newsminer.com

FAIRBANKS — The last remaining Nunamiut Inupiat Eskimo community settled Anaktuvuk Pass just 60 years ago, trading in nomadic life for village life in a valley tucked 2,200 feet up in the central Brooks Range. In the one-airstrip town with no roads in or out, some 300 residents live crowded into 1970s era wood-frame houses perched on the windswept, arctic mountain pass.

But innovative designers now want to help the villagers build homes following a modern design that is actually inspired by the sod igloos that the Nunamiut first carved from the land.

Mayor George Paneak has lived nearly all his 58 years in Anaktuvuk, save the time he spent trailing caribou and studying abroad. In a video interview in the town hall, the Alaska Native reflected on how life has changed since the modern world — with its cookie-cutter architecture and electricity — infiltrated his village in the 1970s.

“No water ’til five years ago,” he said. “We got Internet. It’s so easy now.”

But not everyone would consider Anaktuvuk’s intense wind and 50-below winters easy. The generic framed houses that popped up several decades ago were not designed for the climate or hunting traditions of the Nunamiut.

So scientists at the Cold Climate Housing Research Center are trying to design a house that weds the wisdom and aesthetics of ancient shelter with the creativity of today’s building science. “These are people that understand their country,” said Jack Hebert, president of the Fairbanks-based center. “And the fact that they’re living in these ridiculous stick-built homes up there in the wind in that amazing country just blows my mind.”

The goals

The research center, with support from industry partners and information from the people of Anaktuvuk, is designing a prototype house. This week, Hebert and his design team finished a computer model of the prototype, which will be about 800 square feet and banked in the earth. They will present the building model to the village and start testing a module at the Fairbanks research center this fall.

The effort is a pilot program that could extend to other villages. Anaktuvuk was chosen for the pilot project for its extreme weather, isolation and the severity of its housing shortage. The team met residents of Anaktuvuk, like other regions in rural Alaska, that have been waiting for a new house for 10 years while squashed in with as many as 20 relatives or neighbors.

“I met a guy that had six kids in one room with bunk beds stacked to the ceiling,” said Ty Keltner, video director for the research center, who is filming a documentary of the project.

The project idea started burning in Hebert’s mind when he homesteaded in the western Brooks Range 35 years ago, he said. It gained momentum several months ago, and now funding from the U.S. Department of Commerce, the North Slope Borough’s Tagiugmiullu Nunamiullu Housing Authority and the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation has it poised to become a template for more prototypes in other parts of Alaska and the Circumpolar North.

The construction and mechanical systems are kept basic and affordable enough to be repeated by local builders. That way, villages can remedy housing shortages and inefficiencies from the grassroots, he said. But first, they need to prove their prototype can handle the extremes of the Bush.

“If you can build a sustainable community in Anaktuvuk, you can build a sustainable community anywhere in the world,” Hebert said.

The process

The design team visited Anaktuvuk Pass in June to introduce their idea and hear testimonials from locals. Residents wanted features such as a cool space out of the wind for skinning caribou, a dry place to tinker with snow machines and natural cold storage for meat.

The factors that affect comfort, such as indoor temperature, differ in Anaktuvuk from the suburban norm.

“Whether you live in Minnesota or Arizona, you walk inside and you get 65 to 72 degrees everywhere in America,” said Aaron Cook, a Fairbanksan who is a chief designer of the prototype at the research center.

But in the dead of winter, people may want it really hot inside, Hebert said.

“But that doesn’t mean you want to have your skins, clothing or your food in a place that’s too hot,” he said. “So there has to be these zones for different activities, and that’s very different from what we understand.”

The model

The prototype is a single-level 800-square-foot home targeted to cost $100,000 for materials, labor and shipping. It combines the time-tested method of earth-banking with original ideas such as spray-on walls and willow-burning masonry stoves.

“Basically, we’re working on a waterproof, efficient skin and shell, and we’re earth-banking it,” Hebert said.

The material being sprayed to form walls, MaxGuard, has never been used for building a house that they know of, he said.

“This is very experimental,” Cook said. “We’re going to test the bejesus out of it.”

MaxGuard is typically used for truck bedliners, and also used in holding tanks and fighter jets, because it is impervious to water and air. Switching it up, builders will first put up the structure, using metal trusses and studs, and then add inside sheathing — likely plywood. Next, they’ll spray soy insulation from the outside against the interior sheathing, blowing it all the way past the studs and wall cavity. They’ll spray-apply the exterior walls last, covering the frame, roof and detailing all at once. That layer will be about seven inches thick, Cook estimated.

“It becomes like a monolithic pool liner with no seams, because water will creep in anywhere there’s a lack of material,” Cook said. “If there’s no seams, there’s no cracks, like a Dairy Queen cone.”

This winter, they’ll see if the prototype is Bush-ready.

“We need to know under which conditions it fails,” Cook said. “We’ll probably be running snowmachines into it.”

The shell will only be showing on one side, as the house will be bermed into the earth on three sides and the roof.

While a hill would be best, the only area available for the project is a flat city lot, he said. So designers will move dirt to seat the house into a bank for a similar, semi-enclosed effect.

“Earth-banking tempers the exterior environment, so it tones it down,” said Hebert. “It also gets you out of the wind.”

Proper siting can turn the wind from a disadvantage into an advantage, Cook said. Instead of facing the house into the wind or away from the wind, where snowdrifts accumulate, they are profiling the house so wind clears the entrance of snow. He demonstrated with a tape dispenser.

“If you have a house and you put it into the wind, the wind will hit it and tumble around, and this is where the drift will be,” he said, pointing downwind.

“If you put the door here,” he said, pointing along the dispenser’s waist, “the wind would scour it clean, however it would not get too cold in the house.”

The home’s placement will also exploit natural sunlight and energy. The prototype’s parts are designed to anticipate future solar and wind generation. For example, the trusses are angled to easily mount solar hot water panels.

“Unlike a lot of retrofits, when it’s a square peg in a round hole, this house is already made for it,” Cook said.

The research center is working on a wood-burning masonry stove, Cook said. The gravity-fed stove (known as a Rocket Mass Heater) contains an insulated chimney inside the stove itself. It burns wood super-efficiently, absorbs heat into its channels and releases radiant heat slowly throughout the day. The prototype would be specialized for willows.

“Willow is the only wood you’ve got,” Hebert said. “You could decimate the area of willows in a hurry in an inefficient home.”

So they’re shooting for a tight thermal envelope that traps warmth inside. However, a tight house has to be ventilated to maintain healthy air quality. “Native people knew that, so up high they always had a vent they could open up, and they had enough natural leakage so it would cause natural convection to get rid of the stale air inside the house,” Hebert said.

Borrowing that old savvy, designers are creating positive air pressure through adding a vent up high to drain air and ushering in new air mechanically.

“We bring in positive air that’s been warmed to fill the envelope with nice warm fresh air, and the stale air exhausts passively out the vent at the top,” he said.

Placement of the homes also is important. The designers advise clustering five or six homes together to share resources such as solar and wind orientation.

“If you look at Anaktuvuk Pass or most villages, you’d see a grid that could be in Omaha, Nebraska,”Cook said. “Just absolute silliness with oversized plots that were put there so you could have (utilities).”

The materials

Meeting a budget of $100,000, plus $50,000 for other infrastructure such as water, sewage and electricity, using local materials, such as abundant soil and human resources, and outsourcing materials wisely.

“The prototype has to be built incredibly cheaply to show that it can be built cheaply,” said Cook.

Indigenous people made homes out of earth, sod and animal skin because that’s all they had.

“The amount of local material is pretty sparse,” Cook said.

For this project, Anaktuvuk’s wealth in good gravel, soil and willows will help support, bank and heat the house. But they can’t be the house. So designers are customizing building materials to be transported cheaply.

“One strategy is one house per plane,” said Hebert.

The only transport options are a Hercules plane, used by the Army and costing about $40,000 per load, or a DC 6 plane, at about $15,000 per load, Cook explained.

“If you didn’t have staging down correctly you could end up delivering 13 Herc-loads of materials, which is hundreds of thousands of dollars before anyone even picked up a hammer,” said Cook.

The steel studs and joist system for this project come in cross sections and nest into each other, he said. The trusses, or roof assembly, fit into a bundle and take up minimum surface area on a plane.

“Imagine you have a set of Lincoln Logs and a Tonka Truck, and you see how many Lincoln Logs can fit in the Tonka Truck,” Cook said.

Walls and insulation, which travel in 55-gallon drums, stay liquid until extruded on-site with local water.

“Those take up far less weight and volume than any other kind of insulation,” Cook said of the soy spray-foam insulation.

Earth and human hands don’t need to be imported. Using Anaktuvuk’s abundant soil, the house will be covered entirely by earth on two sides, half-bermed on the other two sides and covered on top with sod.

“The earth is a great moderator of temperature. It doesn’t like to get hot very quickly and it doesn’t like to get cold very quickly,” Cook said. “It’s resistant by virtue of its mass.”

The village already has the workforce and machines it needs, according to Hebert.

“There are fine young men and women in those villages that are ready to build their own house,” he said.

The research center will supervise and help the local crew, not build the house for them.

“What we really have to be clear about here is we’re not a housing agency,” Hebert said. “We’re a research center.”

The project raises questions of who gets the new homes and new jobs, he said, but Anaktuvuk is handling its local politics. Hebert’s one bid is that the whoever live in the house take part in building it.

“I put sweat and labor and equity into my home,” Hebert said. “Just like the Habitat (For Humanity) approach; you don’t get the house unless you work on it.”

Looking forward

Hebert envisions five homes in Anaktuvuk by next summer, he said.

“The need is so great, so why mess around?” he said anxiously. “Waiting to do our demonstration house until next summer is driving me crazy.”

Through its video documentary and on-site demonstration, designers are targeting local leaders, budding professionals and possibly carpentry students. They are also applying for funding through the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation for a coastal prototype.

Some 240 other Bush villages are equally overcrowded or pressured by coastal erosion to move, Cook said.

“The people in the village are cognizant that every other village is watching,” Cook said.

This project pushes for sustainable, affordable housing throughout rural Alaska without forcing technology on Native communities, Hebert said.

“This is a new, old way,” he said.

Contact News-Miner intern Molly Rettig at newsroom@newsminer.com.