A design for all time: Nunavut’s legislative assembly

DWANE WILKIN
Nunatsiaq News

IQALUIT — It bows to greet you, sloping its hooded glass facade to show a frost-white roof.

Like a creature penned in a yard too small, Nunavut’s new legislative building yearns for room to strut.

But in the month since its public debut in Iqaluit, the streamlined teardrop has adapted good-naturedly to awkward surroundings.

For a fast-growing frontier town without a rich architectural heritage, this has been no small feat.

“I gather it’s been called the ‘blue mouse’ by some people, which I think is quite fun,” says Bruce Allan, lead design architect on the project and a partner in the Montreal firm, The Arcop Group.

In form and scale, the flowing, contoured seat of Nunavut’s public government easily resists comparison with all other building projects in Iqaluit, with the possible exception of St. Jude’s Cathedral, built nearly 30 years ago.

From its massive post-and-beam construction right down to the sealskin uphostery on its cushioned public benches, the new government building marks an important departure from the boxy utilitarian buildings that dominate most Arctic communities.

If the legislative assembly works, it is because the design team, including Iqaluit architect Keith Irving of Full Circle Architecture, was given rare artistic license early on in the planning stages to create a space that would distinguish itself with its respect for the majority Inuit culture of Nunavut.

Irving, one of only three practising architects who live permanently in Iqaluit, allowed himself a small conceit this week.

“What the leg can do,” he said, summing up the potential impact of the structure on future development, “is to show people the value of design, the value of involving professional designers in a building.”

Lot too small

Despite its less than dramatic location, squeezed as it was by Town Council onto a municipal lot that’s not big enough to give it room to breathe, the 36,000 square-foot building does manage somehow to achieve its main objectives — what it lacks in setting it makes up in intimacy.

“How many houses of parliament in the world,” Bruce Allan asks rhetorcially, “are open to the outside, to anybody?”

Inside, an abundance of warm, light wood in the exposed glue-laminated timbers of the main hall and lobby is the principal esthetic element.

Outside, prevailing wind patterns influence the building’s unique round-wedge shape. Although snow-drift experts at first recommended turning the building by 180 degrees to encourage the least possible drift accumulation, architects balked.

“This is one of the tradeoffs we face in design,” Irving said. “If we build everything the way a structural engineer wants, we would end up with a box. If we build everything according to the snowdrift guys, it would look like a snowdrift.”

The choice of natural wood both in structure and detail also sprang from budgetary and technical constraints, faced by the project’s principal builder, Nunavut Construction Corporation. In addition to its wide esthetic appeal, wood, Irving says, can be easier to work with, more flexible and more forgiving than steel.

Sense of community

Allan encouraged the use of themes inside and out that would evoke a traditional sense of community, while striving overall for a shape technically suitable for the harsh Arctic environment.

“The building form is really trying to respond to nature,” he said, “which demands minimum exterior surface, from the point of view of protection from the cold, and demands the minimum number of irregularities, in view of drifting snow; and also demands maximum opportunity to admit light.”

From the beginning, the organizing principle of the blue mouse was driven by the structure’s twin functions: that of a legislative assembly and that of an office building.

Several return trips to the drawing board would be necessary, however, before piles were driven through the permafrost at the start of last year’s construction season.

First and foremost, there was the need to create a formal meeting hall to accomodate Nunavut’s 19 newly elected MLAs, visitors, the public, support staff, cameras and members of the press.

Separate office space for politicans, their staff, and a legislative library were also specified in the federal government’s design contract. Ottawa has bankrolled the $12 million project.

And as designers considered the central democratic function of the building — to debate and administer public government — a third requirement emerged: making the building truly accessible to ordinary people.

Different functions

At first, Allan said, it was assumed these different functions would demand separate buildings, possibly arranged together around a central plaza.

“Technically an all-wood building with two distinct functions within it, one the function of assembly and one the function of office, should be separated completely. It should be two buildings. But that wouldn’t work.”

Not the least of the constraints that interfered with the initial direction of the design was an additional need to meet national standards for fire safety. Separate structures would be subject to different building codes. Working closely with local fire protection authorities, Arcop and Full Circle overcame the problem.

Allan eventually reconciled the building’s very distinct space requirements by inserting an airy reception lobby between the assembly hall and the government office complex.

Soaring ribs of thick glass bind the lobby to its associated parts and suffuse it in a welcome natural light. Two curved wooden walkways span the reception area like the rungs of a kamotik over a lead in the sea ice.

The whole space is enveloped in three-storey-high, specially reinforced fire-retardant walls that will eventually be used to showcase Inuit tapestry when the building is finally ready for occupancy next fall.

Whether the blue mouse is eventually revered as a model for northern Canadian architecture or reviled as an extravagant whimsy, one thing seems certain — it won’t be ignored.

“That’s good,” Irving says. “That’s what architecture should be doing.”