A Profound Immersion
The Ilulissat Icefjord Centre, designed by Dorte Mandrup and built close to Greenland’s Sermeq Kujalleq glacier.(photo: Adam Mork).
Until relatively recently, our northern circumpolar regions remained outside most people’s imagination or consciousness. These are places that few have travelled to and which are little known by those of us living in the urbanised (read: southern) parts of North America, Europe and Asia. They are frequently perceived as pristine and empty.
There are, however, few regions that have seen more dramatic environmental, economic and cultural transformation over the past four decades. World powers vie for the Arctic’s resources and navigation routes; climate and local ecologies are undergoing dramatic changes; and indigenous peoples are increasingly asserting their sovereignty and cultural practices. Simultaneously, tourists have become willing to venture further afield, and are now encountering the Arctic’s exquisite landscapes and peoples. As architects extend their interest beyond urban centres and familiar design references, rural and remote regions offer a new challenge for thoughtful design.
Greenland, a territory of Denmark with a population of 56,200, of whom 89 per cent are Inuit, has been working toward political and economic autonomy since Home Rule was established in 1979. Its landscape is one of mountains, fjords, rocks, glaciers, moss and snow. There are no trees, making the articulation of topography the main expression of landscape. This landscape, however, is fragile and ever-changing, a reality amplified as the Arctic becomes the canary in the coal-mine of global climate change.
The Ilulissat Icefjord, a fjord in Greenland’s western Avannaata municipality, is of particular interest in this regard. The fjord is a Unesco World Heritage Site, designated for its natural beauty and the significance of the scientific research being conducted on its rapidly transforming Sermeq Kujalleq or Jakobshavn Glacier. “One of the few places where ice from the Greenland ice cap enters the sea, Sermeq Kujalleq is also one of the fastest moving (40m per day) and most active glaciers in the world,” notes Unesco. “Its annual calving of over 46 cubic kilometres of ice, i.e. 10 per cent of all Greenland calf ice, is more than any other glacier outside Antarctica, and it is still actively eroding the fjord bed.” The annual parade of icebergs in Disko Bay has made the town of Ilulissat (the Kalaallisut word for “icebergs”) the country’s most popular tourist destination. Despite this, the country remains remote, and travel to and within it is relatively difficult. Even internally, Greenland’s communities are largely accessible only by boat, helicopter or plane.
It is impossible to consider architecture in the Arctic without thinking about the impact of the local landscape, climate and geography. The recently completed Ilulissat Icefjord Centre (IIC) is, therefore, highly significant. It sits in the landscape – half pavilion, half public viewing platform – overlooking the small lake that leads to the icefjord. The architect of this remarkable building is Dorte Mandrup, a Danish practitioner whose Copenhagen studio has developed a number of projects that are located in unique, fragile ecologies or else on sites that grapple with troubled historical events: the thatched-roofed Wadden Sea Centre (2017) is based in Denmark’s Unesco-listed Wadden Sea, a system of intertidal sand and mud flats, while Mandrup’s unrealised competition proposal for the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center outside of Kyiv marks the site of Nazi Germany’s massacre of 33,000 Jews in 1941. In both cases, Mandrup’s designs serve to reveal the landscapes and histories in which they sit. Her structures question the environmental and cultural ground upon which they are built, and often seek to remake it. Originally trained in sculpture, ceramics and medicine, Mandrup has built her practice with projects that pursue sculpturally bold yet simple forms, and material choices rooted in local culture and narratives.
I have researched the Arctic for 15 years and a question that has long shaped my reflections on architecture in this region is: what constitutes an Arctic vernacular today? How, as designers, can we listen to and learn from the cultural and material practices of this unique place, rather than importing familiar, Eurocentric references? This is a particularly difficult question in Greenland, which was under Danish control for more than 200 years, but which maintains a vibrant Inuit culture. Equally, Greenland is a country with no permanent building tradition of its own; most of its architecture reflects building styles largely imported from Scandinavia. Mandrup suggests that in an environment such as this, “contextualism” is less about relating to formal (imported) building traditions and more about how architecture relates to the landscape and environment such as wind forces, unstable ground and seasonal differences.
Several times in our discussion, Mandrup used the term “house” in describing the IIC. This, she explains, is an unintentional translation from the Danish, but it also seems appropriate for the intimacy of the project. As Mandrup suggests, the wider European landscape is groomed and tamed – it is rarely threatening or out of control – whereas Greenland’s topography and climate are quite different. Responding to the immensity of this landscape, however, the Ilulissat building offers opportunities for both outlook and refuge. Its protected interior evokes a tent-like shelter or an over-turned boat hull, while the roof provides a generous viewing platform. Both of these allow visitors to better immerse themselves in the dramatic geology and ecology of the icefjord, with its slow, cinematic sweep through the landscape.
As the theorist Timothy Morton argued in his 2010 book of the same name, “ecological thought” imagines human and animal species, ecology and culture working as an immeasurably vast mesh of interconnectedness. We cannot understand phenomena in isolation; “the ecological thought needs to develop an ethical attitude we might call ‘coexistentialism’”. In Ilulissat, geologic time and the Anthropocene collide, and the IIC bears witness to it all with a profound immersion in its environment. Perhaps the only question is: do we deserve Mandrup’s exquisite building as a setting for witnessing the ecological upheaval we have authored?
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Lola Sheppard How did you become involved in the project and how did the community of Ilulissat decide to develop it?
Dorte Mandrup There have been people working on this for many years – both to get it funded and to get the idea through, because Ilulissat is a really small town. It’s just 4,500 people. The idea was initially funded by a group of people in Nuuk and Ilulissat, and I think they actually tried to get Peter Zumthor to do the project without hosting a competition, but later on the Danish foundation Realdania became involved and they then ran a competition. So we applied and were pre-qualified together with [firms including] Kengo Kuma and Olafur Eliasson. It was a two-stage competition and quite a long process before we actually won. The brief was also put together by Realdania. It featured a thorough investigation into sustainable tourism in the area, also looking at how to make sure that the centre would be used both locally and for research. The brief specified an exhibition, of course, but also a café that could be used by the local community, offices for researchers, and an office for the ranger who looks after the Unesco heritage area. It also focused on how to place the building such that it didn’t disturb the views from the Unesco heritage park, because it’s right in the buffer zone. Part of our work was to make sure that you couldn’t see the building from anywhere on the trails of the Unesco heritage park.
Lola So the exact site was something that you decided?
Dorte There was a given site that was not large, but what was a little bit disappointing when we first came there was that you couldn’t actually see the Icefjord from that site. There’s quite a large rock facing the Icefjord, so you had to go right up to the edge to be able to see the ice field. Part of our design was to make the building overhang the site. There’s a small lake and steep hill that we cantilevered over to make sure that while you’re moving through the museum, you discover the Icefjord on your route. Part of the formal language was to shape it as a boomerang, because we really wanted to exhibit the Icefjord as well as the exhibition itself. Another part of the design was that it twists from one side to the other to create a ramp onto the roof, so that when you’re there, you don’t necessarily have to buy a ticket to go through the exhibition – you can still have the experience of moving up this ramp and then discovering the Icefjord as you move down the other side. So, in a way, creating this movement through and over the house marks a kind of gateway between the civilisation of Ilulissat and this amazing geography.
“The summertime is magical, because you have the midnight sun and a feeling that you’re somehow missing out if you go to sleep. Life is around you all the time and people are up all night, fishing or hunting. ”
Lola This site is significant scientifically, but also as an amazing landscape – what were your impressions of it when you visited? Had you been to Greenland before?
Dorte No, which is so interesting. Danes travel a lot, but Greenland somehow feels difficult – “Oh, going to Greenland is a big expedition.” It’s also quite expensive to go there.
Lola I took a group of students to Greenland almost 10 years ago and the experience felt like our Canadian North – very few Canadians go there, partly because it seems inaccessible; it is very expensive to travel there and you have to fly. I think it stays outside our collective imagination, in the same way that Greenland does for Denmark.
Dorte Yes. The first time I went to Greenland was actually in October, when it is already very snowy and extremely cold. But the area changes a lot in the summertime because the snow melts at the end of May and you have this short window of June, July, and maybe August, before the snow comes back. That window is just amazing. I’ve now been there several times and visiting in the summertime is magical, because you have the midnight sun and a feeling that you’re somehow missing out if you go to sleep. Life is around you all the time and people are up all night, fishing or hunting. I now can’t understand why I didn’t go before.
Lola So how does the project address that seasonality, because as you noted the landscape changes so dramatically. Does the project change its reading as a building from summer to winter?
Dorte In a lot of ways, you could think of the building as being a part of the landscape, changing with the season. In Greenland, when you have snow, mobility is very much through dog sleds or snowmobile. Since the landscape is covered in snow, the roof of the IIC becomes a part of that landscape. In the summertime, it’s much more like an animal that is resting on top of the rocks. The idea was that the building should reflect time, because Greenlandic bedrock is one of the oldest in the world, whereas the building has a much shorter timespan, so the idea is that the building just rests on top of the rock. We wanted to do as little blasting of the bedrock as possible, both out of respect for its longevity, but also because the marshes and small plants growing there are very fragile – if you blast something, it can take 30 years to restore the nature around it. So we’ve tried to land on the rock as sensitively as possible. More practically, when the snow is melting there’s quite a lot of water that you need to drain, so lifting the building up and letting the water drain into the lake in front of it was obvious. When you look at most of the buildings in Greenland, they are all constructed on small stilts because it means that when the snow melts you don’t get the water in your house. Another practical issue is that the wind is so strong that it blows the snow around, so you get snow buildup which can be huge. To prevent that, the shape of our facade is aerodynamic, so the snow blows away from it. We tested the building during the competition in a wind tunnel to make sure that snow would not build up on its facade.
“The idea was that the building should reflect time, because Greenlandic bedrock is one of the oldest in the world, whereas the building has a much shorter timespan.”
Lola What other challenges were there in building for that extreme climate and how is the building designed to accommodate the environment?
Dorte It was always part of the idea that we should make a building that is sustainable within the climate that you’re placing it in. In this context, you have to think about the extreme cold of the outside compared to the interior: when you are designing a highly insulated building, you need to make sure you’re not creating any cold bridges that might cause deterioration. Originally, for instance, the house was [going to be] 100 per cent wood, but because of climate change, the permafrost is not there anymore – you have much more volatile movement between frost and not frost. Wood used to be a great construction material in Greenland, but it is now less durable because it doesn’t withstand the humidity. So we used Accoya on the exterior, which is a modified wood that is extremely durable, and we used steel frames for the main structure. The rest is a wooden construction to create the most sustainable building possible. Everything was designed to be packed in shipping containers, shipped to Greenland and mounted quite rapidly to use the short construction window of two or three months in the summertime and close off the building as quickly as possible, leaving builders with the winter to work on the interior. Construction was extremely thoroughly planned.
Lola Is the project site not just pure bedrock? Is even that affected by the permafrost changes?
Dorte It’s gneiss, which although a rock is not pure bedrock, so there is still a bit of soil. And what is interesting is that Realdania has also been restoring Greenlandic buildings from the 17th century – old trading stations an hour away by ship. Those were placed right on the permafrost when they were built, but they’ve now had to make foundations for them, because everything is changing. It’s devastating, like how the Icefjord is withdrawing so quickly. You see the effects of climate change very clearly here.
Lola On this question of climate change, communicating that to a public is difficult. You probably have a more enlightened tourist in Ilulissat – people going there are presumably curious and interested – but what strategies have been adopted by the centre to communicate the story of the landscape, climate change and the people living there? How do you hope the building might alter people’s perceptions?
Dorte Well, one of the things is how you hear about the glacier withdrawing. When you go to the Icefjord and see the site, you’re not able to see the glacier, because it has withdrawn so far. You have to travel by helicopter to see it. So, in a way, it is already a communication of the climate change that is happening there that you are not able to see the glacier. Then there is the idea of the centre exhibiting ice cores, in which you actually see the history of the world – you can see the industrial revolution go by, with a few layers of ice that are absolutely black. There’s a kind of “revelation” when you see them. You suddenly understand that everything you do around the globe affects everybody else. There’s that idea that you can take those cores from the ice cap and see what has been happening around the world – large volcanic eruptions, changes in climate. Everything is visible in them. I hope that people will understand that we have a responsibility, no matter where we are and what we are doing personally. As well, the Icefjord Centre works with rangers and their activities are part and parcel of understanding the importance of the ice and the Arctic, and not just seeing it in terms of natural resources and oil. I was actually in Kangerlussuaq, west Greenland, with students from Cornell a few years ago. Even though we’d been working for a whole semester on Arctic issues. Without being too sentimental, being in the Arctic really gave them the experience of being human within a global continuity. It is very healthy for everybody to understand we’re quite small.
“There is that contradiction between enormous beauty and danger. The cold – and the sense that if you walked out, you could die – is somehow a very exciting or exotic experience.”
Lola Let’s come to this question of cultural heritage – the challenges of designing for a landscape that is protected and where the act of adding a building might be controversial. How do you create an architecture that plays a scientific and cultural purpose, but which also sits lightly on the land?
Dorte Well, one of the things about the Arctic and which, especially as a Dane, I haven’t experienced before, is this feeling of endlessness. The Arctic has no trees and so no scale; there is no measuring tool and the feeling of being human in that vast landscape is very different from any of the other places we’ve designed for. The feeling of creating shelter and creating a starting point for understanding that landscape has been important to us. At both ends of the house, we have these open shelters, where you can find protection from the wind. There is that contradiction between enormous beauty and danger. The cold – and the sense that if you walked out, you could die – is somehow a very exciting or exotic experience, for most Europeans, at least. The idea of creating shelter in this landscape and a departure point was important.
Lola The project is seen as important for Greenland’s tourism strategy, but there is a constant battle between wanting to bring tourism and recognising that it’s a force that actually threatens these fragile ecologies and cultures. Most of the communities are small, so what does it mean when you have twice as many tourists coming through as there are local people?
Dorte It’s extremely important that we work consciously to create sustainable tourism – which is kind of a strange buzzword – because tourism is necessary for these areas to survive. It is no secret that there are a lot of social problems in Greenland and that its transition from being a traditional culture has been really tough. Being conscious about how to create tourism in a decent way is part of creating jobs and dignity, and in that sense the Icefjord Centre is important. It goes hand-in-hand with the Greenlandic government’s initiatives around creating education through tourism. To me, it’s not a contradiction to create tourism here, because you can’t leave Greenland with all the problems that modernism has created for it; you can’t just ignore it.
“In Ilulissat, they have this tradition that when the sun rises for the first time in six weeks, you come out, go to the highest peak and see the sun come up to celebrate, which is very poetic.”
Lola And I think that Greenland doesn’t want to be “left alone” – part of its devolution from Denmark is developing economic autonomy. Flipping the question around, how is the building being used by local residents? One of my revelations from being in Nuuk was the Katuaq cultural centre [a 1997 building designed by Schmidt Hammer Lassen for Greenland’s capital, ed.]– coming from Canada, where there’s nothing like that, it was so lovely to see and I got the sense that locals really used it.
Dorte That’s the hope. I haven’t been back since its opening because of quarantine rules, but the idea is to make this a place that is locally anchored. In Ilulissat, they have this tradition that when the sun rises for the first time in six weeks, you come out, go to the highest peak and see the sun come up to celebrate, which is very poetic. By having the roof of the house as part of the landscape, it becomes a potential gathering place. You are outside, but you’re still creating a sense of place. And so the hope is that the roof will be a Greenlandic plaza, you could say, or a public place where you actually meet and gather. As far as I understand, people are already all over the roof, and that’s local people, not tourists, which is really wonderful.
Dorte Mandrup (photo: Cecilie Lindegaard).
Lola One of the things that I have thought about a lot is how one understands a modern architecture vernacular for the Arctic, and of course that vernacular would be different in Canada from Greenland and from Russia. In this case, it would be a Greenlandic Arctic vernacular.
Dorte Most of the design was addressed towards the Arctic climate. We didn’t want to do what many Danish architects have done when designing in Greenland, which is create – with no ill intent – buildings that you would see in Copenhagen or Norway or Sweden. This creates problems technically, but also culturally. Most Greenlandic houses are freestanding for functional and cultural reasons – it’s partly for melting snow, but also because there is no private land ownership. When you live in Greenland, you don’t buy land – your house is on everybody’s land and you create your life around that. It was really important to us that we did not create a culture that belonged to a Danish way of life or else a kind of urban setting. We created shelter at the centre against the western and eastern winds, and we did not landscape anything; we just left everything as it was. We were really trying not to recreate an urban setting in a Greenlandic context – which is certainly not urban at all. So when you enter the building, the entrance is quite large because you need to wear spiked shoes when you walk around in winter, otherwise you’ll fall. And, of course, they have large winter coats on too. You need an area where you can take off your shoes and leave them there, or take off your coat and dry your clothes a bit.
Lola These sorts of seemingly banal observations about having a lot of clothing, having gear, are the things that are unique – which architects often don’t look at, but which make a project a place. I’m interested in how architects learn from these cultural and material practices, rather than importing familiar influences from elsewhere – Denmark or southern Canada, for instance. This is critical, now more than ever, because many countries are coming to term with their colonial legacies. I’m curious – was it difficult being a Danish architect working on this project?
Dorte It’s an interesting discussion and balance all the time. Especially in Greenland, there is no real building or vernacular tradition, because it’s often just been imported from Scandinavia. Think about those wooden houses that we now know as typical Greenlandic houses – while their use of colour is very Greenlandic, the building tradition itself is Scandinavian. In a way, I would rather not relate to the building tradition itself, but more to the way in which the buildings relate to the landscape, or the way that you conceive of buildings in comparison to landscape. I would much rather discuss the building as a shelter for human beings in the landscape. It’s quite amazing: there were people here 1,000 years ago – how is that even possible? I have great respect for that culture of survival. It is not something that I understand, but I admire it.
Introduction Lola Sheppard
Photos Adam Mork
This article was originally published in Disegno #30. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.