Inuit living spaces
Béatrice Collignon - “From Igloos to Three Bedroom Houses: At the crossing of Architecture and Cultural Geography”
Tuesday February 5th, 2008, 12 noon
The “Pit”, School of Architecture, Carleton University, Ottawa
In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s the Canadian Inuit experienced an important shift in living patterns, moving from one multi-functional room igloos to houses brought North by public housing programs which were made up of several mono-functional rooms. The Inuit had to adapt to dwellings designed following Euro-Canadian’s norms and carrying values alien to their culture. In 1998, Dr. Collignon conducted and filmed interviews with elderly women belonging to an Inuit community living in the central western arctic, who had experienced this shift. Her research continued for the next ten years and revealed that adaptation had been more than difficult, but also that, if the Inuit culture is put at risk in southern-style dwellings, it is also inside of them that Inuit are creating efficient mediations between their culture in transition and the Western one. Dr. Collignon’s presentation, based on her video documentary, will focus on two issues: empirical - Inuit experiences of housing - and epistemological - combining architecture an cultural geography. The talk will therefore be of special interest to architects and cultural geographers.
See also:
Nunatsiaq News: Identity and survival carried in Inuit place-names
Siku News: A people and their land
Aboriginal Canada Portal: Housing and Infrastructure
Flickr Pool: Nunavut
Flickr Pool: Images of Canada’s North
- Anne