1: Site preparation for Yellowknife’s newest hous- ing development. The pre-manufactured homes, designed in, and brought up from the South, require level sites. Pre-Cambrian Shield is not like flat prairie grasslands and level sites need to be created when these houses are used.
rubble culture | Yellowknife and land integrity Aleta Fowler
2: Giant Mine housing was adjacent to the mine. Roads followed natural contours. Water and sewer were brought in separately from the roads via utilidor; electrical lines were overhead.
w hen you see something really ugly in the built environment, a desecration of the land, you have to wonder how it happened – and what to do (photo 1). Yellowknife is typical of those Northern communities whose economy is not based upon traditional rhythms of hunting, trapping, fishing, but instead grows in spurts linked to opportunities like gold, diamonds, gas. Each spurt brings more buildings – a process few have time to pay attention to because, during growth spurts, everyone’s working too hard! Although explosives have been available in Yellowknife as long as Yellowknife has been in existence, in the early days it was easier to place housing around the contours of the land, especially when you were in a hurry. The early log houses were discretely tucked in the shelter of hollows, where the rocky land allowed access. Later, the mine housing wiggled roads through the rocks & separately drew utilidor lines across the rocks to houses placed in the relative flats of the landscape (photo 2). Later housing required even more ingenuity to work with the land – pads and wedges, screwjacks and piles to name a few. Almost as a mounting skill test, houses were now wanted with piped water and sewer and a way to pull your car up to your door and get the fire truck in if needed. So the places were scoped out where the familiarity of Edmon- ton and Winnipeg could be mimicked for the arriving population, until one day, people looked up and saw – rubble (photo 3).
3: A slightly older large development of pre- manufactured homes in Yellowknife.
4: Two years ago, this was a gently sloping pink outcropping of Pre-Cam- brian Shield providing a foreground to Stanton Region Hospital set on Frame Lake. Stanton services all of NWT and, at that time, also had one of the prettiest hospital settings in the country.
5: This multi-story apart- ment in Yellowknife works with the land- scape, leaving trees and rock intact.
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architecture and land
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