Nomadic City Provides Aurora Views from Icebound Huts

NOMAD CITY - AURORA OBSERVATORY
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NOMAD CITY
AURORA OBSERVATORY

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NOMAD CITY
AURORA OBSERVATORY
Index 2
Project organization 3
Concept 4
Nomad City 5
Røssvatnet 6
Icefishing 7
Aurora observatory 8
Project 9
Elements 10
Workshop 11
What is nomad? 12
Survival architecture workshop 27
Publications 34
Conclusions and future projects 35

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NOMAD CITY
AURORA OBSERVATORY
AUTHORS
Marco Casagrande - Hans-Petter Bjørnådal - Camilla Vivås-Valen
WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS
Marco Casagrande - Hans-Petter Bjørnådal - Jan Tyrpekl - Nikita Wu
TEACHERS
Marco Casagrande, teacher - Hans-Petter Bjørnåal, teacher – Jan Tyrpkl, ass. teacher
UNIVERSITIES
Environmental art masters class of the Aalto university in Finland
Lund university department of sustainable urban design in Sweden
Madrid european university department of architecture,
Bauhaus university department of fine arts in Germany
Université libre de Bruxelles faculté d'architecture la Cambre–Horta in Belgium.
Mosjøen VGS Byggfag
STUDENTS
Harri Henrik – Schuchin Shen - Essi Vehkanen – Giorgia Larsen – Raquel Pastel - Katarzyna Balcerowska
Guoda Bardouskaite – Gabrielle Blais-Defour – Suzanne Van Niekirk
Giorgia Ceccato – Lill Maria Hansen - Cecilia Spampinato
Ronny Korn – Sandra Hofmann
Greg Eeman – Waldo de Keersmaecker
SPONSORS
Varntresk Grendelag - Sæterstad Gård – Xl-Bygg Bernard Olsen
XL-Bygg Næstby Trevare – Coop Hattfjelldal
Nord-Norges Arkitetkforening

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NOMAD CITY
AURORA OBSERVATORY
The aim is to build up a moving and flexible wooden city on top of the frozen
Røssvatnet Lake. The architecture is made out of wood and mounted on movable iron
sledges. The participating students will realize individual and collective structures and
live in them. The nomadic structures will function as a village for icefishing and aurora
observatory on the lake.

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NOMAD CITY
Illustration: Samernas Liv – Rolf Kjellstrøm
While the city of Rome built their Pantheon, the nomads on the northern
hemisphere lived in moveable and temporary structures such as lavvos, Although
serving the same purpose as pantheons they were often regarded as barbaric in
relation to western civilization. Today we see the nomadic way of living as more
in connection with nature than that of modern civilization, and we can call their
structures moveable ecological pantheons.
Nomadic societies move according to season, climate, natural resources and the
sami people developed a whole range of building structures as part of their
nomadic culture. One of them is a house on sledges.
In our modern society we find a new type of nomadic societies forced to move
by economic collapse, famine, wars, pollution and natural disasters.
Our aim is to build a nomadic urban structure in connection with
nature.

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RØSSVATNET
Photo: Ketil Born
Røssvatnet (Sami: Reevhtse) is a lake and reservoir in Norway in the county of
Nordland, and has been the site of human occupation since the Stone Age. Its
area of 219 km² makes it the second largest lake in Norway by surface area.
Without the dam which has regulated the lake since 1957, it would be 190 km²
and the third largest lake in Norway. Its depth is 240 meters, its volume is
estimated at about 15 km³ and its surface is 374 meters above sea level.
Røssvatnet is stituated in the mountains between the coast of Helgeland and the
forests and rivers of Sweden. To the south we find Hattfjelldal with its distinct hat-shaped
mountains and in the north Okstindan,with its glacier. To the east we find the
river of Uman connecting the region with Sweden, Finland and Russia. (Blå vegen)

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ICE-FISHING
Photo: Ketil Born
The landscape provides many natural resources. The fish in Røssvatnet is famed for
it´s size and quality, Char and trout is the most common fish with sizes from 300g –
3 kg. On the shores and the sorrounding forests we find blueberries, cranberries,
cloudberries and mushrooms. Wildlife include grouse, bears, elk, reindeer, lynx,
eagle etc.
The city will be designed as cabins for ice-fishing on the frozen lake,
but will also function as huts on the shores in the summerseason.

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AURORA OBSERVATORY
Photo: Tommy Eliassen
The Aurora and the bright summer-nights are distinct features of life on the arctic
circle, and at Røssvatnet , many miles from the nearest city, there are no pollution
from city-lights and you can clearly see the night sky.
The aurora originates from electrically charged particles from the sun creates
marvellous colurs when colliding with earths atmosphere.
As with all natural phenomen The aurora has many myths associated with it.
According to the Sami, our ancestors live in the aurora and were perceived by
the Sami as a supernatural force. The northern lights are depicted on rune drums
of the noaides, the Sami shamans.
The nomadic city will function as an aurora observatory.

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PROJECT

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ELEMENTS
1. Individual ice-fishing houses
- ice fishing downstairs
- aurora observatory upstairs – skylight
- 2 persons sleeping upstairs
- two-person design-build groups
2. Public fire house
- open fire on fire-sledge
- grilling and smoking of fishes
- aurora observatory – skylight
- collective design-build
3. Public sauna
- Sauna stove + water heater, washing inside the sauna
- Connected with a swimming hole avanto in the ice
- aurora observatory - skylight
4. Internet Café
- Panasonic Toughbook or alike robust laptop
- Windmill for recharging computers and mobile phones
- Internet connection + wireless
5. Drytoilet
- Movable dry toilet or two
- skylight

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WORKSHOP
Time: 5. – 16.3.
The students will construct simultaneously their individual sledge-huts and the movable
public units. The construction work will be realized partly on site and partly in the
near-by schools. Iron works in co-operation with Olav Storholm.
Students will use basic individual carpentry tools: hammer, nails, saw, clips, rope.
Students will prepare for intensive physical work in cold climate.
The participating students come from:
Aalto University Department of Environmental Art, Finland - 6 students
Mosjøen Videregående skole (building) 7 students
Lund Arkitektur og miljø 3 students
Universidad Europea de Madrid 3 students
Bauhaus university department of fine arts 1 + 1 students
Universite Libre de Bruxelles faculte dárchitecture la Cambre-Horta 2 students

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WHAT IS NOMAD
During the Nomad City / Aurora Observatory -workshop on frozen Røssvatnet
Lake in Norway the students were asked to comment on What Is Nomad?
Photo: Greg Eeman
1.
State of the mind, never ending exploration of the space around us. Curiosity.
Freedom of the choices. Everything and nothing. Sky and ground. Sound and
silence. Light and darkness. Equality of days. Enjoying of time.

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Photo: Ketil Born
2.
A nomad is in move.
• He carries all his life in:
- His body
- His backpack
- Something bigger
• The pattern of nomad’s constant movement can be:
a) Cycle based
b) Random
• A nomad whose movement is not cycle based is in constant discovery.
• Nomad’s connection to the environment is based on opposites:
- He is resistant ( A shell protecting from all unexpected and expected unpleasant
conditions of the surrounding world.)
• But very depending:
- Climate
- Community
- Food
- Etc.
• A nomad can be lonely or not.
• A nomad can have a goal of his journey.
• A nomad can be a temporary condition.
• A nomad is me.

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Photo: Guoda Bardauskaite
3.
Nomad lives without settling for set borders individually in a society connected in
motion.

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Photo: Valmar Valdmann
4.
A person wandering around installing his / her home to a place giving the best
shelter, food etc. living conditions. He / she is constantly prepared to move the
“home” in short time and live with the laws of nature.

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5.
Native nomad populations were nomadic for survival purposes, primal survival.
They were following herds and seasons by necessity. However, nowadays, my
vision of what being a nomad is has greatly changed. It is an adopted lifestyle
pushing us to follow our desires and curiosity. A “Neo-Nomad”, in my opinion,
has an attach, an anchor … but escapes to discover, learn and try. Knowledge
of yourself and your surroundings is what you have to gain and gather. It might
also be a temporary lifestyle choice, like a backpack kind of hut, or some might
chose a more permanent way to keep moving around. But in today’s world,
there is something truly liberating in the possibility of escaping the ties of the
modern world and start exploring.

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6.
It seems that nomads have not local roots, maybe that is right, because they
have the space to change – it is only a question of them where is the mental /
spirit home of them.
They have another understanding of a family life; they have to live for each
other, not only on birthday dates or Christmas time.
Nomads are the best human parasites in nature; they live with the nature besides
for the nature. They are not asking them how achieve more than they needed in
the past / not more than the other generations before.

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7.
Nomads don’t live in a fixed place not because they can’t but because they want
and need changing. Is also something that can be moved, small, comfortable,
necessary. It can be also fixed but to welcome nomad people. (or not)
Nomad people are the ones who are travelling in a land and take all their
belongings with them, even the house.

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8.
To me, being a nomad is a way of life – on has a nomadic existence. It implies
an understanding of the temporal nature of things. I feel it would be hard to live
a nomadic life to place value on permanence. Ones life would be in a
constant state of flux as the living arrangement would always invariably change
it would be necessary to appreciate that if one were final happiness. There
have been many cultures of nomadic peoples throughout history of course it is
very easy to romanticise such cultures. The constant changes can seem quite
adventurous while they very well may be, I think there also is steely
determination behind it. It takes a great strength to believe that the weather will
bring what you need where you are heading also a great strength to believe
in yourself your family your community that you are making the correct
decisions. I think it would be quite hard.

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Photo: Greg Eeman
9.
Nomad is a concept about travelling … The liberty to choose your environment.,
the people surrounding you. It’s something that makes you close to the person
with who you are.
It’s a certain concept of liberty. Like a new kind of pirates free to go everywhere
(without the stealing).
It’s also a way to be really close with the nature … to know how it works and
live an experience in biosis.

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Photo: Nikita Wu
10.
When I think of nomads I imagine a tribe of people travelling from one place
and adjusting to another, for whatever reasons there may be. Even though they
carry with them an air of temporarity, their culture and traditions are more than
vivid and are enriched every time the tribe arrives and settles down to a new
environment. To me not having a solid base is intriguing as it is very different
from the society I was raised in. Through the presence of temporarity they seem
have given up the security and developing options a solid base provides and
gained a quality of life I admire.

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Photo: Nikita Wu
11.
Waldo is nomad. No Made
- Following the game and the seasons to survive
- Change often of site
- Easy to build / deconstruct habitations
- Community / support / family
- Functions for / people different
For me, a nomad community is like a big family composed with people not only
linked by blood, but by their ideals of an alternative life.

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Photo: Raquel Pastel
12.
Nature. Togetherness. In a big “space”. Survival. Patience. Tranquility –
thinking. Strong bonds. Family. Being together in a different way than we
normally think people are “social” (being together). Since they are a smaller
group of people (family, friends) than those you find in a city for example, they
relate in a different way – their lifestyle makes them depending more on each
other in order to survive and to have friendships. In this way you have to settle
with your “neighbour”, even you like him or not – and you learn to be patient
and to understand people. Another part is their relationship to nature – since
they have to survive and find food, they need to know how “nature acts”, which
also teaches them to respect nature. They depend on their knowledge of the
environment and all aspects of nature and the earth. And they learn to respect it
and its inhabitants.

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Photo: Lill Maria Hansen
13.
Nomad is to live everyday life in accordance with the nature. It is the attitude
towards the environment that you are in. For me, nomad people respect nature,
they try to read carefully the messages sent to them by the mountains, the rivers,
the trees, the animals, the sky, the sun, the moon … which are long forgotten by
the modern people.
Nomad is also the attitude towards the changing of life, which is the biggest fear
of the people in modern society. Nomad people accept changes and they
choose to live their whole life with changes.

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14.
Most of people think that nomads have no culture. They move from one place to
the next, leaving every time a background that does not belong to them, to
reach another one that does not either.
We are used to think that each culture strictly belongs to the place where it was
born and developed. It is difficult for us to imagine a culture that can flow and
change itself always concerning the environment, different each time and each
time dominating but controlled. Instead, that’s the power of nomads culture. It
allows them to be challenging the environment and adapting to it, using both the
old consistent culture and the really new skills.

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15.
Nomad is, I think, a priviledge.
It might be started by necessity in the search of basic resources for survival and
become there after the only logical way of live.
It might be triggered by the alienation provoked by the routine of stably structure
lives.
But in the end it is limited and controlled by states and borders. In the age of free
trade, only money can move freely. People can not. The few that can (we
sometimes) are the priviledged elite.
But are we nomads? I’m probably not, however much I might move. So there
must be something else to nomadity than mobility… A way of thinking? Flexible
adobtable, open? A way of living? Without attachement to material things,
without striving for escalating in this hierarchical society? Without an end but
with process as and end in itself?

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SURVIVAL ARCHITECTURE WORKSHOP
By Alison Furuto, Archdaily
© Nikita Wu
Led by environmental
architect
and anarchist,
Marco Casagrande,
representing the Aalto University Environmental Art Masters Program, students
were to join in the creation of a nomadic city on the ice, both weathering and
embracing the cold and wind, and alternating blizzards and slush over the
course of ten days. There were twenty of them in total. In addition to Marco
himself, his wife, Taiwanese journalist Nikita Wu, his long time friend Norwegian
architect Hans- Petter Bjørnådal, Czech MA student
and carpenter-extraordinaire
Jan Tyrpekl, made up the organizational team. The Lapland
native believes in an almost cruel method to his medium, where human intentions
come naturally
second to nature’s. It is with this in mind that one needs to
approach his workshop
on the frozen lake of Rössvatnet in subarctic Norway.
More of the team’s description, by Guoda Bardauskaitė and Suzanne van
Niekerk, on the workshop after the
break.

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© Nikita Wu
A cross-disciplinary mix of environmental art, architecture, sociology and
survival, The students were given a task to make a personal nomad shelter and
collectively to build a movable Nomad Sauna on skies and an Aurora
Observatory. Under the ice there were beautiful salmon related fishes – trout
and arctic char. Local Knowledge was needed in order to get them up. The
farmers around the lake were generous in helping the students and more than
that curious to see if they could manage in the demanding Nordic winter
conditions. For the course the survival was not enough – the students had to
manage to construct in 1:1 scale and find beauty through their actions in the
frozen environment.
© Nikita Wu

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The sixteen
students
of nineteen
nationalities
came from four universities
and four
different
artistic disciplines:
Environmental Art students
from Aalto University in
Helsinki, Sustainable Urban Design students
from Lund University in Sweden,
Architecture students
from UEM in Madrid, Spain and one Fine Art student
from
Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany.
© Nikita Wu
In the words of Casagrande, “survival is just the first step in discovering
true
beauty”. Together we were going to create,
explained Marco over generous
cups of Finnish vodka, a city of subtle proportions:
a mobile city for nomads to
respect and be humbled by nature. Individually, the students
would make their
own small ice fishing
shelters come aurora observatories. And together we
would create two key communal focal points: a large scale observatory
and a
sauna. As Marco liked to point out, a sauna is, simultaneously and
contradictorily, both an indicator of civilization and a chance for humans to
return to a more bass
nature

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© Nikita Wu
From the beginning the workshop was spontaneous and intuitive.
The students
were unaccustomed
to each other, building processes and materials were
unsecured, and we were camping in the local schoolhouse for the first two nights
after our original accommodations fell through. Despite the circumstances
though, there was an underlying sense of optimism present from day one. The
workshop attracted a certain
kind of spirit and without complaint we quickly
came to appreciate the quirks of having a road kill for dinner, wearing garbage
bags as rain protection without the slightest sense of irony, and the joy of merely
being out of the wind, even while being completely soaked to the core.

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© Nikita Wu
This was also a workshop
about doing. We were encouraged to lay down our
pencils and start experimenting with structures. It was about self- discovery, and
Marco left us to our own devices. If we needed a consultation, he could be
found on the ice, quietly fishing. There was no lack of inspiration, though. There
is a rich heritage present in the Sami culture, and many of the citizens of
Hattfjelldal were keen to talk with us. Every evening around the fire Marco too
would tell us tales of nomadic culture and myths and stories of his childhood.
Perhaps the most prolific though was the influence
from the nature, it affected
both our design ideas and the development of our
projects.

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© Nikita Wu
We experienced a massive range of weather conditions — from beautiful, clear
sunny days with crisp snow underfoot,
to sleet and hail, soggy snow, and
powerful winds. With the former solid ice surface
of the lake turning into a
continuing series of thigh- high pools of slushy ice water, it took an afternoon to
move the sauna a hundred or so meters from the shore on to the site. We had
envisioned an easy and graceful move, hoping a helicopter pilot at the farm
would transport it for us, dropping it into place without so much fuss. Of course,
that was not going to happen, it took a combined effort of ingenuity and
manpower of the entire group instead. And when it was finally settled, with the
observatory in place next to it, we felt an overwhelming
sense of
accomplishment.

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© Nikita Wu

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PUBLICATIONS
Survival Architecture Workshop
- Alison Furuto. Arch Daily. 5/2012
- VOID+FORM建築設計事務所. Japan. 5/2012
- Le Post-It Jaune. 5/2012
Marco Casagrande: nomad city - aurora observatory
- Richelle. Designboom. 6/2012
Nomad city - Aurora observatory – кочевой город в норвежских горах
- Novate. Russia. 6/2012
Marco Casagrande - Nomad City - Aurora Observatory
- Emmanuel Chaussade. Aima007. Luxembourg. 6/2012

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SUMMARY AND FUTURE PERSPECTIVES
The workshop achieved its aims in building a nomad city on top of the frozen
lake of Røssvatnet. The structures built during the workshop is in use by the
local community. It was also a success in terms of building a knowledge base
around nomadic living in arctic conditions. Also the students acquired a sense
of mastering the conditions and they want more. The project has received
international publicity and there is a big demand for this kind of research.
Future perspectives include building a crossdiciplinary platform including a
research + design center in the region of Helgeland. This crossdiciplinary
platform will include bases by the mountain and the sea, and will focus on
arctic landscape, open form, urban acupuncture, nomadic living and local
knowledge in cooperation with international universities. We have already
begun planning for future workshops in the winter and summer of 2013.

Nomadic City Provides Aurora Views from Icebound Huts

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