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Short abstract:

This paper examines projects by the Montreal-based architectural firm Papineau Gérin Lajoie in the 1970s and 80s across the Northwest Territories as a response to environmentally-inflected Cold War military research in Arctic environments and on the lands of the Inuit.

Long abstract:

This paper examines the schools, laboratories, and airports designed and built by the Montreal-based architectural firm Papineau Gérin Lajoie in the 1970s and 80s across the Northwest Territories as a material response to environmentally-inflected Cold War military research in Arctic environments and on the lands of the Inuit and other northern Indigenous communities. These buildings, many still functioning today, have become darkly iconic examples of architectural colonization in the Canadian Arctic, particularly in relation to the use of polyester resin in their designs. My aim is to situate this body of work and the environmental and military research underlying its development to understand how PGL created an architecture oriented towards the mediation of thermal exposure in the pursuit of colonial settlement. Critically, thermal processes are never neutrally or objectively present as the result of ecological dynamics, but carry with them a long history of themselves being mediated by colonial processes in situ. This is the conjuncture that projects like PGL’s Nakasuk Elementary School, completed in 1976, and its now iconic prefabricated fibreglass panels articulates: a long-standing settler colonial Qallunaat (white, southern) architecture that needs to be named and understood in order to lay the groundwork for an Indigenous-defined future within the design professions and their manifestation across Inuit Nunangat (Inuit homelands).