Ilulissat, or Jakobshavn, as it is also called in Danish, is located 250 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle and with its 4670 inhabitants is Greenland’s third city. It is located at the entrance to the Icefjord, where it empties into Disko Bay. The area, which houses the northern hemisphere’s largest glacier, Sermeq Kujalleq, is so special that in 2004 it was proclaimed a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Since 1850, temperatures in the Arctic have risen twice as fast as in the rest of the world. As a result of the accelerated melting of the ice sheet, the front of Sermaq Kujalleq has retreated 40 kilometres. The melting of the Greenland ice sheet is thought to be responsible for a third of global sea level rise.

The several-thousand-metre-thick ice sheet and the otherwise unique natural conditions attract glaciologists and other researchers from all around the world who want to follow climate developments on site. But it’s not just scientists who are drawn to northwest Greenland. Even if fishing is still the most important industry, everyone expects tourism to grow explosively.

Before the pandemic broke out, we witnessed strong tourism development into places that can offer authentic and unique experiences. One such example was Iceland which, for better or worse, suffered a veritable tourist boom from 2015 until the coronavirus put an end to all travel. Greenland, like Island, has unique experiences to offer, both in terms of nature and culture.

The Icefjord Centre in Ilulissat is the first of six new visitor centres that the Greenland Home Rule government has decided to establish in order to promote the country’s development as a society and a tourist destination and to put the focus on the changes in climate that are taking place. The task of designing the new centre fell on the Danish architect Dorthe Mandrup, who won the international architectural competition held in 2019.

Creating a building in such surroundings requires both humility and courage. Dorthe Mandrup herself emphasises the importance of humility: “One should have a certain humility when placing a building in such a magnificent and sensitive landscape as the UNESCO-protected Icefjord. It requires a deep sense of the site’s distinctive features and, with the help of the architecture, underlines the importance of the landscape. The basic idea behind the Icefjord Centre was thus to design a building in interaction with the spectular, but at the same time vulnerable, nature that surrounds it.”

The snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus) is an equally rare and yet typical bird of the polar regions, with a mighty wingspan of just over one and a half metres. Dorthe Mandrup claims that when she designed the Icefjord Centre, which has a twisted horizontal structure, she was inspired by the way the owl flies across the landscape. The building is in complete harmony with the barren country. While it seems so light that it appears to hover above the ground, it is firmly anchored in the hilly bedrock, whose rounded shapes are reflected in the vaulted roof of the building.

The outdoor environment was designed by landscape architect Kristine Jensen’s studio in Aarhus. Rarely has Mies van der Rohe’s motto, “less is more,” been more relevant than in a case like this. The building is surrounded by barren terrain where shrubs such as crowberry, bearberry, alpine bearberry, woolly willow and dwarf birch form a fine carpet in the thin layer of soil that covers the bedrock and that blazes in brilliant earthy colours during the short period of the year when the ground is bare. The less that disturbs the impression of a building growing right out of the ground, the better.

Kristine Jensen has adapted to these conditions. The only new elements in the landscape besides the building itself are a reflecting pool that collects the meltwater that flows down the mountain and from the roof of the Icefjord Centre; a gravel parking lot; and a boardwalk that leads down to the Icefjord and the remnants of the four-thousand-year-old settlement of Sermermiut.

The climate here is extremely harsh. It has also left its mark on the building. The roof starts already at ground level and is aerodynamically designed so that wind loads are reduced. The entrances, at both ends of the building’s main structure, are covered, so you can shelter from the wind and blowing snow.

Perhaps the most important element of the outdoor environment is the roof of the Icefjord Centre. From there you can look out over the bay and the floating icebergs and it serves as a natural hub for hiking trips into the World Heritage Site. Red-, yellow- and blue-marked trail loops can be followed for moderately strenuous walks of one, two or four hours, with breathtaking views of the icebergs that have calved from the large glacier at the far end of the fjord.

"The building is surrounded by barren terrain where shrubs such as crowberry, bearberry, alpine bearberry, woolly willow and dwarf birch form a fine carpet in the thin layer of soil that covers the bedrock and that blazes in brilliant earthy colours during the short period of the year when the ground is bare."

Care was taken during the construction process. There are no traces of any blasting; the bedrock around the building is intact. However, it has not been possible to avoid scraping off the thin layer of soil with its covering of various kinds of shrubs, lichens and mosses. It is clear that the ambition has been to do as little damage as possible to the existing vegetation and that in time it will recover and re-colonise the scoured rock.

The desire has been to achieve revegetation that is of the same type as the surrounding alpine heath. The only problem is that in the Arctic climate such a process takes an incredibly long time. One could have learned from experience in reclamation efforts following the construction of power plants and roads in barren climates. First and foremost,  getting pioneer species to establish themselves in the thin layer of soil is crucial. A proven technique is to spray a mixture of plant substrates and seeds over the ground to bring about a first generation of plants that, when they decay and die, can form a germination bed for seeds blowing in from the environment. Immigration can be assisted by taking shrubs from the surroundings in late summer and laying them out so that they will deposit their seeds on the surfaces closest to the building. It’s certainly a cumbersome and experimental process, but something that a project of this magnitude should be able to afford.

The Icefjord Centre is a complicated building in an extreme climate. Its steel structure maintains the building’s strength and stability. The skeleton consists of 52 steel frames, each of which has a unique shape. A total of 400 tonnes of steel was used, of which 80% is recycled material. All building elements were manufactured in Denmark and shipped from Aalborg across the Atlantic. The twisted shape requires extreme accuracy of each building element; the slightest error in measurement in the manufacture would have entailed large overheads and delays in assembling the prefabricated building elements.

The developer was Realdania By & Byg, but the contractor was a Greenlandic company, KJ Greenland, which is owned by the brothers Karl and Jens Jensen. Local contractors with experience of building in the Arctic have been instrumental in keeping to the schedule, according to Frants Frandsen, who was the developer’s project manager. This is despite the fact that the pandemic posed major challenges, including half a year when the developer could not visit the construction site.

The Icefjord Centre is located at a convenient yet reasonable distance from other buildings in Ilulissat. That’s good. Partly because its architecture and modern materials in the form of glass, steel and untreated wood clearly deviate from the traditional colour code that otherwise characterises Greenlandic towns. In the past, red houses marked where priests, teachers and ministers lived; yellow houses were those inhabited by doctors and other health professionals; and the green-painted houses were the residences of electricians, mechanics and other craftsmen, while, finally, the fishermen and those who worked in the fishing industry lived in the blue dwellings. Nowadays, these colour codes have been dissolved and other, especially pastellish, colours have become fashionable, but it is still common to paint the houses colourfully.

But there is also another reason to keep a distance from other buildings, because the Icefjord Centre’s distinct structure and rigorous floor plan clearly deviate from the rather unplanned development of many Arctic settlements. Much of that is characterised by new building whenever the resources are made available and simply taking advantage of the land that is accessible at the time. Ilulissat has several examples of this: a fine new school located at the end of the road through an industrial area; a pedestrian mall that has very few shops and ends in the wall of a building. There is also a remarkable amount of car traffic and although the distances are relatively small and it is easy to orient yourself, there is a lack of proper sidewalks and an overall structure in the pedestrian and bicycle path network.

Photo: Leneisja Jungsberg

One of the consequences of the milder climate is that the permafrost is thawing. This means, among other things, that the buildings, roads or other structures that rest on the permafrost ice and not on solid rock suffer from subsidence. This manifests itself in the form of skewed stairs, sloping floors and doors and windows that can’t be closed.

As part of the EU-funded Nunataryuk Project,[1] Nordregio studies the societal consequences of the thawing permafrost together with researchers from the universities of Akureyri and Oulu (Uleåborg). It is estimated that today five million inhabitants live in communities with parmafrost underfoot, a figure that is estimated to decrease by 3.3 million by 2050. However, it is not known how many of these residents live in houses that actually rest on permafrost. Namely, there is a lack of geotechnical mapping in most municipalities in the Arctic. The maps showing the extent of the permafrost are too general to be useful as a basis for municipal planning.

One of the buildings in Ilulissat that is grappling with problems caused by the thawing permafrost is the Ilulissat museum, which is named after the Danish polar explorer and anthropologist, Knud Rasmussen. In addition to sloping floors and crooked stairs and doors, moisture that penetrates under the building also contributes to the problems with the working environment that have been accelerating since the 1990s, and which have become markedly worse over the past two or three years. Installing freezing units in the floors has been tried and abandoned, but it is now being considered for retesting. Today, the problems are so serious that the director decided to resign, on the grounds that instead of devoting herself to the museum’s collections, she must devote all her time to the poor working conditions.

One question that arises is whether it would not have been possible to let the local history museum get even a small piece of the pie in connection with the major investment that the construction of the Icefjord Centre entailed. The total cost of the project was DKK 152 million, of which DKK 108 million came from Realdania, DKK 8 million from Avannaata Kommune and 15 million from Greenland’s Home Rule. The exhibition, which cost SEK 21 million, was mainly financed by the Nordea Fund.

A renovation of the local museum would cost a maximum of a couple of million, but the municipality has apparently chosen to invest all its resources in the new Icefjord Centre, whose exhibition – designed by a consulting firm from Copenhagen – also includes the cultural heritage. The authentic collections found in the local museum could be a valuable complement to the more easily accessible, but also more superficial and flashy exhibition that the Copenhagen consultants have created.

The current plan for the local museum is to apply for private funding to stabilise the building’s foundation and thus save the local cultural heritage from being relegated to inaccessible archives. Avannaata Kommune does not have the resources to pay for the necessary technical repairs, but is carrying out a survey of the extent of the damage as a basis for a future application.

Technical solutions are available to solve all the problems caused by the thawing permafrost, but the municipalities also have problems with mould, sewage that goes straight into the sea and other infrastructure challenges that are considered more acute and therefore take top priority. The problem is a general one for Greenland. The country is overwhelmingly rich in natural resources, both in terms of raw materials and aesthetic values, but lacks both human resources – a total of just over 56,000 inhabitants in an area that is five times larger than Sweden’s and 50 times larger than Denmark’s – as well as the financial means to be able to fully use them.

[1] Nunataryuk means “land by the sea” in one of the Inuit languages of Canada and is the name of a research project within EU’s Horizon 2020 research programme (Grant Agreement No. 77342).