Feeling ourselves unsuited to life in a big city, we moved to Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territory in the north-west of Canada. Situated north of the 60° circle of latitude, the Yukon has an area twice as large as that of Germany, but a population of only 30,000, more than two-thirds of which lives in Whitehorse. Nearly all food and building materials come from the south of Canada some 1,500 km away. The territory is almost wholly dependent on transfer payments from the central government. The Yukon’s own tax revenue would not suffice to keep the roads free of snow in winter. Nevertheless, Whitehorse possesses its own international airport, a regional college, a cultural centre with a theatre seating 1,000 people, a hospital and two prisons, as well as local and territorial government buildings.
Climatically, the Yukon is a cold desert with an annual precipitation of less than 8 inches. Winter lasts from October to May, with temperatures of – 40 °C and lower for much of the time. In summer, the sun shines 22 hours a day, and temperatures exceeding + 30 °C are no exception.
I have been working here as an architect since 1991, and more recently with two partners. In view of the prevailing economic and climatic conditions and the lack of experienced building firms and craftsmen, a good understanding of human nature and an ability to improvise and find simple solutions are necessary to create architecture of even modest pretensions. The following examples illustrate our response to these conditions, realizing buildings with simple forms of construction.
The Kluane First Nation Launderette was built in Burwash Landing, a remote community on the Alaska Highway. Every year, large numbers of Europeans in search of untamed nature pass through Burwash, tired and dirty after their adventures. Our client had the idea of building a small launderette with shower facilities to meet the visitors’ needs.
The building stands on permanently frozen ground, but the construction of technically correct pile foundations would have made the project economically unviable. After removing the topsoil, a bed of gravel was laid with a grid of 15/15 cm impregnated timber plates on top to support the timber substructure. The well-insulated floor and a ventilated cavity below it help to prevent the ground thawing underneath. A system of wedges allows the “foundations” to be adjusted in the case of settlement. The space beneath the base was closed with a steel grating to keep animals out and to prevent fires being laid under the floor.
By an ironic turn of fate, the Tr’ondek Hwech’in people had to wait for the centenary celebrations of a painful event in their history before money was made available to build a cultural centre. The Klondike gold rush drove them from their homelands and hastened the demise of their culture, after they had already been separated by the boundary drawn between the US (Alaska) and Canada (the Yukon).
Faced with the task of designing a building for a people with a nomadic past and without its own architectural tradition, we began to study the life of the Tr’ondek Hwech’in prior to their contact with European settlers. The stark contrast between the dark winters and sunlit summers found expression in the configuration of the building. The introverted, dark rotunda housing the exhibition areas symbolizes winter, while the brightly lit assembly space is meant as a reminiscence of the summer hunting camps and smoking houses.
The building is situated on the dyke of the Yukon River, to which the Tr’ondek Hwech’in always had strong links. At the beginning of the 20th century, Dawson City was built by gold prospectors, based on the models of their home towns. Today, it is has the character of an open-air museum. The new cultural centre is a gesture of reconciliation that seeks to re-establish the link between river and town, which was lost with the building of the dyke. At the same time, the centre avoids the use of historicist formal elements. In order not to endanger the river embankment, it was necessary to sink pile foundations down to the bedrock. The timber-framed structure is braced by the birch plywood sheets that form the facade cladding. The horizontal slats laid over this, and continued with double spacings over the windows, create a bold play of shadows that recall the interior of a smokehouse. They also serve as a ladder when the windows have to be cleaned.
The Canadian government is seeking to promote energy-saving forms of construction. The new “C-2000” support programme is designed to encourage the development of buildings in which an energy saving of 50 per cent can be achieved without increased construction costs. This is to be accomplished through a synergetic approach to all aspects of the design, from the external detailing to the mechanical services.
In this respect, the Commercial Buildings Incentive Program (CBIP) also provides a stimulus to design teams by offering a bonus equivalent to twice the annual energy savings attained with a building that complies with these conditions. A simulated structure of the same size and complexity forms the basis for the comparison.
The Yukon Energy Corporation building was erected on the site of the transformer plant for the hydraulic power station in Whitehorse. The client required a progressive low-energy concept with construction costs no higher than the market average. We therefore determined to design the project to the conditions of the above-mentioned programmes. The orientation and layout of the building ensure a relatively even exploitation of solar energy throughout the day, so that it was possible to reduce the dimensions of the mechanical services and to operate them for longer periods within the range of greatest efficiency. A decentralized heating and ventilation plant, consisting of 27 individual units, helps to avoid long duct runs and the costs and energy losses associated with these. The lower storey heights this allowed also helped to reduce construction costs. By exploiting the groundwater as a means of cooling, it was possible to avoid the use of toxic liquids and expensive condensers. Simple, galvanized sunshading elements function as light reflectors and screen the south-facing windows in summer without impeding the indirect ingress of light. The room depths and fenestration were designed in such a way that no workplace would need permanent artificial light. The lighting is controlled by sensors. This daylight strategy is the principal means of achieving the design goals, since artificial lighting accounts for almost 50 per cent of the energy costs for these buildings and thus offers the greatest potential for savings.
The sole example of high-tech materials in the building was the selection of an “intelligent” type of glass that allows light to enter only in the visible range of the spectrum, thus preventing overheating or excessive cooling through infrared radiation. This timber structure is one of the first in Canada – and perhaps the only one north of the 60° line of latitude – to comply with the requirements of the C-2000 and CBIP programmes.
Great hopes are placed in tourism as a means of freeing the economy of the Yukon from its dependence on the fluctuating fortunes of the mining industry. The Tourism Business Centre in Whitehorse contains facilities for the reception of visitors, as well as the office of the Ministry for Tourism. In accordance with the clients’ wishes, the entrance hall makes formal reference to the Victorian style of building of the Kondike gold-rush period. Instead of resorting to the ornamentation of this era, however, we were able to comply with the brief with a strict, classical fenestration in an otherwise plain timber facade. This building, too, has a timber-frame structure with wood floor and roof joists. For the high space of the visitors’ centre, we developed a fish-belly truss, consisting of two parallel laminated timber upper chords and a tubular steel lower chord. The diagonal members were made from the charred stems of trees from a forest ravaged by fire.
