T HE North is Canada’s periphery and one of the major buildings in it is Arcop’s Assembly Hall in Iqualuit. Peripheral to the architectural terrain in urban centres is the industrial hinterland at the city’s edges — warehouses, industrial plants, transport depots. Unlike the high-profile urban condition, this industrial hinterland is known almost entirely by people who actually work in it and by truckers. Just as one doesn’t drop by Iqualuit, neither does one drop by a call centre out where the coyotes roam and the snow blows. Sites on the edge of developed cities are practically virgin, close to agriculture in the most romantic way and seem to invite a kind of clarity without urban reference. So to what do they refer? Bruce Allan of Arcop says that Iqaluit was a box city of ATCO trailers in a white desert. The form of the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut, 1999-2000, was inspired by the wind which scours the snow off of and from around the building. This is not a case of a building looking like a snowdrift, but rather being a shape that conspires with wind and snow to provide shelter. It is, Allan says, a large building specific to the far north, not informed by the south. moving to the edges Stephanie White
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