An Architectural Approach towards Innovative Renewable Energy Infrastructure in Kapisillit, Greenland

This paper claims that an architectural approach to the planning of renewable energy infrastructures - specifically architects’ ability to closely read and conceptualise the characteristic material practices of a place beyond the boundaries of a site - can underwrite development that is more culturally sustainable. Greater cultural sustainability is particularly relevant in peripheral regions where both cultural and economic sustainability is contested. Building upon a research-through-design case situated in Kapisillit in West Greenland, this paper presents selected results from a design workshop with architecture students who were asked to create conceptual strategies, driven by distributed, community-controlled renewable energy, for the future of the village. It culminates in a discussion on how this empirical work contributes towards the construction of a vocabulary of material practices indigenous to this region, and how such a vocabulary can be useful in developing culturally sustainable planning, before reflecting upon how such an architectural approach to infrastructural planning could be carried out in other peripheral regions, expanding the definition of sustainability in this techno-economically driven field.