Arctic House Design

It's interesting to be able to read about the changes going on at the arctic level ->

In other Nunatsiaq News:

Pond’s Martian mansion

It looks like Martians have landed in Pond Inlet, where an odd structure crouches on a nearby hillside. It resembles three enormous pop cans fused together, standing one and a half metres above the tundra on three pointy legs.



In fact, it’s a prototype home being built by Richard Carbonnier, an architect who works by day as a project officer for the Government of Nunavut, and spends his evenings single-handedly labouring away on this odd creation.

“It’s not science fiction,” he says, during a telephone interview last Friday.....

“When he first started to build it, it sort of looked like it was some kind of a launch pad for a space shuttle,” Qamaniq says with a laugh.

Carbonnier says the tripod design is far more stable than a typical, four-cornered home, and that this will be important if the climate continues to warm, and permafrost continues to melt.

In the Nunavik community of Salluit, some buildings have already begun to buckle as their foundations sink into a boggy mess. But Carbonnier believes his building would simply tilt to one side if the permafrost melted, and he says this could be easily fixed.

“If the home goes crooked, I go beneath it with a five-tonne jack and I jack it up,” Carbonnier says.