The curved shape of the community centre echoes the bend of the meandering river.PROJECT Old Crow Community Centre, Old Crow, YukonARCHITECT Kobayashi + Zedda ArchitectsTEXT Adele WederPHOTOS Andrew LatreilleArriving in Old Crow is like entering another country. Tucked into the northwest corner of Yukon, this tiny village of 280 citizens of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation is accessible only by air, orfor intrepid seafarersalong the adjacent Porcupine River. A grocery store is the sole commercial outlet. All-terrain vehicles putter through a network of dirt roads lined with simple wood houses in various stages of weathering, many festooned with caribou antlers.In this otherworldly hamlet, Old Crows new Darius Elias Community Centre, designed by Kobayashi Zedda Architects (KZA), stands out like a spaceship.From the road, the building reads like a giant cylinder clad in wood slats. From the waterfront side, it flexes inward, roughly framing the outdoor space into a naturalistic courtyard and subtly echoing the meandering river. On a balmy late-summer evening, a young man and woman and their dalmatian are hanging out around the buildingunder the building, actually. Like almost all structures built in the Arctic, the Centre is raised above the ground so that its warmth does not melt the top layer of permafrost that sheathes the Arctic. This building is raised even higher than the norm, partly to account for the periodic flooding of Porcupine River. Architect Antonio Zedda notes that the buildings elevated condition creates a completely different planar experienceinside and out.The Centre comprises a community hall, Elders lounge, industrial kitchen, games room, meeting spaces, offices, and exercise room. The main spacethe large, circular hallhosts the Vuntut Nations assemblies, which include intense discussions, heritage dances, bonding, and reconnecting. Although Old Crow is the current home base of the Vuntut, the Nations thousand citizens are dispersed across Yukon. A few times a year, those citizens gather and reconnect in the large hall. Its a beautiful space for dancing, observes Vuntut Gwitchin Chief Pauline Frost. The adjoining kitchenindustrial in both size and equipment calibreruns at full steam during those events to provide the accompanying traditional feasts.The structural beams topping the main gathering room radiate outwards, adding a dynamic energy to the space.The oblique angles and concentric double circle of the ceilings radiating structural beams make the space feel alive and active even when empty, and emphasize the centrifugal force of the plan.At the other end of the structure, the spacious exercise room offers a stunning panoramic vista of the river, and doubles as a repository for traditional costume-making materials, with a hundred-plus bolts of fabric stacked floor-to-ceiling along one wall. The textiles are end-rolls donated to the community for use by local seamstresses. While it would be incongruous for a big-city gym, this juxtaposition makes perfect sense for a tiny community reclaiming its heritage crafts.KZA also designed the John Tizya Cultural Centre a few dozen metres down the road, a rectangular mass sheathed in corrugated metal. The Cultural Centre serves as a venue for locals and visitors to explore Vuntut Gwitchin culture and history. That compact and superbly designed building, like the new Community Centre, resulted from the advocacy of Chief Frost, who successfully lobbied for these and other new buildings while serving as the Vuntut Gwitchins MLA from 2016 to 2021. She was sworn in as Chief last year, in the same Community Hall that she helped bring to fruition.The Community Centre presents an architectural contrast to KZAs Cultural Centre, both in terms of massing and material. The clients wanted a building clad in wood, period, recalls Zedda. Not metal, nor anything simulating wood. That was the challenge for us; the reality in Yukon is that wood does not last long because of the extreme sun and extreme temperatures. In response, the design team researched an array of materials, finally settling on modified pinewood by Kebony, a Norwegian wood producer. Infused with an alcohol solution that preserves the wood, Kebony pine will naturally weather into a silvery hue over time, but will not decompose.The volume of the building is more closed towards the north side, giving it protection from winter weather.To many locals, the building is shaped like a snowshoean Aih in Gwichin. Others, like Vuntut Gwitchin Deputy Chief Harold Frost, tell me its designed to resemble a caribou trap. To this reporter, as a descendant of Prairie settlers, the plan evokes a leather waterskin. Read into it what you will. Drum? Snowshoe? Caribou trap? Its all those things, says Zedda. We dont typically design things that reference something specific. When the architects showed the floor plans to community members, he recalls, they started to infer ideas of what it resembled.For Zedda, the original community halla wooden octagon that still stands, vacant and rotting, beside the new structurewas the biggest driver. The idea was to capture the essence of that building and its [interior] space in the newer building, he says. The concept of circularity, rather than any specific representation, is at the heart of the design, echoing Indigenous respect for the cycle of life.But here is the uncomfortable question: is this building too big, and too state-of-the-art? For Chief Frost, the biggest challenge of the Community Centre is its high heating costs. That is not an architectural failing per se: the design team followed the design brief in terms of size, but few buildings of this size and scope could keep their energy costs low in an Arctic locale with viciously cold winters. The huge circular space that is so highly appropriate and welcoming for the quarterly gatherings of the Vuntut Nation is otherwise often vacant.Site planZedda argues that our system of consistent building-code application and aggressive energy targets is problematic for remote places like Old Crow, with populations so small that residents are unlikely to have the skill sets to address and maintain the technical issues and features. In terms of codes and standards that affect building systems such as mechanical heating and ventilation, for example, the code requirements tend to overly complicate the systems without understanding the context in which they are being placed, he says. This needs to be revisited. Otherwise, highly complex and efficient systems, if not operated properly, tend to perform poorly and are more expensive to operate.The time has come, he argues, to question whether its imperative in every instance to follow every code requirement when in certain communities it might be inappropriate or cost-prohibitive. And by inappropriate or cost-prohibitive, he clarifies, we are not talking about life safety items, for which there should be no flexibility. Whats needed is more consideration for the immediate geographic and cultural context.He cites a real-life example from a past project in Old Crow: The client asked why we needed to include a wheelchair ramp in the building design. Being on permafrost, the raised building resulted in a steel ramp system that was over 12 metres long with a price tag of over $50,000. The client told Zedda that a ramp wasnt strictly necessary, since on the rare occasions when someone would need assistance to enter and exit the building, others in this tightly-knit community would step up to help. They would never leave an Elder or mobility-challenged individual to navigate these spaces and places on their own, says Zedda. I was in awe hearing this. What are the fixes for the Darius Elias Community Centre and buildings like it? An architectural solutionunfeasible now, but perhaps viable with some future technologyis crafting a means to expand and contract a buildings capacity in response to shifting needs. As for the challenge of making and maintaining buildings in small and isolated places, it may be time to consider encouraging flexibility with certain code requirements and energy targets in such communities.Ultimately, for the Vuntut Gwitchin, the Darius Elias Community Centre is not just a functional amenity, but an existential one. Their periodic gatherings are essential as a cultural reaffirmation, both amongst their Nations citizens and to the outside world. We were essentially the forgotten community, because of our remoteness and social isolation, says Chief Frost. We didnt have anything before. But whats happened here in the last six or seven years is so amazing.Adele Weder is a contributing editor to Canadian Architect. KZA Architectscontributed a portion of the travel costs for this article.CLIENT Vuntut Gwitchin Government | ARCHITECT TEAM Antonio Zedda (MRAIC), Chris Chevalier, Sheelah Tolton, Phillippe Gregoire, David Tolkamp | STRUCTURAL Ennova Structural Engineers Inc | MECHANICAL Williams Engineering Canada; Building Systems Engineering | ELECTRICAL Williams Engineering Canada | CONTRACTOR Johnston Builders Ltd. | FOOD SERVICES Lisa Bell & Associates | ENERGY MODELlING Morrison Hershfield (now Stantec) | SOLAR PV STUDY Green Sun Rising | GEOTECHNICAL EBA/TetraTech | AREA 940 m2 | BUDGET Withheld | COMPLETION June 2021As appeared in the November 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazineThe post Northern Light appeared first on Canadian Architect.