Architecture: Design for a Winter Nation

Originally published in the Globe and Mail. Read the full text here

The Maison Glacé incorporates ice as both a decorative element and a functional component of design

In January, 2013, Chicago had its biggest fire in a decade – a blaze in an historic warehouse on the south side of the city. Nearly 200 firefighters worked through the night, spraying water that froze instantly. By sunrise, the building was encased. Icicles hung from the lintels and entablature.

If you’re a design-minded person and you google morning-after photos of the event, a number of thoughts might come to your mind. First, there’s the question as to whether the ice formed or was put in place. Nobody intended to convert the warehouse into a winter palace, but if you accept that ice is chemically no different from water then you must also accept that the transformation of the building was set in motion by humans. Ice is a material like any other: It can be produced, manipulated and sculpted.

It’s also an insulator. As the fire subsided, the ice became a kind of membrane. Nighttime photos of the occurrence are particularly dramatic: They show a smouldering glow through a skin of ice, like a fireplace behind tempered glass.

Mr. Pujatti designed a screen of metal mesh that will run parallel to the northwestern façade at a five-inch remove. Some windows will sit behind this structure, while others will jut out and poke through.

The most obvious takeaway is that ice is beautiful. Few materials are as sinuous or as textured. It’s a shame Gaudi didn’t work with ice. Online, you can find hundreds of images of ice-covered buildings: a storefront from WWI-era Philadelphia, an abandoned school in Minneapolis.

The Italian architect Stefano Pujatti, founder of the firm Elasticospa, showed me one such photograph when I met with him this October: a sepia-toned image of a turn-of-the-century façade in Montreal. The icicles were thick, like bars over the windows. “I’m a Cancer, a water sign,” he says. “Water, to me, is a fascinating material, because it becomes air, it becomes fluid, it becomes solid.” We’d met to discuss a new project, the Maison Glacé (the Ice House), which incorporates ice not just as a decorative element but also as a functional component of the design.

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