Ice & Earth: The Architectural Genius of the Arctic Peoples

The Arctic has a forbidding climate, one dominated by the longest and harshest season: You guessed it—winter. Yet traditional peoples have not only lived but thrived in this circumpolar realm for millennia, occupying much of its territory (outside of such inhospitable places as the Greenland Ice Sheet and the sea-ice blankness of the North Pole) permanently or seasonally.

A big part of that success has to do with the ingenious shelters Arctic peoples devised to protect themselves from elements that, needless to say, can most definitely be life-threatening.

The best-known traditional Arctic shelter is, most likely, the igloo (iglu), yet this remarkable snowhouse had a fairly restricted geography, and most Arctic cultures didn’t utilize it. In this article, we’ll take a sweeping tour of traditional Indigenous polar and subpolar dwellings—the igloo included—and close with a brief consideration of their use today.

The igloo is a marvel of thermal engineering, utilizing the insulating properties of snow to create a sanctuary of warmth amidst the most extreme conditions on Earth.
Source: Drawn by unknown artist based on sketches by C.F. Hall and photographed from the book by User:Finetooth, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Traditional Shelters of the Circumpolar Zone: The Tremendous Variety of Indigenous Arctic Dwellings

Building with the Earth: Wood, Bone, and Stone

The kinds of dwellings traditional Arctic peoples historically constructed reflect a whole suite of different factors. For one thing—and it’s a big one—there’s the type and quantity of available building materials. People who lived below the Arctic timberline at least part of the year had abundant supplies of wood from northerly tree species such as spruce, fir, larch, birch, and poplar. But wood was also available to some extent even to inhabitants of mostly barren Arctic tundra coasts and islands thanks to driftwood rafted down rivers and piled up on ocean beaches.

Cultures who hunted whales, or who had access to coastal areas where dead whales might wash ashore, often used whalebone for the same kind of structural support that timber poles provide.

Stones also were a common building material throughout the Arctic, including in the harshest high-latitude polar environments where other suitable resources were scarce.

And then, of course, there’s the snow that provided the literal building blocks of winter igloos for the Inuit peoples who used them.

With an igloo, the same foundational material serves as a protective exterior. But for other kinds of shelters, timber, whalebone, and/or stone frames could be covered by a variety of siding (and, in some cases, roofing): from the hides of reindeer/caribou, seals, or walruses to earthen turf and sod, moss, and, where available, certain kinds of tree bark or even the baleen of whales.

By seamlessly blending earth, stone, and animal skins, Arctic builders created semi-permanent homes that harnessed the land’s natural insulation to withstand the fierce polar winds. Source: Edward S. Curtis, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Subterranean Solutions: The Power of Sod

Semi-subterranean sod homes were built in many parts of the circumpolar Arctic, from the gamme turf huts used (among other dwellings) by the Sámi people of northern Fennoscandia to the partly sunken sod structures widely constructed by Unangax (Aleut), Yupik, and Inuit cultures. Their recessed, dugout-like design and turf exterior gave these earth-lodge-style homes topnotch insulation.

While some coastal Arctic and Subarctic peoples lived more or less year-round in permanent structures, many other groups utilized different kinds of shelters as they went about their seasonal rounds.

Above-ground houses made of timber served as a summer residence for some Arctic peoples with access to trees or driftwood, such as southwestern Alaska Yupik. During warmer months, many semi-nomadic and nomadic Arctic peoples required a more mobile shelter while out hunting or reindeer-herding, and just about everywhere in the circumpolar zone some version of a tent fit the bill.

These grass-topped sod dwellings are masterpieces of insulation, demonstrating how Arctic inhabitants utilized the very earth beneath them to create cozy, subterranean living spaces.

Nomadic Life: Conical Tents and Summer Shelters

Some of these—for example, the lavvu tent used by Mountain Sámi, the chums of the Nenets, the churns of the Evens, and some styles of the Inuit summer tent called the tupiq—had a wind-resistant conical form quite reminiscent of the tipi widely used by Indigenous tribes of North American temperate grasslands and steppes. Depending on the region and the specific cultural design, these warm-weather Arctic tents typically had scaffolding made of timber or whalebone poles and an exterior of animal hide (caribou/reindeer, sealskin, etc.); others had birchbark coverings, while the Evens in coastal areas sometimes employed fishskins in addition to hides.

All of these Arctic shelters, from wintertime sod homes and igloos to summer tents and wooden houses, were inherently well-insulated thanks to their skillful design. But depending on their use and size many came additionally warmed by, often, one or more hearths inside—ventilated via a smokehole up top—and/or a soapstone or oil lamp, as well as, of course, human body heat. Some of these structures were large enough to house multiple families, or even entire villages. This included the semi-subterranean, sod-covered longhouses of the Aleutian Unangax—known as unangum ulaa, ciqllmaq, or, by the Russians, barabara—as well as the stone houses used by the Inuit in parts of Greenland.

The conical tent is a hallmark of nomadic efficiency, designed for rapid assembly and resilience against the tundra’s winds, allowing communities to follow the natural rhythms of the land.

The North American High Arctic: Traditional Dwellings of the Inuit People

From Thule Stone Houses to the Little Ice Age

As many of our top-of-the-world cruise routes are focused on the North American Arctic (including Greenland), we wanted to zoom in a little on the traditional dwellings of the Inuit peoples for whom this remains home.

As mentioned, a very widespread traditional form of winter-dwelling among the Inuit is some manner of semi-subterranean house, often with a driftwood, stone, and/or whalebone frame and an insulating exterior of sod (and snow). Such winter houses have been documented in archaeological sites of the Thule people, the ancestors of today’s Inuit (as well as Yupiks), who spread from Alaska beginning roughly in the 11th century across the Canadian Arctic and east to Greenland.

Records of Thule winter homes include areas of the Canadian High Arctic where, centuries ago, the igloo appeared to become the more common winter-dwelling. There’s some speculation that the colder climate period of the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s known as the Little Ice Age may have prompted Inuit in much of this region to abandon the Thule-style stone-and-whalebone winter home and adopt the igloo. Yet there may have been deeper-rooted precedent for the snowhouse, as snow knives have been recovered among the artifacts of the Dorset culture, North American Arctic peoples who preceded the Thule.

The snowhouse or igloo, which for many people around the world has become a cultural symbol of the Arctic, was primarily used by Inuit in the Central and Eastern Canadian Arctic as well as northwestern Greenland. (We should stress that, in many Inuit dialects, igloo or iglu can refer to a number of different dwellings, not only snowhouses; but following popular English convention we herein use igloo as synonymous with snowhouse.) In other parts of the North American Arctic, semi-subterranean homes (and, in some places, double-walled tents) remained the go-to winter dwelling.

As the climate cooled during the Little Ice Age, architectural mastery adapted, shifting reliance from stone to snow with the igloo becoming a vital and ingenious life-saving structure.
Source: Canadian Museum of History, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Engineering the Igloo: Sintered Snow and Spirals

The igloo’s dome-shaped architecture depends on a particular type of snow: windblown drifts whose integrity derives from strong bonds between the constituent wind-shattered snow crystals. This sintered snow, as it’s known, can be easily carved into blocks, as the Inuit traditionally did with whalebone knives.

Across different dialect groups of the Inuit language there are a number of words used for well-bonded snow that’s ideal for igloo-building, including pukaangajuq or pukakjiq (roughly, “snowhouse snow”) and ilusaq or illuksaq (“what can be become a house”).

Blocks are arranged in spiral fashion from bottom up so that sound structure is maintained throughout the building process. The entrance to the igloo slopes downward, which allows cold air to drain outside, and additional stone blocks form a door. The doorway and a top hole provide ventilation. Some igloos had windows paned with ice or seal-gut skin.

Snow is a wonderful insulator, so the interior of an igloo by virtue of its design alone may be around or above freezing. Igloo-dwellers stayed further toasty thanks to body heat and efficiently insulating clothing and sleeping fur, and often by the heat of an oil lamp. Platforms were frequently carved out to provide elevated sleeping niches, which kept sleepers above cold air pooled on the igloo floor.

Recall that the igloo was traditionally a winter-dwelling—often a base camp during a time of year when hunters would daily head onto the sea ice after seals—and that most Inuit peoples used tents (such as the aforementioned tupiq) during summer hunting-and-gathering months.

The igloo’s spiral architecture isn’t just for show—it’s a sophisticated structural choice that allows snow blocks to support one another during construction, creating a remarkably strong and stable home.
Source: Otto D. Goetze, Seattle, Wash., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Traditional Architectural Inspiration in the Contemporary Arctic

Many Indigenous Arctic peoples today live in modern, Western-style housing. But that doesn’t mean that traditional dwellings are a relic of the past: not by a long shot.

Indeed, some Indigenous folks still use these marvelous “old-school” dwellings in some form, including as seasonal shelters for hunting or herding. And—reflecting the ongoing ingenuity that has facilitated Indigenous lifeways in the Arctic since time immemorial—there are numerous examples of time-tested blueprints being used to inspire modern constructions. For instance, reindeer herders in Russia’s Nenets Autonomous Okrug have developed a number of contemporary spins on traditional summer nomad tents, as with the canvas-walled palatka mobile shelter that Nenets/Komi herders innovated on the Kamin Peninsula as a replacement for the traditional reindeer- and birchbark-sheathed chum.

From the igloo to the laavu, traditional Arctic shelters also remain a proud expression of Indigenous heritage, a tradition passed on from elders to youth partly as a way of maintaining and affirming cultural identity. Furthermore, many Indigenous communities and organizations across the Arctic are recognizing the continued practical relevance of traditional dwellings as more self-sufficient, sustainable, and efficient structures as opposed to imported architectural designs and materials. Human resilience in the rapidly changing Arctic means looking to thousands of years of highly refined craftsmanship and resourcefulness.

The enduring power of traditional design is beautifully interpreted in these modern cabins, where the iconic lavvu shape is transformed into a cozy and functional retreat.