w hen I first moved to northern Canada in the mid-eighties there were a number of old military buildings and off the shelf designs from the south being used for schools, offices, community centres and nursing stations.The school in Tuktoyaktuk, built right on the coast of the Beaufort sea, was the same building that could be seen all over southern B.C. At this time there was a recognition of the various social problems that were evident in northern communities.The government of the North- west Territories initiated large, comprehensive and expensive building programmes to address both suitability and social fit. However, the primary factor in these projects was speed, followed closely by cost. Innovative or creative thinking was quickly brushed aside.The driver was brutal economics. Moving to the Yukon in 1990, I found the same kind of problems.This time the government of Yukon asked me to write a new set of architec- tural design guidelines. Merely producing another set of jurisdictional standards, was not going to cut it, so I took the state of the art mandate and the research for it seriously and published the guidelines in 1991, incorporating a Green approach in 1992. Much of what is thought to be innovative is actually old, and can be reduced to four basic components, the site, sun, microclimate and the user group. These can each be found in recent northern-appropriate; climate-sensitive buildings. The considerations are elementary: building orientation, sun paths, daylighting and shading, helio-morphic form gen- eration, topographical use of the site, photovoltaic systems, microhydro systems and water recycling. Northern building is increasingly Green. In 1995 I went to the International Winter Cities Association Forum, in Bratsk, Siberia. The theme was Children and the North. I used my experiences in planning and designing for children, (in schools, hospitals, clinics, and the urban habitat), with northern-appropriate criteria to develop an ecological model: Place Experience for Child-Sensitive Northern Habitats .The model is a dynamic one and recognizes dualisms found in the north such as dark-light, indoor-outdoor, warm-cold, retracting- expanding, close-far, free-constrained, young-old, culture-environment. All WCA forums are held mid-winter in an interesting winter city. Bratsk was certainly one of the most interesting, especially from a western-circumpolar perspective. It is a homogeneous city that origi- nally housed workers who laboured on a large dam, finished in1955, and which supplies power for all of eastern Siberia. Many workers were political prisoners from the Stalin era. In 1995, Bratsk had much brutal concrete with a surprising amount of planning and landscaping. The large apartment slabs had landscaped parkways between them, with roads and paths on each side of the park. It was a quiet city with few cars. Although there was public transportation, many people walked considerable distances — scores of walkers could be seen at all hours of the day. Other technological differences were seen. Much Russian construction uses prefabricated concrete and cinder block panels.Window technol- ogy did not (in the mid-90s) use double or triple glazing units, rather they installed a standard single pane window on the inner and outer skins of the envelope. Northern Building Perspectives: from concrete to green Michael L. Barton
the central system: how it all fits together
Children playing in the parkland between apartment blocks in Bratsk, Siberia.
Architects and engineers in the Canadian north, have been to Russia and Siberia, to help with northern-appropriate design.There is a mini sub- division that uses timber frame construction with rigid insulation sys- tems, incorporating coincident air-vapour barriers, in the Yakutsk region of Siberia designed by Ferguson Simek Clark architects and engineers, and built by Canadian building contractors. In just twenty years I have seen a huge change in northern construc- tion, from cast-off has-been buildings to e-green projects that promote non-toxic, recycled, indigenous, low embodied energy building practices which support and encourage low life-cycle cost and ecological balance. We are in an innovative and exciting new era.
On Site review 11
60
Spring 2004
Architecture of the Circumpolar Region
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