BY JESSICA BRIDGER
The Arctic could be the next hot place to live.
FROM THE JANUARY 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE
The dock screeches and groans, the noises of cold metal in cold air. It is dawn as 14 students, two instructors, and one journalist board the Langøsund. The boat sits in the Adventfjord in the High Arctic. Barren gray slopes, crusted with snow on their peaks, rise from the glassy surface of the sea. The sky?s colors are reflected in the fjord, a mirror of this strange, cold place.
The mission is an experiment in design education: an expedition for serious research about the human settlement potential of Arctic places. We motor out into the water, leaving Longyearbyen (population 2,144), bound for Barentsburg (population 471). Both towns lie on Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago, halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole. Longyearbyen is said to be the northernmost town with a permanent population in the world. Leena Cho double-checks the zipper on her poppy-red jacket as the boat makes headway. She grins at the students; they are all jet lagged but facing icy winds with palpable excitement. Cho is intense, with a seriousness she often undercuts with a wicked dark humor. Along with her husband, the architect Matthew Jull, she founded the Arctic Design Group (ADG) in 2013, to examine how landscape architecture and architecture can contribute to places like Svalbard or settlements in the Russian and Canadian Arctic. Cho is an a...