Active Layer

Utqiaġvik sits on the Chukchi Sea coast at the northern edge of Alaska, on ground that is frozen most of the way down and thaws only at the top. That thin seasonal thaw is the active layer, and it is getting thicker. Everything a town needs to do — build, bury a pipe, bury a body, hold a road in place — is negotiated with it.

This was studio research for an MLA, carried out with the Arctic Design Group under Leena Cho and Matthew Jull. The work took the active layer as the design medium rather than the design constraint: reading permafrost, subsidence, drainage and coastal erosion as a single system in motion, and asking what settlement looks like when the ground itself is the thing that is changing fastest.

Concepts, not construction. The value of the exercise is in how it reframes ground — as something with a season, a depth and a direction of travel.