Northern energy efficiencies, design & architecture.

• Author: West, Gail
• Position: SPECIAL SECTIONS: Building Alaska & Environmental Services

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The elders knew. When winter came to Anaktuvuk Pass, homes built into the ground were warmer and more habitable. Then came "conventional" housing and homes became harder to build and harder to heat. In the Brooks Range and accessible only by plane, this tiny Nunamiut community currently has wood-frame structures built on pilings in the 1970s--exposing the homes to the intense winds of the mountain pass.

When the Cold Climate Housing Research Center arrived in Anaktuvuk Pass in 2008 to begin a research study of the area housing, Aaron Cooke, CCHRC architectural designer, said he heard from community members: "We used to bury our dead up in the air and live in the ground where it was warm. Now we bury our dead in the ground and live in the wind. We've been cold ever since."

By listening to the traditional knowledge and combining it with lessons learned and innovative technologies, CCHRC and its partner, Tagiugmiullu Nunamiullu Housing Authority, a tribally designated housing entity serving the North Slope, designed a prototype home. This prototype is being used to test an experimental active venting sys tem, a roof truss system designed to hold solar panels, and sprayed polyurethane foam insulation sealed with a spray-applied elastomeric liner to insulate the walls, floor, and roof and provide a weatherproof exterior finish. The home is also bermed with soil as insulation and a wind buffer and has a foundation of two feet of gravel fill topped with a synthetic waterproof membrane that supports the home's light frame that is filled with spray foam insulation. The new house sits directly on the ground.

Cooke said traditional homes in many rural Arctic areas "sat very lightly on the earth, so we're experimenting with returning to on-grade structures. In areas of deep permafrost, you want to keep the ground cold. If you build a house on piles, you don't have the melting permafrost problem but now you have to heat the floor as well as the walls and the roof. Keeping the ground cold feels less admirable if you have to keep yourself cold to do it."

Cooke describes the "floating slab foundation" that CCHRC has developed as a prototype for building in permafrost: "We've come up with a monolithic raft foundation--a rigid, sprayed foam foundation with joists embedded in it. It keeps heat from escaping into the ground and keeps the house down on grade and out of the wind. We've even done earth-banking around walls to lessen the heating load of the building."

CCHRC is one of a handful of Alaska organizations that have taken the traditional knowledge of the indigenous peoples and melded it with developing technology to create new solutions for Arctic challenges. The Institute of the North's Week of the Arctic, August 12-18 this year, will feature presentations and case studies from many of them. Cooke is...