Arctic Engineering: We Learn to Build Like the Inuit Do

PM contributing editor Jeff Wise travels to northern Quebec to learn the secrets of igloo construction from master builders. Bundle up.
Thomas Kuhlenbeck

Cold seeps through the layers of my clothing as a few lonesome snowflakes skitter from an overcast sky. Everywhere I look there's nothing but ice and snow, a flat, monotonous landscape with the gentle slope of a low hill here and there. By arctic standards, it's a beautiful spring day.

I've come to northern Quebec to learn the art of igloo building at the Nunavik Arctic Survival Training Center, where Inuit instructors teach wilderness skills. The training center is a few miles from here in the village of Puvirnituq, a lonely outpost of 1450 souls on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay. Actually, to call it lonely is an understatement—as you arrive by air, it looks like a tiny island in a sea of white that stretches uninterrupted from horizon to horizon. At least these days it has heated buildings; 50 years ago, most of the community spent the winter in igloos.

Paulusi Novalinga, 56, was born in one. For years he accompanied his father, hunting and fishing in the traditional way and moving across the frozen landscape by dog team. Then times changed. The government built houses, a hospital, a school. Snowmobiles came, and TV, then the Internet. Kids grew up caring more about music than wilderness skills. Novalinga helped found the survival school 12 years ago as a way to reverse the trend. Today he enlists young men from the community to keep the old skills alive by teaching them to outsiders: army personnel, arctic pilots, the occasional tourist.

And now me. Judging by the burning sensation on my exposed skin, the temperature must be around 10 degrees Fahrenheit—it's hard to know precisely, because the Inuit don't seem to own any thermometers. Novalinga leads me a few yards to a sloping hillside. The ideal igloo-building material, he explains, is deep, solid snow that falls in the course of a single storm, so it doesn't have layers that could cause blocks to shear. It should also come from the windward slope of a hill, because the force of the wind packs the snow more densely.

Wielding his panak—a homemade machete with an angled handle—Novalinga digs in a few places to find the best spot, then cuts a rectangular hole about the size of a briefcase. Now we're ready to quarry snow blocks. Novalinga hands me the machete and talks me through the process. I make a long slice parallel to the existing cut, then lop off the bottom and sides at an angle. To get the block out, I insert the panak to its hilt in the middle of the long cut and punch downward to pop out the block. It has the texture of dense Styrofoam and weighs about 20 pounds.

Novalinga has me cut block after block until I've excavated a hole the size and shape of a shallow grave. With the machete, he inscribes a circle in the snow about 10 feet across, centered on the middle of the trench. I set my first block upright on his line, then chop the left edge along an imaginary line extended from the center point, haul up another block, cut its right edge to match, and slide them together. It's important, Novalinga says, to not only position the blocks right side up, but with the correct face inward. The Inuit believe that if you place the blocks backward, it will summon a storm.

We complete the first row, then spiral the blocks upward, angling them ever more steeply inward as they climb. The work progresses in a steady rhythm: Cut a block, lift it into place, trim the edge to match its neighbor, then trim the snow away from the middle of the bottom edge by jamming the panak into the joint and working it back and forth. This is the secret rule of igloo architecture: Each block must touch the row below only at its corners. (To understand why, I later consult with John Ochsendorf, a civil engineering and architecture professor at MIT. "What prevents the new block you've just added from falling out is a line of compressive force that passes through the block to the row beneath," he tells me. Each block acts as a mini arch, creating a line of compression between the top corner of the last block placed and the diagonally opposite corner of the block below.)

I do half the second row, then ask Novalinga to take over so I can snap some photos. In the time it has taken me to place three blocks, he lays down an entire row. I help by cutting more blocks from the floor, and from a section under one wall that will serve as the entrance. Soon he's working overhead, the chips of snow flying and settling onto his face and shoulders as he places the blocks into nearly horizontal positions. I keep expecting the fragile-looking structure to collapse, but the blocks stay glued in place by their own stickiness—adjacent blocks cement together because the snow is constantly melting and refreezing at a microscopic level.

At last Novalinga maneuvers the final block into place; it's irregularly shaped, like the last bite of a cookie. "That's an igloo!" he says. I look at my watch. We've finished the structure in 3 hours—an eternity for an Inuit igloo-builder. Novalinga has won speed-building competitions in 20 minutes.

Our work isn't quite done. We still have to go around the igloo's dome and stop up holes with carefully shaped plugs and loose chunks of snow, then form the debris inside into a low platform, so that the floor is slightly higher than the bottom of the door opening to keep the warm air from escaping. Inside, we poke holes for ventilation. With a pot of tea bubbling on the Coleman stove, candles burning, and caribou hides on the platform, it's easy to forget that we're encased in frozen water. <

br />

For the Inuit, the igloo is hearth and home, the center of their culture. But as a feature of daily life, it's fading from memory. When Novalinga eventually stops teaching igloo making, the skill will pass from the hands of those who knew it as a living art. "Young people are living in an imaginary world they see on the tube," Novalinga says. "They see the world down south and they can't have it, and they get confused. We're having a culture shock."

Outside, the daylight slowly fades to dark. The igloo glows like a Japanese lantern as the northern lights undulate overhead. Novalinga's nephew, Andrew, will spend the night here with me. I head back inside, and he cuts a block of snow to seal the entrance. (Traditionally, the Inuit built an entrance tunnel, like you see in a children's-book illustration, only when a storm was bearing down.) With my parka still on, I climb into my sleeping bag. It's the first time I've ever spent the night in a room with no door.

Andrew turns off the stove and climbs into his sleeping bag. The air cools quickly. My breath swirls out of my mouth like smoke. I pull the sleeping bag around my face and, as Andrew blows out the candles, fall into a deep sleep.


Thomas Kuhlenbeck

Sophisticated engineering underpins the design of the igloo. A cross section shows the snow shelter is a catenary arch that distributes the force of each row of snow blocks to the row below. This compressive force follows the curve of the wall to the base, creating a stable structure. According to a study in the December 1973 issue of Arctic, a sturdy igloo has a minimum height-to-diameter ratio of 3:10—that is, an igloo 6 feet tall and 10 feet wide (3:5 h/d ratio) is stable, but one 5 feet high and 25 feet wide (1:5) would be in danger of imminent collapse.


How to Build an Igloo >>>

Heiko Wittenborn

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
More From Design