Nunavut is the youngest, largest and most northerly territory of Canada - a place of extremes with averaging temperatures below zero, no roads and a winter with no daylight. But most of all it is a place of drastical change. The general warming of the climate has severe effects on the permafrost ground, accelerating landforming processes and destabilizing the ecological system.

The Inuit who inhabited this land for millennia as a nomadic people, went through an extremely quick modernization in the last forty years, replacing their nomadic lifestyle with living in modern towns alongside the coast. Because of that no way of construction that is truly adapted to the environment emerged yet and now the melting permafrost ground poses a serious threat to all built structures. The goal of this project was to develop a building strategy that is not only able to cope with this environment, but also benefiting from it, seeking opportunities within conditions, rather than working against them. To understand, visualize, and ultimately to manipulate the landscape an iterative feedback loop- approach based on GIS (geography information system) was established. To test and exemplify the insights gained from the work with scientific geographic data, a speculative proto-typical design of a research center was created.