Glacial Dust as a building material

The project is anchored in Nuuk's construction industry. Greenland still upholds its relationship with its old colony through the import of materials and labour. It is estimated that 93% of workers in construction are non-Greenlanders and 86% of construction materials are imported from Scandinavia. The existing trade route of 3.311 km raises the costs of construction to 2.5 times higher than in Denmark. The project proposed a new logistics of import and export. First, Greenland has some of the world’s largest deposits of natural resources, the project aims to capitalize on local resources within 100 km and establish an international relation to Canada whose largest industrial cities lies within 1.500 km from Nuuk.

The project aims to heighten the cultural and financial value of glacial dust by putting it into circulation in Nuuk’s building industry in an effort to move toward an industry of local material supply. By engaging existing labour practices from other fields such as boat building into the new material culture of glacial dust, the project hopes to move towards a use of local labour rather than imported, strengthening the local economy and removing dependency on import of labour within the Greenlandic building industry.

The project is based on fieldwork to Nuuk.

The project defines circularity of a raw material anchored in a geographical, political, culture and site-specific context. By fostering a cultural sense of autonomy and agency, the project aims to extend to structural and societal levels.

Glacial dust is geological detritus that is generated by the grinding of moving glaciers on the mountain below, generating dust. As the glaciers melt, they release the glacial dust into the meltwater that transports the dust towards the costs of Greenland. Glacial dust is a by-product of climate change and as the melting of the icecap is speeding up with the earth’s warming climate, more and more dust is liberated from the glaciers. It is estimated that 1 bn tons are released every year, an increasingly growing number as glaciers melt faster and faster.

The mock-up space is hosting activities related to the act of scaling up kayak building techniques to the scale of architecture. The building is a skin-on-frame structure; a timber construction with a glacial dust waterproof membrane. The building is formed by two long curved timber walls and edges off by large open gables, opening up towards the public walking path and the fjord. Upon arrival, there’s a display of material experiments that continues to run along the hallway as well as a canteen with a view straight into the mock-up hall. A ton bag of raw material gets picked up and put to use in the compression workshop, a process to which moulds have been prepared in the mould workshop area. The compressed materials move into the drying room in preparation to potentially get put in the kiln. The mock-up space takes the final products and engages them in experimental structures.

The experimentarium is composed of a building complex of a mock-up hall, a production line hall and a Raw Material Mix hall. The mock-up hall generates experiments and develops a starting point for the new building technique generated by the up-scaling of kayak building and glacial dust. The building’s capacity allows this new labour force to build prototypes by applying the material and construction techniques to existing buildings in Nuuk. From this prototyping, new knowledge will be generated to bring back to the Experimentarium.
This process will leave traces of glacial dust experiments of all sorts in the city of Nuuk as small building parts. If glacial dust as a building material shows to be successful, the Glacial dust Experimentarium expands with a production line facility and a raw material mixing hall that will allow small scale production. Adding the production will allow for building houses purely out of glacial dust and timber constructions. Adding the raw material mixing hall will allow to upscale production for a widened local distribution. Each building has its unique architecture inspired by an upscaling of the kayak building techniques and a glacial dust based building materials. The form of the building responds to the surrounding landscape and the functions hosted within.