eople living in heavily forested shelter. Here is a brief pictorial essay areas built with wood; those of how they did it, reenacted by Jan living in areas with heavy rainfall and friends, extracted with permission The remarkable Pbuilt with mud and grasses and those from their Maud Returns Home living in rocky environments built with (MRH) blog of December 13, 2012. stone. The Inuit usually lived beyond It was Sunday, and while we may the tree line, so wood was a scarcity. have been watching football on history of Arctic Rocks were a possibility, but for much television, they built an igloo. When of the year the rocks were buried under they were done, they cut a hole in the a thick blanket of–snow! “floor” of the igloo, did some ice fishing So is it any surprise that their and secured dinner. The obvious first step is to procure architecture dwellings became known as snow your “bricks” of compacted snow houses? Snow is a natural insulator and simultaneously dig out your because of the air pockets trapped By John Bechtel “foundation” around the perimeter. Freelance culture and travel writer within it, and snow became a You cut your blocks out of the area construction material when it could that will eventually be the inside of be compacted. Soft feathery snow your snow house. In the final product, does not make good snow houses. The the central area where the Inuit slept snow crystals have to cling to each ou have probably never thought of the igloo was raised, and was covered with other in order to make a dwelling with hides. This, combined with body as a form of architecture, but why not? There structural rigidity. heat of the occupants, made the are different types of architecture, and not The word igloo itself, comes internal temperature of the igloo quite from the Inuit iglu, and it is widely comfortable. Yall of them require a formally-trained architect. As a RETURNS HOME JAN WANGGAARD-MAUD PHOTO: matter of fact, there is an art form known as vernacular associated with the indigenous Inuit The wall grows in a spiral which of Central Canada (think Cambridge Members of Jan Wanggaard’s team display their fishing catch after carving out is of crucial importance as the wall architecture which requires that an architect not be Bay in Nunavut, introduced to our bricks of compacted snow and using them to build their igloo. gradually starts to lean inwards. To involved. The term is borrowed from linguistics, where readers in the Fall 2016 issue of SP in you will recall, harbored over winter Northwest Passage by sail. Without constantly define the right degree of it refers to language use particular to a place, time, or the article “The Maud Goes Home”) in this tiny, remote location with the the benefit of advanced theoretical wall angle is the primary engineering people. For example, the primary translation of the first and Thule, Greenland. The insulating Inuit, and what he learned from them principles of physics and engineering, achievement of this construction. five books of the Bible from Hebrew into Greek was not qualities of compacted snow are so great had much to do with his completing the Inuit developed through trial and that temperatures inside the igloo could the first successful crossing of the error an extremely strong and useful translated into classical or the formal, educated Greek, be as high as 60 degrees F. (15.5 C.) but into koine, or the Greek spoken by the common while the external temperatures were man in Alexandria, Egypt in the third century A.D. as low as -50 F. (-45.5 C.) There were when the translating was done. Koine Greek was the different types of igloo, depending on lingua franca of the time and place. This translation was the need. There were quick-set-up igloos for one-night stays of a family on the done into the vernacular language of the time. move, and there were communal igloos So too, vernacular architecture is a practical RETURNS HOME JAN W-MAUD PHOTO: comprised of several igloos connected Unique dome shape strong enough to construction by amateurs without any formal training, by tunnels and with a common support a person standing on the roof. built with local, indigenous materials, and the emphasis entrance. The igloo is unique in that it is is on function, not style. The “know-how” to build was Building an igloo a dome that can be raised out of acquired by trial and error and passed along orally from (for the DIY readers) independent blocks leaning on each generation to generation. Vernacular architecture was How is an igloo made, and how other and polished to fit without an very purpose-driven: it was all about filling survival long does it take to make one? Jan additional supporting structure during needs with whatever building materials were locally in Wanggaard, Norwegian project construction. An igloo that is built manager for the raising of Amundsen’s correctly will support the weight of abundance, and not with impressing anyone with its ship Maud from its frigid, watery a person standing on the roof. How aesthetics. The construction itself required hands-on grave in Cambridge Bay and towing many generations of the Inuit did it intelligence, common sense, ingenuity, and mechanical it back to Norway, decided to find take to figure out that a dwelling with ability, and for that reason, although vernacular out in 2012. He was motivated by a straight, vertical walls was not their architecture is generally unadorned and functional, respect and admiration for the people solution? For this writer, the invention and societies of the world that learned of the igloo in the Far North is right up many refrain from referring to it as primitive. to live and survive in very harsh there with the invention of the wheel in environments by understanding rather RETURNS HOME JAN WANGGAARD-MAUD PHOTO: its significance. than fighting nature. Amundsen, as Rising in a spiral formation, walls lean inwards as each row of bricks is added. (Continued on page 00) O SPRING- 2018 | SCANDINAVIAN PRESS SCANDINAVIAN PRESS | SPRING 2018 O fjäll (Sweden); and tunturi (Finland). The latter is borrowed from the Inari What about Sami word tuodâr, which comes into the English language as tundra. In archaic English these areas were also sometimes referred to as Fells, or treeless elevations (meaning anything bigger than a hill). The English fell is the Sami? very similar to its Nordic antecedents. What is important however, is that the tundra areas of the world generally have light precipitation; they are in fact Arctic deserts. So while there is snow, it’s not the same as the Canadian ust as there are no penguins at the or Greenland Arctic. The weather is cold, but not quite as cold as some taiga North Pole and no polar bears at areas south of the tree line. This writer remembers three weeks in the winter Jthe South Pole, the igloo is not of 2013 when the wind chill in Minot, North Dakota never got above -50 F. part of the Sami history and culture in (-15.5 C.), and we were nowhere close to the tree line. northern Europe. Their available building So the Sami didn’t build igloos. They built goahtis in Scandinavia, or kota materials were different, and therefore so in Finland. Again, vernacular culture, building with available resources, were their dwellings. Many of the Inuit which in this case were small saplings covered with fabric, peat moss, or igloos were built on sea ice and became timber. In the coastal areas the more non-nomadic coastal Sami used the in effect, floating homes and hotels. This peat goahti as a combined human and livestock building up until the second was not an issue for the Sami. Let’s look world war. The lavvu is a smaller, more transportable (now only used in at the reasons for this. displays of traditional culture) dwelling similar to the North American tipi. Taiga, or boreal forest, is the world’s All of the following are examples of vernacular architecture among the Sami second largest biome, after the oceans in the European Arctic: themselves. These coniferous forests contain spruce, pine, and larches. The taiga covers most of inland Canada and Alaska, and very northern parts of the U.S. such as northern Minnesota, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the north woods of New York and New PHOTO: JAN WANGGAARD-MAUD RETURNS HOME JAN WANGGAARD-MAUD PHOTO: Aging and compressing snow won’t cause this igloo to buckle or collapse, something the Inuit understood eons ago. England. In Eurasia it covers parts of coastal Iceland and most of Sweden, (Continued from page 00) Norway, Finland, and Russia from The stresses of snow as it ages and compresses Karelia (just east of Finland) all the way against the igloo does not cause it to buckle to the Pacific Ocean. Many of these areas because in an inverted paraboloid or catenoid are lowlands, and not alpine, or elevated, the pressures are exclusively compressive. Please as one might expect. remember that the Inuit figured out how to do As you proceed northward through SKANSEN PHOTO: this before the sciences of differential geometry the taiga, you come to a border area An example of the peat goahti, above, reconstructed and on display at the and calculus were invented. For Jan and friends, between the taiga and the next biome, Skansen open-air museum in Stockholm. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to the final stage was a bit nerve-racking for which is tundra, or permafrost regions.