This essay was excerpted from 'Arctic Practices: Design for a Changing World' (Actar Publishers, 2025), edited by Bert De Jonghe and Elise Misao Hunchuck.

INTRODUCTION Bert De Jonghe and Elise Misao Hunchuck

Arctic Practices: Design for a Changing World emerges at a critical juncture wherein the very stability of Arctic ecosystems hangs in a precarious balance induced, almost entirely, by humans. This volume assembles forty-six contributors — designers, educators, artists, photographers, filmmakers, some Indigenous, some residents, and some visitors to the Circumpolar North — to create a polyvocal assembly of Arctic practices. This assembly represents an attempt to deliberately depart from traditional academic frameworks that have historically privileged Western voices and epistemologies.

As a geographical reality, conceptual framework, and region with shared physical characteristics, the Arctic emerges from a complex intersection of Indigenous knowledge systems, colonial histories, and scientific paradigms. From early Greek measurements of Polaris’s position to today’s satellite monitoring of rapidly retreating ice sheets, understanding of this region has been shaped by successive waves of external observation and internal resistance. This tension between ways of knowing — between Traditional Knowledge holders and (often Western) scientific frameworks — lies at the heart of contemporary Arctic discourse and design practice.

Contemporary Arctic design practice is caught between urgent climatological imperatives and the slower, necessary work of anticolonial reconciliation. The immediacy of environmental change — evidenced in the collapse of Norilsk’s infrastructure due to melting permafrost, the seemingly inevitable relocation of Tuktuyaaqtuuq (Tuktoyaktuk in English) from eroding coastlines, and the rapid transformation of traditional hunting grounds in Nunavut — demands immediate technical responses. Yet these responses must be developed alongside and in dialogue with Indigenous knowledge systems and governance structures. Projects like SIKU (Sea Ice Monitoring and Real-Time Information Sharing in the Arctic) and the Pan Inuit Trails Atlas demonstrate distinct but complementary approaches to bridging Indigenous and Western ways of knowing. These initiatives represent critical steps toward what scholars like Julie Cruikshank term “intellectual sovereignty” — the right of Indigenous peoples to maintain, protect, and develop their own knowledge systems while engaging with Western scientific frameworks on their own terms.

The gaps in current literature — particularly regarding Indigenous design voices and knowledge exchange within global design disciplines — point to the ongoing work needed in this field. By addressing these gaps while acknowledging our own limitations, we hope to contribute to a broader conversation about the future of Arctic design practice in an age of unprecedented change. These changes demand new frameworks for understanding and action, which this volume attempts to assemble. By bringing diverse voices and perspectives together, we hope to contribute to an emerging discourse that recognises the urgency of climate action and the necessity of anticolonial practice in Arctic contexts.

Note: The above introduction is a shortened version of the original introduction published in Arctic Practices. It is meant to summarise the general intent of the book and, most importantly, situate Sofia Singler’s chapter in the book’s broader framework.

When Is Now? The Case for Temporal Ambiguity in Critiques of Sámi Architecture Sofia Singler 

The evidence was always hiding in plain sight: modern architecture was not about rejecting the past as much as selectively appropriating and manipulating it, swapping the burdens of recent history for a more ancient past. Tellingly, the cover of the Bauhaus manifesto depicted not a heroic factory but a cathedral.¹ The Alberses’ studies in colour and textile drew from the messianic formal purity of pre-Columbian temples and miniatures rather than transport terminuses.² Despite declaring war on an antiquated “consciousness of time,” even De Stijl turned to methods borrowed from art history in its zeal to dismantle the “old world with its contents.”³ A Classical statue lay in observation at the foot of Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer’s Motorworks Pavilion at the Werkbund Exhibition of 1914, her relaxed pose communicating calm contentment: the authority of the past keeps its gaze on the modern, yet offers a relaxed acceptance of the novelty being celebrated.⁴

Still, a temporal bias persists in many accounts of the modern movement of the twentieth century. Awareness of modernists' simultaneous and mutually reinforcing interest in ancient history, on the one hand, and techno-scientific modernisation, on the other, has grown considerably in the last few decades and remains the subject of scholarly interest today.⁵ Yet it has not managed to extinguish the assumption that modernism was primarily, if not fundamentally, about rejecting the past. Modern architecture is, to this day, often understood as an architecture that unidirectionally positions itself toward the future — at the cost of the past.

The opposite bias lingers in accounts of Sámi architecture in the sub-Arctic and Arctic. As with many other Indigenous architectures and cultural practices, Sámi architecture is often assumed to be unidirectionally oriented toward historical origins: a vernacular that comprises moveable, modest, and momentary familial dwellings, such as the goahti and lávvu, built of timber, mosses, and reindeer hides. Although the Sámi have moved and been forced to move into permanent dwellings since the nineteenth century, particularly intensely from the 1950s and 1960s onward (as a result of which nomadic and semi-nomadic lifestyles have largely been replaced by sedentism), the lávvu, in particular, persists as an ethnopolitical symbol of resistance and as architectural shorthand for Sámi culture more generally.⁶

While the ‘orthodox’ modern architecture of the twentieth century has been narrated simplistically as rejecting history, ‘authentic’ Indigenous architecture is often deemed to indiscriminately belong to or perpetuate the past.7 In critiques of Indigenous architecture, ‘authenticity,’ more often than not, describes an allegiance to historical precedent and tradition, a state of uncorrupted originality and primordiality that is fundamentally at odds with contemporaneity. Analyses of Aboriginal architecture, for instance, remain constrained to a framework wherein “representations have a tendency to simplify and romanticise ideas of ‘Aboriginality’ and ‘authenticity’ that are framed within readings of the historic past, the Dreaming or a connection to country. From the point of view of this colonial framework, Aboriginal cultures are fixed in an unchanging past and delineated by a singular set of values.”⁸

Assumptions of such definitive temporal orientations both underpin and bolster historiographical patterns of marginalisation. Qualities deemed to contradict the assumed temporal disposition of an architectural ethic are cited as evidence of inauthenticity. Modern architecture that draws from craft rather than mechanised mass production or from stylistic precedent rather than abstracted expression is deemed ‘backward-looking’ and therefore not truly modern; its belonging to the past becomes an affront to its purportedly future-oriented disposition and thus disqualifies it from the canon of modernist orthodoxy.9 “Pervasive anomalies” that are detected in modern architecture — such as undeniably influential projects that come with a dubious whiff of history — may be categorised as “anachronistic holdovers from defunct proto-modernist trends, or as successors challenging an already-codified modernism.”¹⁰

The same dynamic, in reverse, is at play in analyses of Sámi architecture. Sámi projects that concern themselves with the ‘materials of modernity’ (steel, concrete, plastic) rather than ‘vernacular’ natural materials (timber, moss, reindeer hide) or that address conditions of the contemporary city rather than nomadic life in ancestral landscapes sit uneasily within what is perceived to be the authenticity of Sámi building tradition. Such designs are, therefore, often dismissed as exceptions to the rule or marginalised as something wholly Other. Categorisations such as ‘Indigenous,’ ‘folk,’ ‘primitive,’ or ‘vernacular’ architecture serve to “help define and legitimise the exclusive domain of what may be called ‘high design’ or ‘capital A’ architecture […] by representing those architectural traditions that are not seen to be part of it in a way that emphasises their Otherness.”¹¹

Both modern and Sámi architecture have suffered from being tethered — too strictly — to opposite ends of the same linear teleology. The false dichotomy that fuels patterns of Othering in both cases — that an architecture can only ever reject or accept history — is particularly pernicious in the Indigenous context. Assigning Sámi architecture exclusively to the past continues to constrain its analysis to a colonial framework of interpretation, wherein modernity and contemporaneity are considered the realm of the sovereign Nordic nation-states (the future) and ancient history that of Sámi architecture (the past).

This framework relegates Sámi architecture to an interpretive schema of nostalgia. Since it dwells in the past, it can never quite manage to realise itself in the current moment; ‘authentic’ Sámi architecture cannot be retrieved or revived in the present. Sámi new-build commissions are thus stuck treacherously between Scylla and Charybdis. They may enter modernity by aligning themselves with the Nordic mainstream and thus accept a degree of inauthenticity in exchange for contemporary relevance, or they may maintain distance to their Nordic counterparts but, in so doing, surrender to becoming something Other, uncontemporary, and therefore nostalgic. Especially in Indigenous contexts, such “claims for authenticity and fulfilment of identity through the invocation of memory are normally the rhetoric of dogmatists who would lead us, individually and collectively, into desperation.”¹²

The discourse surrounding the major public buildings erected in Sápmi from the 1970s onward testifies to the limits of such temporal determinism. Designed to give a contemporary form to an ancient nomadic Indigenous culture, the central attributes of publicness and permanence are foreign to the architectural tradition that newly built Sámi public buildings seek to represent. The museums, cultural centres, and parliamentary assemblies built in Sápmi in the last half-century have been critiqued in light of an ostensible contradiction: their very existence, as manifestations of ancientness in the contemporary moment, is seen as inherently paradoxical. They appear to simultaneously occupy the ancient and future poles of the timeline of history, thereby violating the presumed belonging of Sámi architecture to the past.

Subsequent scholarly insistence on the ‘contradictory contemporaneity’ of Sámi public buildings has fueled a contrived hybridity wherein qualities perceived as ‘ancient’ are deemed Sámi, whereas ‘contemporary’ facets are considered Nordic.13 Elements read as references to the past — semiotic citations of vernacular craft traditions or the employment of pre-industrial natural materials — are deemed Sámi, but elements considered decidedly contemporary — prefabricated concrete frames or triple-glazing — are judged inherently Nordic. In the case of the Sámi Parliament Building in Karasjok, for instance, designed by Stein Halvorsen and Christian Sundby and inaugurated in 2000, the exterior cladding in Siberian larch “ties the building to its specific location history, while steel, glass and concrete herald the modern and new.”14

The Sámi Parliament and Cultural Centre Sajos, in Inari, designed by HALO Architects and completed in 2012, has been described in similar terms as a crossbreed. On the one hand, its morphological references to duodji, Sámi handcraft, are credited as authentic Indigenous elements: “The auditorium is shaped like a kiisa, an oval-shaped wooden container, like a small chest. The conference room of the Sámi Parliament resembles a risku, a rounded piece of jewellery. Both spaces may also be conceived of as transformations of the shape of the traditional drum.”15 On the other hand, its overlaps with Nordic counterparts are perceived as threats to its Indigenous identity. “The authenticity of Sajos can justifiably be called into question: the building represents the mainstream of young Finnish architecture with its curved forms and minimalist, airy central space. Moreover, the topological quality of the roof surface and plasticity of form also associate the building with its contemporaries.”16

Čoarvemátta, a cultural complex home to the Beaivváš Sámi Našunálateáhter (Sámi National Theatre) as well as Sámi Joatkkaskuvla ja Boazodoalloskuvla (Sámi High School and Reindeer Husbandry School), set to open in 2024, is another case in point. Designed collaboratively by Snøhetta, 70°N arkitektur, Econor, and Joar Nango, the scheme is seen to embody ancient tradition both in terms of its program (reindeer husbandry, oral histories, performance, crafts) and its massing, which purportedly draws from the geometry of reindeer antlers.17 Yet the technological sophistication of its structural system, environmental control, and construction is typically seen as Nordic. The design, therefore, appears to embody an inevitable concession Sámi culture is forced to make to its Nordic coloniser — a conclusion not limited to ]oarvemátta but endemic to much of the criticism of architecture in Sápmi. These hybrid categorisations, rooted in the perceived conflict between ancientness and modernity, generate ever-recurring conclusions of Sámi architecture being stuck in a purgatory between Indigenous authenticity and contemporary relevance. New-build Sámi buildings, as an architectural genre, are condemned to be never quite authentically Sámi.

What happens if we reject a teleological account of history and move away from the historiographical dichotomy in which Sámi architecture is exclusively oriented to the past? If we accept that Sámi architecture can simultaneously seek to reject and reprise facets of history and, similarly, that it can both claim and resist aspects of contemporaneity, we may find the tools to interpret it beyond the colonial frameworks that have defined its study for so long. Acknowledging a more ambiguous approach to time promises to expand critiques of Sámi architecture beyond the insipid constraints of comparative analyses of the architecture of the Nordic nation-states.

Given the inherently interdisciplinary nature of architecture and ever-changing definitions of what constitutes the architectural field, the theoretical and methodological frameworks employed to analyse the histories and present of the built environment “need to keep changing, too, in order to keep pace with the permanent reconfiguration of our object of study. An eclectic approach to interdisciplinarity is the almost inevitable consequence of this state of affairs.”18 Taking a cue from other disciplines, it becomes immediately apparent that bells announcing the necessity of non-linear understandings of history are sounding loud, echoing rapidly into architecture.

Scholars of Sámi religious history underscore that narratives surrounding the Christianisation of the Sámi have been unduly constrained by the assumption that historic Indigenous religious practices were simply substituted by new Christian dogma. Rather than the ancient being replaced by the new, Sámi and Western religions interacted and overlapped in complex and sometimes contradictory ways, ultimately melding into an “increasingly syncretic belief system.”19

Sámi pastoralism, similarly, has long been considered a paradigmatic shift from traditional hunting to modern pastoralism. The dominant narrative is of an ancient past being replaced by a new life-form, of Sámi livelihoods switching their orientation from history to the future. Researchers have therefore tended to focus on identifying the precise timing and mechanisms of the pivotal change at the expense of considering its character. Increasingly, scholars now recognise that “there has probably never been an abrupt change; hunting and herding have both been parts of a multifaceted adaption existing up to the nineteenth century.”20 A novel era did not replace a previous history in a singular temporal fold, but rather, the reverberations between pasts and futures were — and remain — tangled, dynamic, and synergistic.

Anti- and non-teleological readings of Sámi architecture pave the way toward productively ambiguous interpretations that, rather than imposing a predetermined temporal orientation on Sámi buildings, recognise both the fragility and vigour with which pasts and futures meld in them. Elin Haugdal offers a provocative and nuanced analysis of the complexities of material use in modern and contemporary Sámi architecture. Her interpretation avoids the pitfalls of reductively defining ‘old’ materials as Sámi and ‘modern’ as Nordic and thereby illustrates the value of moving beyond the historiographic dichotomy that constrains so much of the discourse on Indigenous architecture.

On the one hand, in line with the typical understanding of Sámi architecture’s orientation to the past, materials such as untreated timber are seen to communicate “an aesthetics of decay that contemporary observers see in the ephemerality of traditional Sámi building practices,” especially the ideal of never leaving permanent physical traces in the land, associated with mobile Sámi dwellings such as the lávvu.21 On the other hand, non-decaying materials, which resist the effects of time, may be interpreted as cultural defiance — not products of a vernacular tradition, yet equally if not more ‘Sámi.’ Rather than invasively parasitic Nordic elements that corrupt Sámi authenticity, materials such as steel and concrete may be read as vessels of Sámi meaning that declare: “This building is decidedly not meant to decay.”22

What anchors Joar Nango’s practice in Sámi culture is not merely an interrogation of local materials, traditions, symbolisms, or tectonics — qualities recognisably linked to a Sámi past. Its embrace of the contemporary and the future is of the essence, epitomised by a design attitude or method Nango and Silje Figenschou Thoresen describe as ‘indigenuity,’ a portmanteau of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘ingenuity.’23 Temporally, indigenuity might be understood as operating beyond a dualistic dialectic between history and the future; it draws from both in tandem. While the Sámi vernacular may draw from natural materials, ancestral landscapes, and semi-nomadic livelihoods, contemporary Sámi material culture “includes Euro pallets and Coca-Cola bottles, plastic ropes, and other leftover consumer goods.”24 Projects of indigenuity resist being read as emblems of loss. Mass-produced Western commodities, consumer goods, or building systems are not evidence of colonial contemporaneity assuming a chokehold over Indigenous tradition as much as an instance of redefinition, reclaiming, and resistance. “The creation of an autonomously programmed object that distorts capitalist material flows” is subversion rather than surrender.25

Resisting the urge to pinpoint Sámi architecture to the historic end of an imaginary architectural timeline liberates analyses of contemporary Sámi buildings from the typical conclusion that they represent a sorry compromise between Sámi pasts and Western futures. Forms and types of Sámi architecture that have previously been marginalised because of their incongruity with an assumed orientation to the past might come to represent a wholly novel category of authenticity, which gains legitimacy not from the authority of the past but from refusing to be pigeonholed to a strict teleology. What was previously narrated as a misfit now stands to be viewed as defiantly and presciently Other. This is a historiographical framework in which “accident, contingency, and human universals — fluidity without inevitability — offer the raw materials for a better model of architectural historical process than the static idea of culture (with either a capital or lower-case c).”26

In modern architecture — similarly appointed to one extreme of an assumed timeline of existence, albeit the opposite end — the “Other tradition” of modern architecture has been theorised as an ethic that transcends simplistic dualisms of past and present. The Other tradition, as described by Colin St John Wilson, gains its potency from its refusal to address time in dialectically opposed terms. It embodies “a dynamic relationship in which not only is the new derived in part from the past but, by extending the scope of the traditional, changes (in turn) our understanding of the past.”27 It consciously collapses pasts and futures into one another, resulting in a “true modernism not only of Eliot and Joyce but also of Matisse and Picasso, in which dazzling powers of invention jostle with ancestral figures.”28 The result is an architecture that cannot be considered in exclusively historical or contemporary terms. “The point of history was no longer to give triumphalist, teleological accounts of modernism’s seemingly inevitable rise” — instead, linear accounts of history’s triumphant march from the past to the future were substituted by an invocation of “its multiplicity, its variability and its unexpected shifts or reversals” in time.29

Similar conceptions abound beyond St John Wilson’s thesis: many ways of verbalising ambiguity exist. Svetlana Boym’s characterisation of a “History Out-of-sync” and “Architecture of the Off-Modern” speaks to history writing, which evades a clear historical narrative arc. “Off-modern,” she defines as “a detour into the unexplored potentials of the modern project. It recovers unforeseen pasts and ventures into the side alleys of modern history, at the margins of error of major philosophical, economic, and technological narratives of modernisation and progress. It opens into the modernity of ‘what if,’ and not only postindustrial modernity as it was.”30

More recently, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen has continued challenging the presumed future-orientedness of modern architecture, arguing that “temporal disorientation was a hallmark of twentieth-century architecture, and that, while we often think that being modern means aspiring to leave the past behind with every tick of the clock, a disregard for chronological time was, in fact, an integral aspect of modernity.”31 Her characterisation of “untimely” modernists explicitly foregrounds “the far-reaching intellectual legacy of questioning linear historical time and the impact it had on twentieth-century intellectual and artistic culture.”32 Hitherto Sámi architecture has been predominantly conceptualised as an aspiration to return to historical origins — what about an ‘out-of-sync’ or ‘untimely’ Sámi architecture?

Interrogating Sámi architecture with reference to a productive Othering or untimeliness, in which time is viewed in non-linear terms, helps transcend the limitations of colonial interpretation. It frees the criticism of contemporary Sámi architecture from facile conclusions of hybridity. If a given project’s ostensibly modern or futurist elements are interpreted as Sámi rather than Nordic, what might otherwise be interpreted as a cultural concession or submission may now be read as defiance, authenticity, and critique. As Hirini Matunga notes: “Indigenous architecture is both position and opposition and acceptance and resistance […] Given that it continues to evolve as a design and built response to an ever-changing context, it should also resist the pejorative labels that in the past have tried to marginalise it, render it invisible or minimise it as a ‘legitimate’ architecture. These have ranged from labels such as primitive and savage to folk and traditional, ‘rough’ or ‘just buildings’ through to the vernacular, pastiche or ‘just a little bit too local’.”33

The “Other” approach has far-reaching consequences in light of green colonialism and other issues. Exploiting land areas in Sápmi is easier to justify if the Sámi built environment is defined in terms of ancientness. So long as patterns of reindeer herding or fishing are not directly impacted, the effect of large-scale infrastructural interventions such as wind farms and new railways are said not to threaten Sámi dwelling. From the Nordic states’ perspective, ‘unbuilt’ and ‘underused’ Lappish territories represent an empty canvas on which to build sustainable architecture. If we accept that Sámi architecture, as an ‘untimely’ mélange that comprises not just structures and lands that support ancient livelihoods and patterns of dwelling but also modern life forms from ‘snowmobilescapes’ to commercial infrastructures via which Sámi artisans serve tourist populations, the threats posed by such megaprojects become more difficult to neglect. These megaprojects may, at best, avoid disrupting vernacular Sámi lives, but they also upset modern, sedentary, and urban patterns of dwelling — which an untimely understanding of Sámi architecture compels us to view as just as relevant.

Embracing Otherism also broadens the scope of analysis to issues typically glazed over in the criticism of contemporary Sámi architecture. Hitherto, criticism has been limited predominantly to major new-build commissions of a public genre: civic, artistic, and political complexes that seek to serve Sámi communities. The politico-cultural burdens of such commissions — to celebrate or even represent an Indigenous people within the borders of a sovereign state — make them obvious targets for analyses rooted in the perceived conflict between Sámi pasts and Western futures. Yet little has been remarked on spaces and places that do not as explicitly straddle ancient pasts and presumed futures, and whose designs do not as straightforwardly carry responsibility for cultural representation. Although awareness of urban indigeneity is growing rapidly, architectural discourse has yet to interrogate the problems of the contemporary city in light of Sámi architectural practice.34 Housing, for instance, is rarely addressed explicitly as Sámi architecture, nor has much been said of major Nordic cities south of Sápmi being home to sizable Sámi communities; for instance, the largest Sámi community in Finland is in Helsinki rather than the Arctic.35 Architectural discourse remains complicitly silent on the situation faced by towns in Sápmi, such as Inari, which suffer from severe housing crises.36

Future scholarship on Sámi architecture ought to root itself in a critical re-evaluation of its relationship to history. Looking and seeing beyond Sámi architecture’s assumed exclusive belonging to the past — via off-modern or untimely paradigms of historical interpretation — promises to expand and enrich the analysis of Sámi built environments manifold. After all, to borrow Stanford Anderson’s reading of Banni architectural traditions in Gujarat, “despite its presence from time immemorial, this art of building […] is very much a matter of the present.”37 Many Sámi individuals have “dual” or even “plural” identities through which they identify with the Sámi nation as well as the nation-state(s) in which they live; analogously, much of the architecture in Sápmi straddles ambiguous hybridities between nation-states and Indigenous communities, as well as between pasts and futures.38

Modernist architects who viewed time in kaleidoscopic rather than telescopic terms found meaning in the process more than periodisation. Their interest in select moments of history was rooted in an appreciation of sociocultural context and method: the medieval church-building as a paragon of collective labour, or the Mesopotamian house-temple as a perfect translation of ritual movement into built form. Calls for questioning or even collapsing strict temporal orientations in the interpretation and criticism of Indigenous architecture similarly suggest an “approach that explicitly focuses on building traditions rather than buildings,” on process rather than product, as a method of avoiding the pitfalls of “historical entrapment.”39 In the context of Sámi architectural scholarship, a non-linear temporal foundation is not a novel framework of historical analysis as much as a re-acknowledgment of architecture as a timeless, immediate encounter with the meanings one can create and encounter through the manipulation of materials and space.

Book blurb

Arctic Practices: Design for a Changing World (Actar Publishers, 2025), edited by Bert De Jonghe and Elise Misao Hunchuck, emerges at a critical juncture wherein the very stability of Arctic ecosystems hangs in a precarious balance induced, almost entirely, by humans. This volume assembles forty-six contributors — designers, educators, artists, photographers, filmmakers, some Indigenous, some residents, and some visitors to the Circumpolar North — to create a polyvocal assembly of Arctic practices. Arctic Practices stands as both documentation and provocation — an attempt to record current practices while simultaneously imagining new possibilities for Arctic design in an age of crisis.

Bios

Dr. Sofia Nivarti (née Singler) is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. A native of Jyväskylä, Finland, Singler trained as an architect at the University of Cambridge and the Yale School of Architecture. She completed her PhD in architectural history at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Singler’s primary research specialism is the critical analysis of the architecture, urbanism, design and thought of Finnish modernists Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto and their associates. Her other research interests lie in the histories and theories of modern architecture, Indigenous architectures in the Arctic — especially Sápmi — and architectural pedagogies for children.

Dr. Bert De Jonghe​ is a landscape architect, educator, and founder of Transpolar Studio. He specialises in landscape architecture, urbanism, and design research in the Arctic regions. He has worked as a design­er at a range of land­scape archi­tec­ture practices worldwide, including in Belgium, South Africa, and Norway, and as a research assistant at Harvard GSD's Office for Urbanization. He has served in multiple teaching positions at the Arctic University of Norway, the University of Toronto and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

Elise Misao Hunchuck is a spatial researcher, editor, curator, writer, and educator. Based between Berlin and Milan, her transdisciplinary practice brings together architecture, landscape architecture, ecology, and media studies. She documents, studies, and archives the co-constitutive relationships between plants, animals, and minerals of sites in Canada, the US, Japan, China, and Ukraine by employing text, images, and cartographies. Elise is an editorial board member for Scapegoat Journal: Architecture / Landscape / Political Economy, and from 2021 to 2025, was the editor and discourse curator for transmediale, the festival for digital art and culture in Berlin. Elise is currently one of the spatial, architecture and design Fellows (2024–2026) at Akademie Schloss Solitude and a visiting assistant professor at Columbia GSAPP since 2022.

Notes

1. Magdalena Bushart, “Am Anfang ein Missverständnis. Feiningers Kathedrale und das Bauhaus-Manifest,” in Modell Bauhaus (Bauhaus-Archiv, Museum für Gestaltung, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau und Klassik Stiftung Weimar, 2009), 29–32
2. Lauren Hinkson, ed., Josef Albers in Mexico (Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2017).
3. Theo van Doesburg et al., “Manifest I of ‘The Style’, 1981” De Stijl 1, no. 1 (1918): 4.
4. William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900 (Phaidon, 1996), 104–06.
5. Kenneth Frampton, The Other Modern Movement: Architecture, 1920–1970 (Yale University Press, 2021).
6. A “symbolic breakthrough” has been pinpointed to the early 1980s, when Sámi hunger strikers constructed a lávvu outside the Norwegian Parliament building in protest of the hydroelectric development of the Alta-Kautokeino river valley. Ivar Bjørklund, “The Mobile Sámi Dwelling: From Pastoral Necessity to Ethno-political Master Paradigm,” in About the Hearth: Perspectives on the Home, Hearth, and Household in the Circumpolar North, ed. David Anderson, Rob Wishart, and Virginie Vaté (Berghahn Books, 2013), 69–80.
7. In this regard, the criticism of Indigenous architecture parallels and indeed overlaps with that of ‘historical,’ ‘traditional,’ and ‘vernacular’ building practices. Marcel Vellinga, “The Inventiveness of Tradition: Vernacular Architecture and the Future,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 13, no. 2 (2006/2007), 117.
8. Tara Mallie and Michael J. Ostwalf, “Aboriginal Architecture: Merging Concepts from Architecture and Aboriginal Studies,” in Liam Fennessy, Russell Kerr, Gavin Melles, Christine Thong and Emily Wright, eds., Cumulus 38° South: Proceedings of the Cumulus Conference, ‘Hemispheric Shifts Across Learning, Teaching and Research’, Swinburne University of Technology and RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, 12–14 November 2009 (Swinburne University of Technology and RMIT University, 2009), 483.
9. After all, the condition of modernity comes with a fundamental “orientation toward a future that will be different from the past and from the present,” and modernism, as a set of responses to the condition of modernity, declares “sympathy with the orientation toward the future and the desire for progress.” Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (MIT Press, 1999) 9–10.
10. Sarah Williams Goldhagen, “Something to Talk About: Modernism, Discourse, Style,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 64, no. 2 (2005): 149.
11. Marcel Vellinga, “The End of the Vernacular: Anthropology and the Architecture of the Other,” Etnofoor 23, no. 1 (2011): 172.
12. Stanford Anderson, “Memory without Monuments: Vernacular Architecture,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 11, no. 1 (1999): 21.
13. Sofia Singler, “Contradictory Contemporaneity? Sámi Building in Nordic Architectural Discourse,” in Joar Nango, ed. Axel Wieder (Sternberg Press), forthcoming.
14. Elin Haugdal, “‘It’s Meant to Decay’: Contemporary Sámi Architecture and the Rhetoric of Material,” in The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous Architecture, ed. Elizabeth Grant, Kelly Greenop, Albert L. Refiti, and Daniel J. Glenn (Singapore: Springer, 2018), 818.
15. Lauri Louekari, “Sámi Cultural Centre Sajos, Inari,” Arkkitehti, no. 5 (2012): 30.
16. Ibid., 30.
17. Statsbygg, Detaljregulering for Beavváš og Samisk Videregående Skole og Reindriftskole, planbeskrivelse til detaljregulering (Statsbygg, 2021).
18. Mario Carpo, “Architecture: Theory, Interdisciplinarity, and Methodological Eclecticism,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 64, no. 4 (2005): 426.
19. Tiina Äikäs and Anna-Kaisa Salmi, “North/South Encounters at Sámi Sacred Sites in Northern Finland,” Historical Archaeology 49, no. 3, “Contemporary and Historical Archaeology of the North” (2015): 90–109 (100).
20. Ivar Bjørklund, “Domestication, Reindeer Husbandry and the Development of Sámi Pastoralism,” Acta Borealia 30, no. 2 (2013): 174–189 (174).
21. Haugdal, “It’s Meant to Decay,” 823.
22. Ibid., 812.
23. Joar Nango and Silje Figenschou Thoresen, ed., The Indigenuity Project (Motto Books SA, 2013).
24. Joar Nango, “In practice: Joar Nango on building a library of Sámi architecture,” Architectural Review (2022).
25. Ibid.
26. Dell Upton, “Starting from Baalbek: Noah, Solomon, Saladin, and the Fluidity of Architectural History,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68, no. 4 (2009): 465.
27. Colin St John Wilson, “The Other Tradition,” AA Files, no. 24 (1992): 3–6.
28. Ibid.
29. Anthony Raynsford, “Provoking the ‘Thingness’ of History: The Anti-Teleological Hermeneutics of Steen Eiler Rasmussen,” in 104th ACSA Annual Meeting Proceedings: Shaping New Knowledges, eds. Robert Corser and Sharon Haar (ACSA Press, 14.7), 543–48.
30. Svetlana Boym, The Off-Modern (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 3.
31. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past (Yale University Press, 2023), 1.
32. Ibid., 12.
33. Hirini Matunga, “A Discourse on the Nature of Indigenous Architecture,” in The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous Architecture, ed. Elizabeth Grant, Kelly Greenop, Albert L. Refiti and Daniel J. Glenn (Springer, 2018), 304.
34. Dana Brablec and Andrew Canessa, eds., Urban Indigeneities: Being Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (University of Arizona Press, 2023).
35. Jenni Hakovirta, “Building a Case for Indigenous Architecture with Mixed-use Anarâškielâ Language Nest and Home for Elderly,” MArch thesis, University of Oulu, 2021.
36. Reetta Lehtiranta, “Kotiin? Paikallisten suhde arkkitehtuuriin Inarissa,” MArch thesis, University of Oulu, 2022.
37. Stanford Anderson, “Memory without Monuments: Vernacular Architecture,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 11, no. 1 (1999): 15.
38. Mikkel Berg-Nordlie, “The Governance of Urban Indigenous Spaces: Norwegian Sámi Examples,” Acta Borealia 35, no. 1 (2018): 53.
39. Vellinga, “The Inventiveness of Tradition,” 118.