an island that is sinking into the sea. The effort earned the residents the title of the United States’ first “climate refugees.”
Ms. Cox said communities voting to relocate must balance how to take care of residents at their current site with “incrementally strategizing to make this relocation become a reality.” In Shishmaref, the close vote to relocate reflected a division among residents. Percy Nayokpuk, 63, the owner of the Nayokpuk General Store, was not convinced that the relocation would happen. “I’m going to have to wait to see how all of this shakes down,” he said on Thursday in a telephone interview. “There’s a number of questions to be answered before we can make a very serious attempt at moving.” Mr. Nayokpuk said that those who voted against relocating were not opposed to moving but were unhappy with two potential sites on the mainland for the village’s future home. He said those sites — Old Pond and West Tin Creek Hills — lacked access for barges, which serve a vital role in delivering fuel and other supplies. “I’m a businessman, and I have to stock up on fuel and building materials, and without good barge access around, that village will not survive,” said Mr. Nayokpuk, whose father opened the general store in 1960.
“To me, I think some people are just putting this relocation to the side,” Mr. Sinnok said. “They think Shishmaref will always be there.” After so many years of debate and study, the question of moving remained an emotional topic, Mr. Sinnok added. “It’s been really hard for me and my family to really discuss this because Shishmaref is our home; it’s where our heart is,” he said. “It’s where I want to be buried.”
Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
Another resident, Esau Sinnok, 18, supported relocating but conceded in a phone interview on Thursday that it might be long in coming. He said some locals were resistant to uprooting their history and heritage from a place that has been inhabited for 400 years. He said he would prefer to have residents move collectively to a new home rather than be dispersed to a number of mainland communities.
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references
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A type of shelter built of snow, typically built when the snow is easy to compact. On the outside, temperatures may be as low as −45 °C (−49 °F), but on the inside the temperature may range from −7 °C (19 °F) to 16 °C (61 °F) when warmed by body heat alone
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Igloo
Highly optimized, only functionality counts, aesthetics is not important. There is no ornametation. Dome can be structure can be raised out of independent blocks leaning on each other. Building on site, dependency on a material snow.
Credits: https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/national-film-board-of-canada-how-to-build-an-igloo-1949
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Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
Igloos - historical background - my research
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Inside the life of the Inuit: Extraordinary photographs document how Alaska’s Eskimos survived the cruelest of winters
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Igloo building: A family of Eskimos containing four children and three dogs are seen surrounding the work of an igloo gradually built up from the surrounding snow
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Withstanding: A line of Eskimo men are pictured between 1900 and 1930 while wearing various shades and patterns of animal furs as protection
Gosia Grzesikowska
Homes’ accommodations: Stacked homes of cliff dwellers along King Island in Bering Sea, Alaska are seen just off the side of snow
Home sweet home: An Eskimo hut, lined in animal skins, is seen from the outside
Their unique methods and examples – from their heavy, bundled furs to their exhaustive hunt for meat across the ice and sea – are shown proven methods of survival. Adaptation - using only thing from the surroundings
Credits: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2253029/Historic-photographs-document-Alaskas-Inuit-Eskimos-survived-worlds-coldest-winters.html
Ice to the rescue.
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Inside the life of the Inuit
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Snowflakes nucleate around mineral or organic particles in moisture-saturated, subfreezing air masses. They grow by net accretion to the incipient crystals in hexagonal formations. The cohesive forces are primarily electrostatic.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Classification of snowflakes An early classification of snowflakes by Israel Perkins Warren
Credits: https://howlingpixel.com/i-en/Snow http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Snowflake
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Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
Incredible shapes of snow flakes. Inspiration - process of freezing can be beautiful in micro scale.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 2018/2019
„Both houses and cities must unfold itselves as flowers do in the summer sun, but also like flowers should turn away from shadows and cold northern winds, providing the warmth of the sun and wind protection to the terraces, gardens and streets. They should be totally different from those buildings with colums, cities with porticos and sunny streets from Arab villages and southern Europe, although very close considering their main goal: help people keeping their body temperature at comfortable 35º. We would not be interested in forms while studying these southern villages, but surely about their inventiveness and art by which the solved different problems, the beauty they achieved.”
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ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Arctic Town Ralph Erskine, The Polar Record. 1968
Ralph Erskine, view from the south of the proposed new Resolute Bay town design, c. 1973.
Credits: https://www.metropolismag.com/cities/planning-cities/untapped-promise-arctic-urbanism/ http://www.grahamfoundation.org/grantees/5153-post-occupancy-report-ralph-erskine-s-experimental-arctic-town
Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
Ralph Erskine’s proposed Resolute Bay town design (1973) remains a symbol of an Arctic-informed urbanism.
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Some coastal communities in western Alaska have observed the occurrence of “slush-ice berms.” These features typically form during freeze-up, when ice crystal – laden water accumulates in piles on the shore. Slush-ice berms can protect towns from storm surge, and they can limit access to the water.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Slush-ice berm Slush-Ice Berm Formation on the West Coast of Alaska
Slush-ice
Credits: https://arctic.journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/arctic/index.php/arctic/article/view/4644/0
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Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
Slush-ice berm was proven to be better shorline protection, better than any man-made concrete berms.
The Snow Show in Lapland, Finland, in 2003 and 2004 was a first-of-a-kind curated exhibition for an international collaboration between leading artists and architects. Lance Fung invited architects including Zaha Hadid, Morphosis, Diller + Scofidio, Asymptote and Tadao Ando for this project, which partnered with international artists. Thirty structures made of ice and snow revealed various conceptual and architectural possibilities for the visual and practical arts. The teams transformed their unusual building element into a cool light experience – ranging from transparent, to opaque and colorful and even to glowing effects.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
The Snow Show
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Fluid fossils - Morphosis + Do-Ho Suh
Obscure Horizons - Lawrence Weiner & Enrique orten
Zaha Hadid and Cai Guo-Quiang
Credits: https://alchemyindesign.wordpress.com/tag/ice-architecture/ https://www.archdaily.com/780763/frozen-architecture-from-glistening-snow-shows-to-multi-colored-ice-festivals?ad_medium=gallery
Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
The visual possibilites of ice. Aesthetics
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How is it possible to make an ice structure that’s over a dozen feet tall, yet only a few millimeters thick? Swiss engineer Heinz Isler hung nets, cloth, balloons and strings from trees, supported them with rods and then sprayed them with water. Once the supporting structures were removed, these fragile and dreamlike structures became free-form shells of ice.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Heinz Isler ice structures
Credits: https://safetythird.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/heinz-isler-ice-structures/
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Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
a millimeter thick layer of ice was enough to allow the supporting structure to be removed
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 2018/2019
Each of these form-fiding methods was illustrated in his paper, with an example. However, the most interesting illustration of all was the last, which showed sketches (in Isler’s own hand) of 39 very different possible shell forms with the caption „Natural hills on the different lines” (Isler 1961). In the bottom right-hand corner of the diagram was the abbreviation „etc” indicating the potential that Isler saw for an infinite number of exciting shells to be created.
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Heinz Isler ice structures
The hey factors: Function Shaping Artistic expression Statics Construction Cost
For any given plan shape, the number of forms that can be found using a hanging membrane is potentially infinite.
Credits: https://safetythird.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/heinz-isler-ice-structures/
Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
Form studies.
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Due to unexpectedly warm weather we were headed home with only one completely finished object but on the other hand with very good feeling that our original idea actually worked.
Credits: http://www.mjolk.cz/en/ice-balls https://inhabitat.com/tiny-ice-pods-provide-shelter-for-cold-weather-adventurers/
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Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
2018/2019
Tiny ice pods provide shelter for cold weather adventurers
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
The Ice Balls / Mjรถlk architekti
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Ice Balls Technology Ice Balls Technology is based on water spraying on air balloon during freezing. After creating the ice crust, these balloons can be deflated and used for another icy object. One necessary condition is temperature under -6 degrees. Newly formed objects have very characteristic light and acoustic features. These features differentiate them from other standard igloos or ice hotels.
Credits: https://www.archdaily.com/804906/the-ice-balls-mjolk-architekti
Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
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The Ice Balls / Mjรถlk architekti
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Ladakh is a trans-Himalayan mountain desert in the extreme north of India with villages located at 2,700m to 4,000m altitudes. It is a cold desert with winter temperatures touching -30° C, and an average annual rain/snow fall of only 100 mm. Human settlements are almost always located around glacial streams which feed into the Indus and other rivers as tributaries. The key to human settlement in this cold desert is the art of diverting water from the streams through meticulously built canals toward deserts to grow crops like barley, wheat, vegetables and trees like apricots, apples, willow and poplar.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
The ice stupas of Ladakh – India
Ice Stupa: Made from artificial glaciers, they store wasting winter water that melts & feeds farms when water is scarce
Construction of ice stupas is usually started in winters. This technique needs no pump or power. The water piped from upstream can easily rise up to the height of the source. The water rushing out of the pipe starts freezing in cold winter nights (at -30 to -50°C). The water first freezes at the ground level and then mount higher increasing the height of ice stupa. As the height of the stupa increases, it naturally takes the shape of a cone. To support the structure, ropes and willow tree branches are used. Due to the cone structure, the stupa can escape melting. As these ice cones extend vertically upwards towards the sun they receive less amount of direct sunlight. This helps the ice stupa to escape melting and last longer till summer.
Credits: http://www.urban-hub.com/buildings/examples-of-ice-architecture-for-cold-winters/
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http://icestupa.org/ Ice to the rescue.
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Gosia Grzesikowska
Learning from nature and adapting this in new technology. Innovative and simple use of ice.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
These amazing sculptures are made possible because of Hanson’s geothermal heating system used to heat his home. A geothermal heat pump works like a reverse refrigerator taking heat from one source and rejecting cold into another. In Hanson’s case, his system takes ground water at 47 degrees to preheat his home and then rejects the water at 37 degrees into the pond near his home. During the winter, he takes this super cold, but not frozen, water and uses it to form his ice castles.
Credits: https://weburbanist.com/2013/12/25/intricate-ice-architecture-17-fantastic-frozen-buildings/2/ https://gearjunkie.com/ice-sculpture-collapse-lake-superior
Ice to the rescue.
ICE 45
Gosia Grzesikowska
2018/2019
Winters in Minnesota are cold and the best way to get through the bone-chilling season is to have fun with it, just like Roger Hanson does. For the last 4 years the ice builder has been growing ice castles in his front yard with the help of his geothermal heating system, some fancy sprayers and a computer program he created himself
2018/2019
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Geothermal Ice Castles
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2018/2019
2018/2019
The structure is built with 5,000 to 12,000 large icicles, each 18 inches to 3 feet in length, some grown naturally and some frozen within pipes, that form the basic structure, like an internal scaffolding.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Ice castles
“Ice is amazing – as we add these layers, we put icicles out where we want the next layers to be and spray. ... It’s like a welding process – it will both melt the existing ice and then freeze to it, so the layers are actually fused,” he said.
Credits: https://www.concordmonitor.com/ice-castle-nh-14426397
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Ice to the rescue.
ICE 46
Gosia Grzesikowska
Sherri Covell of Ashland fuses icicles to the top of an in-progress ice tower at the ice castle display in Lincoln on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2017.
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The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Elaborate ice castles are among the frozen wonders on display each year at the Winter Carnival in St. Paul, Minnesota. The tradition goes all the way back to 1886, when the first winter festival was held to celebrate the character and strength of the city and its people after a New York reporter wrote that St. Paul was “another Siberia, unfit for human habitation.�
2018/2019
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS 2018/2019
Winter Carnival Ice Castle, Minnesota
Credits: https://weburbanist.com/2013/12/25/intricate-ice-architecture-17-fantastic-frozen-buildings/2/
Ice to the rescue.
ICE 47
Gosia Grzesikowska
Ice as a building material as an example of culture pride.
47
2018/2019
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The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Going all the way back to the first Ice Palace in 1886, the towering palaces have been an awe-inspiring feature of the Saint Paul Winter Carnival for decades.
2018/2019
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Winter Carnival Ice Castle, Minnesota
Credits: https://weburbanist.com/2013/12/25/intricate-ice-architecture-17-fantastic-frozen-buildings/2/
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Ice to the rescue.
ICE 48
Gosia Grzesikowska
Ice as a building material as an example of culture pride.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 2018/2019
A blight of an abandoned house – one of many, sadly, in the city of Detroit – became a work of art when two Brooklyn artists blasted it with water in freezing winter temperatures, turning it into an ice sculpture. The project had to be carried out quickly, before warm days could melt the ice, and required continuously spraying it with water throughout the night during the coldest days of winter. Of the decision to use ice, artist Matthew Radune says, “In the end it was also an ecological decision. The ice would disappear after the project was complete, leaving no waste for us to dispose of.”
2018/2019
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Ice House of Detroit
Credits: https://weburbanist.com/2013/12/25/intricate-ice-architecture-17-fantastic-frozen-buildings/2/ Credits:
Ice to the rescue.
ICE 49
Gosia Grzesikowska
Art
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Frozen architecture – using ice as a building material in structures worldwide
2018/2019
2018/2019
Europe’s second-largest glacier is now “open” for business – literally. An 800-meter-long cave carved into the belly of the 50-kilometer-long glacier welcomes visitors to a unique appreciation of the power of nature. LED lighting illuminates the way to an array of secondary tunnels and – for the truly romantic – a space for weddings or other special events
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
The world’s largest human-made ice cave – Iceland
Credits: http://www.urban-hub.com/buildings/examples-of-ice-architecture-for-cold-winters/
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Ice to the rescue.
ICE 50
Gosia Grzesikowska
The power of ice.
2018/2019
Students from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and Summa College, both from the Netherlands, and the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) worked together to build the tower for the Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
A record-breaking 31-metre-high ice tower has been installed at the annual winter festival in Harbin, China, featuring a shape inspired by the flounces of a flamenco dancer’s dress.
2018/2019
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
World’s tallest ice tower built with the shape of a flamenco dress
Credits: https://www.dezeen.com/2018/01/23/worlds-tallest-ice-tower-flamenco-dress-harbin-ice-snow-festival-2018/ https://materialdistrict.com/article/ice-architecture/
Ice to the rescue.
ICE 51
Gosia Grzesikowska
Structural capabilities of ice.
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2018/2019
2018/2019
Harbin, China transforms into an ethereal showcase of ice architecture and sculptures illuminated in bright colors each January. The annual festival began as a traditional ice lantern garden party in 1963 and is now the largest snow and ice festival in the world, taking over virtually the entire city, with a unique theme each year.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Harbin Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, China
Credits: https://weburbanist.com/2013/12/25/intricate-ice-architecture-17-fantastic-frozen-buildings/2/
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Ice to the rescue.
ICE 52
Gosia Grzesikowska
Amazing possbilities of ice in architecture
The construction alone requires muscle power, snow ploughs, and tons of ice — a very respectable feat considering the fact that these hotels have to be built from scratch every year.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Ice hotels
Hôtel de Glace, Quebec City, Canada
2018/2019
2018/2019
PHOTO: COURTESY OF HOTEL DE GLACE.
Ice Hotel, Jukkasjärvi, Sweden PHOTO: COURTESY OF ICE HOTE
Sorrisniva Igloo Hotel, Alta, Norway PHOTO: COURTESY OF ICE HOTE
Credits: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/ice-hotels
Ice to the rescue.
ICE 53
Gosia Grzesikowska
The example of modern usage of ice in comercial architecture.
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Pykrete is a frozen composite material, originally made of approximately 14 percent sawdust or some other form of wood pulp (such as paper) and 86 percent ice by weight (6 to 1 by weight).
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pykrete
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Pykrete
Project Habakkuk
2018/2019
2018/2019
During World War II, Geoffrey Pyke proposed it as a candidate material for a supersized aircraft carrier for the British Royal Navy. Pykrete features unusual properties, including a relatively slow melting rate due to its low thermal conductivity, as well as a vastly improved strength and toughness compared to ordinary ice. These physical properties can make the material comparable to concrete, as long as the material is kept frozen
Artists impression of a Pykrete Carrier
Credits: https://allthatsinteresting.com/project-habakkuk
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Ice to the rescue.
ICE 54
Gosia Grzesikowska
Discovery of a new material and increadible idea for usage.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 2018/2019
The prototype proved it was too impractical to implement, and Pyke and his team were eventually forced to abandon the idea. The British turned their attention to more practical projects, and the remains of the prototype, and an underwater plaque, still lie under the bottom of Patricia Lake.
2018/2019
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Project Habakkuk
Credits: https://allthatsinteresting.com/project-habakkuk
Ice to the rescue.
ICE 55
Gosia Grzesikowska
mission failure
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2018/2019
2018/2019
The shape of the ice structure is based on a geodesic dome, because this shape will only cause very little tensile forces in structure. Ice has very low tensile strength, but with this shape very thin ice structures are still possible. Structural analyses of the dome indicated that the largest forces occur at the bottom and around the entrance of the dome. For those reasons pykrete is applied only in the lower part of the dome. In the upper part plain ice is sufficient
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Pykrete dome
Credits: http://structural-ice.com/dome.html
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Ice to the rescue.
ICE 56
Gosia Grzesikowska
Structural capabilities of pykrete.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 2018/2019
The Design of the Sagrada Familia in Ice is based on the design of the real Sagrada Familia by Antoni GaudĂ. The Sagrada Familia is designed by a model with suspended chains, which is better known as catenary design. A suspended chain or rope will always get the shape of a smooth curve, meaning that the chain is only subjected to tension and absolutely no pressure.
2018/2019
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Sagrada Familia in Ice
Credits: http://structural-ice.com/SAGRADA.html
Ice to the rescue.
ICE 57
Gosia Grzesikowska
First architectural approach in usage of pykrete.
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2018/2019
2018/2019
Mythbusters Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage see if a ship made out of ice and sawdust—or, in this case, newspaper—is seaworthy.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Can you Build Ships Out of Ice?
If you break it down, pykrete is really a type of particleboard that uses water as the binding agent instead of glue. But it’s weak like particleboard, which has limited structural strength. So what would be a stronger alternative? Plywood! Its layers of wood veneer and glue form a stable, sturdy sandwich.
Credits: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a4101/4313387/
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Ice to the rescue.
ICE 58
Gosia Grzesikowska
Use of other materials than sawdust to reinforce ice.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 2018/2019
A 52-foot bridge made of live ice is on display in front of the Danish Parliament on the Christiansborg Slotsplads. The display for COP15 „opened” yesterday and stays up until in melts. It’s part of the Leonardo Bridge Project, which is creating this graceful yet powerful structure in permanent materials on each continent around the world based on a 500-year-old design by Leonardo da Vinci. All the bridges hold a symbolic meaning and though Copenhagen’s ice bridge will melt, the hope is that it remains standing through the conference.
2018/2019
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
The da Vinci Bridge in Ice
Credits: https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/bridge-to-somewhere-davincis-design-on-ice.html
Ice to the rescue.
ICE 59
Gosia Grzesikowska
Example of bigger structures from ice composites.
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2018/2019
2018/2019
ivil Engineering students raised the annual ice arch in the Cornerstone Plaza. The ice arch is continuing the 50 year UAF tradition as a part of Engineering Week
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
An ice arch made of pykrete
This year’s ice arch took on a boxed-in design and new color from the use of pykrete. Pykrete is a composite material made up of sawdust and water. Ryan Cudo, the arch designer and build team co-captain chose the material for its increased durability and slow melting rate.
Credits: http://uafsunstar-archive.com/engineering-students-premier-an-ice-arch-made-of-pykrete/
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Ice to the rescue.
ICE 60
Gosia Grzesikowska
The difficulty of proportion.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 2018/2019
The research was developed through both physical and digital prototypes. Studies were done in order to determine ways to use ice as a 3D printed material, setting up parameters such as temperature, structural performance, curing time and deposition rates which were then correlated into larger scale digital simulations. The next stage of the research involved using architectural solutions to deal with difficult climatic conditions and structural performance. In the last stage of the work, we focused on the translational abilities of quadcopters and the organisation of swarm robotics through simple rules dealing with building time and construction logics.
2018/2019
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
AADRL SWARM PRINTING: TEMPORAL ICE CONSTRUCTION
Credits: https://www.kokkugia.com/filter/behavioural-production/AADRL-swarm-printing-temporal-ice-construction
Ice to the rescue.
ICE 61
Gosia Grzesikowska
New technology in ice fabrication - 3d printing
61
2018/2019
2018/2019
Future colonists stand outside the Mars Ice Home, which was designed as part of a feasibility study at NASA Langley Research Center in 2016 in collaboratioon with SEArch+ and CloudsAO. The home uses water-ice to protect against radiation and for structural support. It also has an inflatable membrane. The ice additionally helps with insulation alongside a layer of carbon dioxide which can be extracted from the Martian atmosphere.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Ice Home on Mars
Credits: https://www.space.com/39760-mars-ice-home-concept-in-pictures.html
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Ice to the rescue.
ICE 62
Gosia Grzesikowska
Future of ice as a structural material. Interesting cosntruction method
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
3d printing, a process that turns subsurface ice into water vapor, vapor used to deposit liquid water, in an environment cold enough to print a form in solid ice.
Credits: http://www.marsicehouse.com/ https://www.space.com/39761-mars-ice-house-concept-in-pictures.html
Ice to the rescue.
ICE 63
Gosia Grzesikowska
2018/2019
The Mars Ice House is the winning design from NASA’s 2015 Centennial Challenge for a 3D-printed habitat for future human settlers on Mars. The architecture and space research collective SEArch+ and Clouds AO created this winning design which allows the humans living inside of it to feel connected to the outdoor environment on the surface of the Red Planet.
2018/2019
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Ice House on Mars
63
2018/2019
2018/2019
A breakwater structure is designed to absorb the energy of the waves that hit it, either by using mass (e.g., with caissons), or by using a revetment slope (e.g., with rock or concrete armour units).
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Breakwaters
Credits: https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/
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Ice to the rescue.
ICE 64
Gosia Grzesikowska
Different design ideas for interlocking elements.
Gosia Grzesikowska
2018/2019
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Credits:
Ice to the rescue.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
text
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ICE 65
2018/2019
Project title
przemyslenia
2018/2019
2018/2019
American artist john grade‘s ‘capacitor’ is a kinetic sculptural installation that moves in response to weather data collected from the roof of its home at john michael kohler arts center, wisconsin. the artwork — whose coil configuration is influenced by organic and geometric forms found in nature — physically behaves according to accumulated statistics from a mechanized controller, amassing both current outdoor conditions and weather patterns from the past one hundred years. sending the information about change in wind intensity and temperature directly to the sculpture, the interactive art piece moves and changes in luminosity.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
Capacitor
the coil configuration is influenced by organic and geometric forms found in nature image courtesy of john michael kohler arts center
Credits: https://www.designboom.com/art/john-grades-capacitor-moves-and-illuminates-with-weather-data/
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Ice to the rescue.
ICE 66
Gosia Grzesikowska
przemyslenia
Gosia Grzesikowska
Credits:
Ice to the rescue.
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ICE 67
2018/2019
2018/2019
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Brick inspiration
2018/2019
2018/2019
In emerging sector of construction is developing new systems that manage to not only reduce construction times and costs, but also solve the housing problem in Mexico’s most disadvantaged areas. Originating from previously known construction techniques, national companies are venturing into international markets by proposing new models of construction that use fewer materials and have a greater structural strength and greater comfort. They’re also introducing smart materials adaptable to any construction need.
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
This Self-Build Concrete Block System Reduces Construction Time by 50%
Credits: https://www.archdaily.com/795653/this-self-build-system-reduces-construction-time-by-50-percent?ad_medium=gallery
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Ice to the rescue.
ICE 68
Gosia Grzesikowska
przemyslenia
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 2018/2019
FORMABLOK is a DIY re-usable block mould that allows the user to cast their own landscaping blocks with their own creative concrete mixes, or simply poured with left over concrete form other projects. After concrete hardens forms can be stripped and ready for re-pour in only a few minutes.
2018/2019
ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONEMNTS
FORMABLOK - the ultimate DIY concrete block mold
Above is a typical full block form. The new patented design allows the mold to come apart in three pieces which makes the use of monograms or texture inserts easy. To the right is a picture of the form apart.
Credits: http://www.formablok.com/about
Ice to the rescue.
ICE 69
Gosia Grzesikowska
przemyslenia
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