Trusses on the Tundra: sustainable Housing Technologies in Southwest Alaska.

• Author: Rettig, Molly
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Building Alaska

It's cold and windy outside, a typical March day in Bethel, Alaska. The snowpack is thin on the windswept tundra. But it's warm and cozy inside two new homes on Chief Eddie Hoffman Highway, heated only by construction lights. The Association of Village Council Presidents (AVCP) is building the super-efficient duplexes to house students for its popular aviation school. The homes are made from integrated trusses that connect the roof, walls and floor joists into single units that are tipped up like the ribs of a whale, a clean, simple design for the extremes of the tundra.

Yuut Yaqungviat, Yup'ik for "Where people get their wings," trains local pilots for the region, which has the third busiest airport in Alaska. Single-engine turboprops, small bush planes, and cargo aircraft connect dozens of remote villages to just a couple of urban hubs. Air travel is a way of life on the Yukon Kuskokwim River Delta, where forty-eight small villages are spread across an area the size of Oregon with no roads and few centralized services.

Southwest Alaska has been occupied by Yup'ik Eskimo for thousands of years, yet communities have struggled to adapt as the region has rapidly modernized over the past fifty years, shifting from a subsistence lifestyle to a cash economy, from seasonal shelters to modern housing and energy. "The Yukon Kuskokwim region has the lowest per capita income, the highest unemployment, the highest suicide rate. We don't have tourism. We don't have oil. We don't have forestry. We have a rich culture," says Mike Hoffman, executive vice president for AVCP, a nonprofit tribal organization in Bethel. It was a blow to the region when high operating costs forced the aviation school to close last year. Students couldn't afford to spend $1,000 a month on energy on top of tuition.

AVCP hired the Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC) to design new energy-efficient duplexes for students to help the school reduce its energy burden and re-open its doors. CCHRC is a research center based in Fairbanks that develops and tests sustainable housing solutions for the north.

Bethel is one of the most challenging places to build in Alaska. Sitting in one of the largest deltas in the world, where the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers empty into the Bering Sea, it is a treeless tundra exposed to wind-driven rain and coastal storms. The soil is constantly shifting, with a high water table and a deep active layer that freezes in the winter and turns to mush in...