AA-2026-F28D04
On the image
Somewhere on the Alaskan tundra, three men are working out a problem beneath a freshly sided building that has been raised on wooden pilings, which is the only honest way to build on permafrost if you want the structure to still be level in five years. The ground here is not ground in any conventional sense — it is frozen water wearing a thin disguise of grass — and the engineers who first ignored that fact in the postwar Arctic building boom produced a generation of structures that slowly tilted, then sagged, then swallowed themselves. These men appear to have learned that lesson, or inherited it, and are now dealing with whatever the next problem is, which in construction is always immediate and always beneath the floor. The building itself, clad in fresh horizontal lumber with window frames still open to the tundra air, has the compact, practical proportions of a utility structure being built for function rather than comfort, in a landscape where comfort was always a secondary consideration. The settlement visible in the distance across the flat, treeless terrain places this somewhere on the western or northern Alaska coast, where in the 1960s the federal government and Native communities alike were replacing older sod and frame structures with something newer, which would turn out to have its own set of problems. Every generation of Arctic builders was confident they had finally figured it out.
Visually related — by likeness
Building on Permafrost: House Construction on Pilings, Arctic Alaska, c. 1960s. 1958–1968. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-F28D04. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/building-on-permafrost-house-construction-on-pilings-arctic-alaska-c-1960s.
@misc{aaAA2026F28D04,
title = {Building on Permafrost: House Construction on Pilings, Arctic Alaska, c. 1960s},
year = {1958–1968},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-F28D04},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/building-on-permafrost-house-construction-on-pilings-arctic-alaska-c-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Building on Permafrost: House Construction on Pilings, Arctic Alaska, c. 1960s PY - 1958–1968 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-F28D04 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/building-on-permafrost-house-construction-on-pilings-arctic-alaska-c-1960s ER -
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