The Department would like to congratulate Dr Sofia Nivarti, Assistant Professor of Architecture, on the publication of Arctic Practices: Design for a Changing World.
The collected volume, edited by Bert De Jonghe and Elise Misao Hunchuck and published by Actar, assembles forty-six contributors—designers, educators, artists, photographers, filmmakers, some Indigenous, some residents, and some visitors to the Circumpolar North—to create a polyvocal assembly of Arctic practices. It is published at a critical juncture wherein the very stability of Arctic ecosystems hangs in a precarious balance induced, almost entirely, by humans.
Dr Nivarti’s contribution, a research article titled ‘When Is Now? The Case for Temporal Ambiguity in Critiques of Sámi Architecture,’ addresses the theory and historiography of Sámi architecture. Drawing a parallel between Modern movements of the 20th century and Arctic Indigenous architecture in the 21st century, Dr Nivarti argues that a false dichotomy fuels the historiography of many ‘recent’ architectures: they are too facilely attributed to either a total rejection or a blind perpetuation of the past. While ‘orthodox’ modern architecture has been narrated simplistically as rejecting history, ‘authentic’ Indigenous architecture is often deemed to perpetuate the past. Yet contemporary architecture rarely embodies either straightforwardly antagonistic or affirmative approaches to history.
Acknowledging a more ambiguous approach to the past as a temporal construct promises to expand critiques of Sámi architecture beyond the insipid constraints of comparative analysis to the architectures of the Nordic nation-states. If we accept that Sámi architecture can simultaneously seek to reject and reprise facets of its own history, Dr Nivarti writes, we may find the tools to interpret it beyond the colonial frameworks that have defined its study for so long.