Arctic Circle: The Latest Architecture and News

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When architects Guylee Simmonds and David Schnabel bought a Scottish survival lifeboat for a voyage to the Arctic, they dreamed of setting sail to Norway and beyond. Called Stødig, the 100-man vessel was purchased in 2018 and converted over a one-year period. Capturing their inspiring journey, filmmaker Jonny Campbell created a feature film that explores the expedition and what it means to discover adventure in the everyday.

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The Danish architecture firm Dorte Mandrup A/S won the international competition to design “The Whale”, a new touristic attraction for northern Norway, that will tell the stories of the majestic sea creature through art, science, and architecture.

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Snøhetta has unveiled its design for "Svart," a hotel for sustainable tourism company Arctic Adventure of Norway. Located within the Arctic Circle, on the edge of Norway's Holandsfjorden fjord at the base of the Svartisen glacier, the building is designed to the "Powerhouse" building standard, a system developed by Snøhetta and a group of collaborators for creating energy-positive sustainable buildings.

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Plans have been revealed by American-Norwegian data company Kolos to construct the world's largest data center, a claim based on the amount of electrical power the site intends to draw from the grid to supply its banks of servers and cooling facilities. Located on a fjord in Ballangen, Norway, the proposed site sits within the Arctic Circle and would take advantage of the cold climate, low humidity, and the abundant supply of hydropower currently available in the area.

Gallivare, Sweden might be known for its reindeer, but it's gradually undergoing an urban transformation. Liljewall Architects in collaboration with MAF architects have created Kunskapshuset (House of Knowledge), a new school, for the archetypal "arctic city."

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Lateral Office's Arctic Adaptations exhibition, which was recognised with a Special Mention at the 2014 Venice Biennale, will travel make its debut in Canada at the Winnipeg Art Gallery this week before heading to Whitehouse, Vancouver, and Calgary. The exhibition "surveys a century of Arctic architecture, an urbanising present, and a projective near future of adaptive architecture in Nunavut" though interactive models, photography, and topographical maps of the twenty five communities of the area, as well as Inuit carvers’ scale models of some of the most recognised buildings in the territory. In addition, it proposes a future of adaptive and responsive architecture for Canada's northern territories.

UPDATE: Our interview with Lateral Office is now up!

For this year's Venice Biennale, the Canadian Pavilion explored the ways modernity was absorbed in the extreme environment of Nunavut, Canada. As Nunavut is the newest, northernmost, and largest territory (with an area of over 2 million square kilometers) in Canada, Lateral Office hoped to shed on light on what Mason White called "modernity at an edge." Wowing the jury with their research and design, Arctic Adaptaptions: Nunavut at 15 garnered Mason White, Lola Sheppard, Matthew Spremulli, and their team a Special Mention during Saturday's awards ceremony.

The geographic and cultural "edgeness" of Nunavut is examined over different parts of the exhibition in three mediums: a recent past, a current present and a near future. Matthew Spremulli explained that Arctic Adaptions sought to "look beyond standards" to see how the fundamentals of architecture are impacted in an area like Nunavut. Given the specific and acutely unique challenges to building and designing in an environment that, understandably, resists being colonized by southern models, the curators presented a case for adaptation.

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Biotope, a three-strong Norwegian practice based in the Arctic town of Varanger, have designed bird hides since 2009. For them, architecture is "a tool to protect and promote birds, wildlife and nature" - an approach reflected in their carefully crafted, environmentally integrated fragments of the 'invisible': small shelters that must blend into and be absorbed by their surroundings. Their diligent work has seen Varanger become established as one of the best birding destinations in Northern Europe and their unique design solutions are now being sought across Scandinavia.

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The results from the first brief of Think Space's MONEY themed cycle of competitions, Territories, have been announced. David Garcia (MAP Architects), juror of the Territories competition, invited participants to send in proposals "that tackle the present economic and territorial challenges in the present and future of the Arctic lands." See them all, after the break...