A Building Laboratory for Greenland

Danish colonisation formed a number of centralised state organisations to build and develop a strong, coherent welfare society with a western-style infrastructure. The goal was primarily to accommodate the wants of the colonial power but secondly also to house the changing needs of its society. Arguably, one of the most impactful organizations was Grønlands Tekniske Organisation (GTO), the Danish bureaucracy in charge of architecture and building construction between the second world war and the 1990's. With its centralized approach to building regulation, design, and construction, the GTO is responsible for much of Greenland's distinctive, architectural character; for example, the variety among type-houses, the coordinated colour schemes, and the similarity in construction materials. The standardised approach to building production, unifying an extremely diverse and spread-out country, is still widely celebrated, not for its inherent colonial starting point, but for its coherent national identity.

It is not at all clear whether the gradual liberalization of Greenlandic economic structures, mirroring the Danish neo-liberal shift, has produced a more favourable outcome in terms of building practice. Rather, we wonder about the potential of a historical organization like GTO to act as a practice-based, research laboratory for fresh approaches to materials, construction, and byggeskik; something inspired, for example, by recent successes under the Balearic Social Housing Institute (IBAVI). Professionals involved in the Greenlandic building industry often have a very narrow and limited view of the available resources. Outside of conventional building practice, however, there is actually an abundance of building materials and infrastructures already there: for example, dimensional stone from Amitsaurssauq (foundations), glacial clay from west-coast fjords (render, bricks, mortars), wool insulation from Greenland sheep, slate from Nuussuaq (roof tiles) - not to mention the plethora of reused material from the aging military and shipping infrastructure. And yet, these potentials are largely held back by the status-quo dependence on the building industry back in Denmark, following the need for architecture and building construction to respond to market-driven conditions.

We see an opportunity for a large-scale building laboratory with a focus on local materials, know-how, and infrastructure - but one that requires a strong Greenlandic-state actor to organise, take risks, finance, and creatively produce architecture for society. To explore this, we propose a research essay on the legacy of the GTO, accompanied by a series of imaginative building sections exploring the possibility of such a building laboratory in the creative and technical production of architecture in Greenland.