Since the mid-twentieth century, buildings and cities in the Arctic has been defined through a post-war modernist urban development, where ‘southern ideas and ideals’ about what a northern city should be, has preoccupied the architectural practice. The ‘Arctic’ has been defined through many utopian projects, where habitation in the ‘extreme environments’ has been seen as a technological challenge, resulting in micro management of urban climates and built form, disregarding the socio-cultural context, at the expense of the northern city-dwellers.

The urgency of finding ‘new methods’ for architecture and urban form to adapt to local winter climate has been addressed in several occasions throughout the last century, especially during the rise of the Winter Cities Movement in the 1970s-80s. Contemporary urban development practices in the Arctic region, seem to have ignored the evidence of past mistakes and continue to promote modernist methods for urban form, with the absence of local winter-knowledge.

Taking on a historical and critical perspective, this PhD-project will follow the evolution of ‘new methods’ for winter-adapted architecture across ‘Arctic places’ throughout the last 100 years. It will, more specifically, map the trajectories of 'travelling winter-knowledge' in the architectural practice across time and distance, and find local adaptations to this winter-architecture in the Arctic Norway.

Åste Kristine Ullring Holtan is a Norwegian architect with a Cand. Arch in Architecture and Extreme Environments from the Royal Danish Academy of Architecture, Design and Conservation. Her background is from working in the cross-section between Architecture, Technology, Innovation and Society, with a special focus on the development of sustainable futures.

Furthermore, Åste brings with her several years of experience working with the development of a ‘pedestrian friendly mountain village’ as an Urban Planner in the Winter Destination Hemsedal. Her childhood from the Alpine region of Jotunheimen has also shaped Åste’s love for snow and winter.