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Master’s Graduation Project 2015: From Construction Waste to Flexible Housing in Greenland

Date
17.07.2015
Category
Cooperation and business
Houseuntis, summer - view at the oceand and iced mountains

Architecture is capable of giving a great deal back to the community. One such example of this is the Greenland Inhabited project. This Master’s degree project addresses the environmental, economic and socio-cultural aspects of reusing materials, and closely examines housing and living conditions in Greenland. Architect Hannah Rasch has designed flexible housing built from reused materials and adapted to living conditions in Greenland. As well as extreme weather and limited resources, living conditions in Greenland are characterised by major demographic movements that occur in relation to seasonal changes, requiring great flexibility, not only economically and socially, but also in terms of resources.

What is your Master’s graduation project about?
My project resulted from field and user studies, statistical analyses and my own personal passion for Greenland and the Greenlanders’ way of life

My studies showed that the majority of Greenlanders are tenants and do not own their homes. Consequently, they do not make changes to their housing or to the areas around their homes. My studies also showed that Greenlanders frequently move from town to town and between rural districts because their employment opportunities or lifestyles often change. This means that in some places there is currently a surplus of living space and in others there is a lack of living space.

In addition to this, Greenlandic lifestyles vary greatly and are characterised by season-linked behaviour, where patterns of movement and activities, both indoors and outdoors, change. A housing solution that addresses these high levels of mobility and the frequently changing lifestyles is not available in the traditional, static housing structures, in which most Greenlanders currently live.

The solution was a prototype for flexible homes, tested and developed in collaboration with PR Trading and Ilulissat Municipality.

What have you gained from working with such a tangible issue and working with other companies?
Over the last five years, I have been travelling and working in Greenland. It has been extremely fascinating, amazing and beautiful. But as an architecture student, I also came across some immensely frustrating things that continued to puzzle me: particularly in terms of the construction industry and architecture. Why, for instance, was nobody looking into using local resources? Or why were all the houses decorated as if they were Nordic, when the Greenlandic lifestyle is completely different?

In order to find a better answer, I decided to collaborate with PR Trading, developing, cutting, bending and testing a number of 1:50 acrylic scale models. I use models not only as design tools, but also as a purely technical means of testing whether things work or whether an idea is totally hopeless. To understand building regulations and current housing allocation and solutions, I also worked with the Ilulissat Municipality, who enabled me to design an extremely realistic and site-specific solution.

By working in the real world, I could make a phone call and say, “Aluu, could you please take some pictures of me from this or that address?” It is so inspiring and you put an incredible amount of pressure on yourself when you choose to work on an assignment based in the real world. But it is also fun and very nice when you are exhausted at 2am on a Wednesday. There is always a common thread there to guide you.

The Mid-Season Housing unit.

 

Houseunits, "mid season".

What is most fun and what things are hardest when working in the way that you do?
Knowing that I will all ways get things done is the part that is most fun. As I mentioned, I work with a lot of physical models, and they just take a long time to make. So I also feel that I am challenging timeframes and deadlines. But this also means that you are often left panicking that you might not manage to get things done. And this can be extremely difficult when you simply have no idea how to solve an issue with a test model or some little part of a strange design thing, and you are just about to give up and go back to square one.

Then you have a chat with Mads from the metal workshop (KADK’s model workshop for students), and then all is well again. You sort it all out and get it delivered on time. That is how it is. And that is how I think it should be, for better or for worse. That is also why it is important to have contact with external partners because  then you have someone to lean on when you do not know how to progress to the next level yourself.

What do you consider to be your greatest strength as a KADK architecture/design graduate?

My strengths are my composure and my faith in myself. Over the last three years, I have really discovered which parts of the subject I want to contribute to and study further. Also, I have learned that we all have different approaches to the subject, and therefore we all have different strengths and weaknesses.

At one point during an exchange stay, I found out that there was no point in stubbornly believing that I could be the best designer, and the best at freehand drawing, and a rendering expert, and an interior-design genius, and a model builder, and a 3D-artist etc. It is fine if you have learned and become acquainted with all of these tools so you can make carefully considered choices. But it is fantastic if you allow yourself to be a bit of a geek and really enjoy some of them, while not losing your confidence and passion for the profession. That is my strength. I know exactly what I really excel at and what I do not.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
In five years, I would like to be somewhere where I could develop and challenge the profession and the users of the solutions through knowledge-sharing and cross-platform collaboration. I hope I will have some great colleagues as my social and professional sounding board.

Having my dream studio or designing huge opera houses is not really my main aim. In my view, architects should not be motivated by the desire to design ‘signature projects’, but more by simply enjoying working on architecture itself. My utopian way of thinking lends me to believe that everyone ends up exactly where they want to be (perhaps without knowing it), whether it be in a large or small studio, in the public or private sector, in Denmark, in Greenland or somewhere else in the world.