Hi I am Thomas Philip, the Architect and QS behind the Igloo Project. If you would like to read a blog about Sound Proofing read Jamies Blog, or about the original Hexayurt Project read Vinay blog. If you would like to read about Nassar’s SABS system head over to stratus.com

 Our story begins North -  Beyond the Arctic Circle, or as the Inuit call it. ‘The Tree Line’. The Inuit word of ‘igloo’ is house. It is believed by anthropologists that the ancestry of the Inuit, the Thule people came over the former land-bridge of the Bering sea to settle in what is now Alaska. At a time most likely when there was little snow, and the bridge was less of a bridge and more of a land mass – Beringia.

It was a cold, dry, mammoth steppe – a tundra. This was during the last Glacial Maximum around 20,000 years ago. was a mosaic of biological communities. There were areas of shrub-tundra with isolated refugia of spruce, birch, willow, and alder trees. These refugia would have provided essential resources like wood for fires and construction, making sustained human habitation possible.

Then, they lost all of it. The climate took the trees away, and all the building material with it. Most moved south to greener land. Some, the most belligerent, stayed. You know the type. The last of their wooden huts and seal pelt tents started fray, to insulates these buildings they packed the snow tight and reinforced the snow with whale bones.

The word “igloo” or “iglu” as some other nations say just means house. In Inuit script that write -- ᐃᒡᓗ.

Kind of looks like a tee-pee with a sledge outside doesn’t it. You might expect something a little more of a dome, with a person outside like --  ᑎᔭ

Well; that’s a “cup of tea” or at least my real-life C3-PO / translation cyborg / AI large language model assures me.

A long time ago, on a land far far north. A group of young Inuit hunters had ventured too far. In Scotland we have the ‘Bothy’ a hut built explitly for the purpose of providing refuge to Shepards if they have ventured too far up the highlands in retrieve of a sheep. In the glassy, nothingness of the Arctic there is no pre-built bothy. In France they have the ‘Orri’ a sort wall in front of a cave in the side of the mountain where rocks are stacked, and a door frame is assembled to protect the shepherds and later skiers in emergencies.

Go wayback to the Incas, and the Inca trails has ‘pitstops’ or as they called them ‘Tambo’ so that merchants leading llama and alpacas could sit out of the sun or the wind.

The Inuit did not have pre-built shelter. Nor did the Yupik a closely related Russian peoples of the whole culture we call the Eskimo, the men who wear snow shoes ‘Esquimaux’.

The Yupik developed the ‘Quinzee’ which is still taught today in the Canadian Military. Although what the Canadians mostly teach is the ‘Reverse Quinzee’ more conventional. It is almost exactly like the ‘ridgepole’ tents that the British Army teaches; or the ‘dens’ the Scouts teach each other. With the exception that after you are done, you just throw a lot of snow on top of your shelter.

A true Quinzee is built by making a pile of snow, or finding one big enough, and just digging a shelter into it. The result will be small but that’s good – the less air you have to warm up and the closer the white shiny infra-red reflecting interior is to your skin the warmer you will feel.  The Yipik say that the snow igloo is the reinvention of the Quinzee. The Inuit say it is the Inuit version of the Quinzee. For the rest of this I will use the term Eskimo – as it does not mean “Men who eat raw meat” – as some people believe, and in my opinion that would be a compliment to their spirit not an insult.

The likely story is that: Once upon a time, in a land far far north from here a group of young hunters wanted to continue the expedition another day or so. They were not stuck in a blizzard so their was no rush to dig down. Instead they cut out a perfect circle, and laid the blocks carefully to the side, the snow was dense, so dense in fact that the blocks resembled square edges stones – sort of like the pumice their cousins on Baffin Island built out of. They laid them sort of a bit wrong, and created a slope, as they stacked blocks on, one in front of the next, going around and around they found the igloo coiled around sort of like the pottery of the time; before the spinning wheel. Once it was more or less complete, they fixed their errors by cramming loose  snow in the cracks like how the UK DIYer does “Try your best and caulk the rest!”.

The next night they tried the same idea, but this time the spiral was intentional. The long hunting knives called the Ulu worked perfectly to shape these blocks with precise bevels and chamfers as they went up and up aiming to complete the igloo right above the very middle of the circular foundation. It worked, and all that was needed was a carefully cut hexagon, an irregular one highlighting the imperfection of the process.

 When the sun was out the igloo melted slightly but it did not collapse. The perfect kuuniq, or as we say catenary curved dome protected the Eskimo from the harsh blizzards, the high winds of up to 250mph simply glided over the slippery and strong surface – building made of manufactured straight cut lumber generally took on a similar shape too; fig X. At night time, even at the height of summer the igloo would refreeze again creating a perfect monoblock.

A skilled Eskimo working alone can build an igloo in 20 minutes. That is according to this British Pathe film from 1962. It is quite hard to find many photographs of real igloos, you can see how much skill is passed down from father to son, just look at the igloos that the American Army made on a training exercise.

 I’ve always been fascinated by the igloo. It is of course the 9th word you learn in a “Learn the alphabet book” so as I am sure we all do and most of us in Europe have watched “Pingu”.  It is not just the way the Eskimo cuts the door out from the inside after fully building from the inside. It is not the perfectly recycled nature of it, made from what’s on the floor, and left to reintegrate.

What fascinates me is that this type of ‘vernacular architecture’ is close to perfection. The way the wind is so ineffective against it, the way the heat radiation bounces of it like a heat-lamp/parabolic lamp, the way – most importantly that it is made from insulation. It is not an afterthought. It is made to be warm. In architecture was over use the word “Functional” sometimes I think people are using it a synonym for “Squareish”. Nobody ever asked me what function I want out of a building. Yes I want it to be somewhere I can fit furniture that itself is looking for a right angle, and shelves that are looking for a straight line – but that is not my definition of ‘functional’ it is my furniture’s.  What I really want, is a place that is warm enough in winter, and cool enough in summer. The Musgum huts of West Africa is the exact same idea.

Hi I am Thomas Philip, the Architect and QS behind the Igloo Project. If you would like to read a blog about Sound Proofing read Jamies Blog, or about the original Hexayurt Project read Vinay blog. If you would like to read about Nassar’s SABS system head over to stratus.com

 Our story begins North -  Beyond the Arctic Circle, or as the Inuit call it. ‘The Tree Line’. The Inuit word of ‘igloo’ is house. It is believed by anthropologists that the ancestry of the Inuit, the Thule people came over the former land-bridge of the Bering sea to settle in what is now Alaska. At a time most likely when there was little snow, and the bridge was less of a bridge and more of a land mass – Beringia.

It was a cold, dry, mammoth steppe – a tundra. This was during the last Glacial Maximum around 20,000 years ago. was a mosaic of biological communities. There were areas of shrub-tundra with isolated refugia of spruce, birch, willow, and alder trees. These refugia would have provided essential resources like wood for fires and construction, making sustained human habitation possible.

Then, they lost all of it. The climate took the trees away, and all the building material with it. Most moved south to greener land. Some, the most belligerent, stayed. You know the type. The last of their wooden huts and seal pelt tents started fray, to insulates these buildings they packed the snow tight and reinforced the snow with whale bones.

The word “igloo” or “iglu” as some other nations say just means house. In Inuit script that write -- ᐃᒡᓗ.

Kind of looks like a tee-pee with a sledge outside doesn’t it. You might expect something a little more of a dome, with a person outside like --  ᑎᔭ

Well; that’s a “cup of tea” or at least my real-life C3-PO / translation cyborg / AI large language model assures me.

A long time ago, on a land far far north. A group of young Inuit hunters had ventured too far. In Scotland we have the ‘Bothy’ a hut built explitly for the purpose of providing refuge to Shepards if they have ventured too far up the highlands in retrieve of a sheep. In the glassy, nothingness of the Arctic there is no pre-built bothy. In France they have the ‘Orri’ a sort wall in front of a cave in the side of the mountain where rocks are stacked, and a door frame is assembled to protect the shepherds and later skiers in emergencies.

Go wayback to the Incas, and the Inca trails has ‘pitstops’ or as they called them ‘Tambo’ so that merchants leading llama and alpacas could sit out of the sun or the wind.

The Inuit did not have pre-built shelter. Nor did the Yupik a closely related Russian peoples of the whole culture we call the Eskimo, the men who wear snow shoes ‘Esquimaux’.

The Yupik developed the ‘Quinzee’ which is still taught today in the Canadian Military. Although what the Canadians mostly teach is the ‘Reverse Quinzee’ more conventional. It is almost exactly like the ‘ridgepole’ tents that the British Army teaches; or the ‘dens’ the Scouts teach each other. With the exception that after you are done, you just throw a lot of snow on top of your shelter.

A true Quinzee is built by making a pile of snow, or finding one big enough, and just digging a shelter into it. The result will be small but that’s good – the less air you have to warm up and the closer the white shiny infra-red reflecting interior is to your skin the warmer you will feel.  The Yipik say that the snow igloo is the reinvention of the Quinzee. The Inuit say it is the Inuit version of the Quinzee. For the rest of this I will use the term Eskimo – as it does not mean “Men who eat raw meat” – as some people believe, and in my opinion that would be a compliment to their spirit not an insult.

The likely story is that: Once upon a time, in a land far far north from here a group of young hunters wanted to continue the expedition another day or so. They were not stuck in a blizzard so their was no rush to dig down. Instead they cut out a perfect circle, and laid the blocks carefully to the side, the snow was dense, so dense in fact that the blocks resembled square edges stones – sort of like the pumice their cousins on Baffin Island built out of. They laid them sort of a bit wrong, and created a slope, as they stacked blocks on, one in front of the next, going around and around they found the igloo coiled around sort of like the pottery of the time; before the spinning wheel. Once it was more or less complete, they fixed their errors by cramming loose  snow in the cracks like how the UK DIYer does “Try your best and caulk the rest!”.

The next night they tried the same idea, but this time the spiral was intentional. The long hunting knives called the Ulu worked perfectly to shape these blocks with precise bevels and chamfers as they went up and up aiming to complete the igloo right above the very middle of the circular foundation. It worked, and all that was needed was a carefully cut hexagon, an irregular one highlighting the imperfection of the process.

 When the sun was out the igloo melted slightly but it did not collapse. The perfect kuuniq, or as we say catenary curved dome protected the Eskimo from the harsh blizzards, the high winds of up to 250mph simply glided over the slippery and strong surface – building made of manufactured straight cut lumber generally took on a similar shape too; fig X. At night time, even at the height of summer the igloo would refreeze again creating a perfect monoblock.

A skilled Eskimo working alone can build an igloo in 20 minutes. That is according to this British Pathe film from 1962. It is quite hard to find many photographs of real igloos, you can see how much skill is passed down from father to son, just look at the igloos that the American Army made on a training exercise.

 I’ve always been fascinated by the igloo. It is of course the 9th word you learn in a “Learn the alphabet book” so as I am sure we all do and most of us in Europe have watched “Pingu”.  It is not just the way the Eskimo cuts the door out from the inside after fully building from the inside. It is not the perfectly recycled nature of it, made from what’s on the floor, and left to reintegrate.

What fascinates me is that this type of ‘vernacular architecture’ is close to perfection. The way the wind is so ineffective against it, the way the heat radiation bounces of it like a heat-lamp/parabolic lamp, the way – most importantly that it is made from insulation. It is not an afterthought. It is made to be warm. In architecture was over use the word “Functional” sometimes I think people are using it a synonym for “Squareish”. Nobody ever asked me what function I want out of a building. Yes I want it to be somewhere I can fit furniture that itself is looking for a right angle, and shelves that are looking for a straight line – but that is not my definition of ‘functional’ it is my furniture’s.  What I really want, is a place that is warm enough in winter, and cool enough in summer. The Musgum huts of West Africa is the exact same idea.

Hi I am Thomas Philip, the Architect and QS behind the Igloo Project. If you would like to read a blog about Sound Proofing read Jamies Blog, or about the original Hexayurt Project read Vinay blog. If you would like to read about Nassar’s SABS system head over to stratus.com

 Our story begins North -  Beyond the Arctic Circle, or as the Inuit call it. ‘The Tree Line’. The Inuit word of ‘igloo’ is house. It is believed by anthropologists that the ancestry of the Inuit, the Thule people came over the former land-bridge of the Bering sea to settle in what is now Alaska. At a time most likely when there was little snow, and the bridge was less of a bridge and more of a land mass – Beringia.

It was a cold, dry, mammoth steppe – a tundra. This was during the last Glacial Maximum around 20,000 years ago. was a mosaic of biological communities. There were areas of shrub-tundra with isolated refugia of spruce, birch, willow, and alder trees. These refugia would have provided essential resources like wood for fires and construction, making sustained human habitation possible.

Then, they lost all of it. The climate took the trees away, and all the building material with it. Most moved south to greener land. Some, the most belligerent, stayed. You know the type. The last of their wooden huts and seal pelt tents started fray, to insulates these buildings they packed the snow tight and reinforced the snow with whale bones.

The word “igloo” or “iglu” as some other nations say just means house. In Inuit script that write -- ᐃᒡᓗ.

Kind of looks like a tee-pee with a sledge outside doesn’t it. You might expect something a little more of a dome, with a person outside like --  ᑎᔭ

Well; that’s a “cup of tea” or at least my real-life C3-PO / translation cyborg / AI large language model assures me.

A long time ago, on a land far far north. A group of young Inuit hunters had ventured too far. In Scotland we have the ‘Bothy’ a hut built explitly for the purpose of providing refuge to Shepards if they have ventured too far up the highlands in retrieve of a sheep. In the glassy, nothingness of the Arctic there is no pre-built bothy. In France they have the ‘Orri’ a sort wall in front of a cave in the side of the mountain where rocks are stacked, and a door frame is assembled to protect the shepherds and later skiers in emergencies.

Go wayback to the Incas, and the Inca trails has ‘pitstops’ or as they called them ‘Tambo’ so that merchants leading llama and alpacas could sit out of the sun or the wind.

The Inuit did not have pre-built shelter. Nor did the Yupik a closely related Russian peoples of the whole culture we call the Eskimo, the men who wear snow shoes ‘Esquimaux’.

The Yupik developed the ‘Quinzee’ which is still taught today in the Canadian Military. Although what the Canadians mostly teach is the ‘Reverse Quinzee’ more conventional. It is almost exactly like the ‘ridgepole’ tents that the British Army teaches; or the ‘dens’ the Scouts teach each other. With the exception that after you are done, you just throw a lot of snow on top of your shelter.

A true Quinzee is built by making a pile of snow, or finding one big enough, and just digging a shelter into it. The result will be small but that’s good – the less air you have to warm up and the closer the white shiny infra-red reflecting interior is to your skin the warmer you will feel.  The Yipik say that the snow igloo is the reinvention of the Quinzee. The Inuit say it is the Inuit version of the Quinzee. For the rest of this I will use the term Eskimo – as it does not mean “Men who eat raw meat” – as some people believe, and in my opinion that would be a compliment to their spirit not an insult.

The likely story is that: Once upon a time, in a land far far north from here a group of young hunters wanted to continue the expedition another day or so. They were not stuck in a blizzard so their was no rush to dig down. Instead they cut out a perfect circle, and laid the blocks carefully to the side, the snow was dense, so dense in fact that the blocks resembled square edges stones – sort of like the pumice their cousins on Baffin Island built out of. They laid them sort of a bit wrong, and created a slope, as they stacked blocks on, one in front of the next, going around and around they found the igloo coiled around sort of like the pottery of the time; before the spinning wheel. Once it was more or less complete, they fixed their errors by cramming loose  snow in the cracks like how the UK DIYer does “Try your best and caulk the rest!”.

The next night they tried the same idea, but this time the spiral was intentional. The long hunting knives called the Ulu worked perfectly to shape these blocks with precise bevels and chamfers as they went up and up aiming to complete the igloo right above the very middle of the circular foundation. It worked, and all that was needed was a carefully cut hexagon, an irregular one highlighting the imperfection of the process.

 When the sun was out the igloo melted slightly but it did not collapse. The perfect kuuniq, or as we say catenary curved dome protected the Eskimo from the harsh blizzards, the high winds of up to 250mph simply glided over the slippery and strong surface – building made of manufactured straight cut lumber generally took on a similar shape too; fig X. At night time, even at the height of summer the igloo would refreeze again creating a perfect monoblock.

A skilled Eskimo working alone can build an igloo in 20 minutes. That is according to this British Pathe film from 1962. It is quite hard to find many photographs of real igloos, you can see how much skill is passed down from father to son, just look at the igloos that the American Army made on a training exercise.

 I’ve always been fascinated by the igloo. It is of course the 9th word you learn in a “Learn the alphabet book” so as I am sure we all do and most of us in Europe have watched “Pingu”.  It is not just the way the Eskimo cuts the door out from the inside after fully building from the inside. It is not the perfectly recycled nature of it, made from what’s on the floor, and left to reintegrate.

What fascinates me is that this type of ‘vernacular architecture’ is close to perfection. The way the wind is so ineffective against it, the way the heat radiation bounces of it like a heat-lamp/parabolic lamp, the way – most importantly that it is made from insulation. It is not an afterthought. It is made to be warm. In architecture was over use the word “Functional” sometimes I think people are using it a synonym for “Squareish”. Nobody ever asked me what function I want out of a building. Yes I want it to be somewhere I can fit furniture that itself is looking for a right angle, and shelves that are looking for a straight line – but that is not my definition of ‘functional’ it is my furniture’s.  What I really want, is a place that is warm enough in winter, and cool enough in summer. The Musgum huts of West Africa is the exact same idea.

Hi I am Thomas Philip, the Architect and QS behind the Igloo Project. If you would like to read a blog about Sound Proofing read Jamies Blog, or about the original Hexayurt Project read Vinay blog. If you would like to read about Nassar’s SABS system head over to stratus.com

 Our story begins North -  Beyond the Arctic Circle, or as the Inuit call it. ‘The Tree Line’. The Inuit word of ‘igloo’ is house. It is believed by anthropologists that the ancestry of the Inuit, the Thule people came over the former land-bridge of the Bering sea to settle in what is now Alaska. At a time most likely when there was little snow, and the bridge was less of a bridge and more of a land mass – Beringia.

It was a cold, dry, mammoth steppe – a tundra. This was during the last Glacial Maximum around 20,000 years ago. was a mosaic of biological communities. There were areas of shrub-tundra with isolated refugia of spruce, birch, willow, and alder trees. These refugia would have provided essential resources like wood for fires and construction, making sustained human habitation possible.

Then, they lost all of it. The climate took the trees away, and all the building material with it. Most moved south to greener land. Some, the most belligerent, stayed. You know the type. The last of their wooden huts and seal pelt tents started fray, to insulates these buildings they packed the snow tight and reinforced the snow with whale bones.

The word “igloo” or “iglu” as some other nations say just means house. In Inuit script that write -- ᐃᒡᓗ.

Kind of looks like a tee-pee with a sledge outside doesn’t it. You might expect something a little more of a dome, with a person outside like --  ᑎᔭ

Well; that’s a “cup of tea” or at least my real-life C3-PO / translation cyborg / AI large language model assures me.

A long time ago, on a land far far north. A group of young Inuit hunters had ventured too far. In Scotland we have the ‘Bothy’ a hut built explitly for the purpose of providing refuge to Shepards if they have ventured too far up the highlands in retrieve of a sheep. In the glassy, nothingness of the Arctic there is no pre-built bothy. In France they have the ‘Orri’ a sort wall in front of a cave in the side of the mountain where rocks are stacked, and a door frame is assembled to protect the shepherds and later skiers in emergencies.

Go wayback to the Incas, and the Inca trails has ‘pitstops’ or as they called them ‘Tambo’ so that merchants leading llama and alpacas could sit out of the sun or the wind.

The Inuit did not have pre-built shelter. Nor did the Yupik a closely related Russian peoples of the whole culture we call the Eskimo, the men who wear snow shoes ‘Esquimaux’.

The Yupik developed the ‘Quinzee’ which is still taught today in the Canadian Military. Although what the Canadians mostly teach is the ‘Reverse Quinzee’ more conventional. It is almost exactly like the ‘ridgepole’ tents that the British Army teaches; or the ‘dens’ the Scouts teach each other. With the exception that after you are done, you just throw a lot of snow on top of your shelter.

A true Quinzee is built by making a pile of snow, or finding one big enough, and just digging a shelter into it. The result will be small but that’s good – the less air you have to warm up and the closer the white shiny infra-red reflecting interior is to your skin the warmer you will feel.  The Yipik say that the snow igloo is the reinvention of the Quinzee. The Inuit say it is the Inuit version of the Quinzee. For the rest of this I will use the term Eskimo – as it does not mean “Men who eat raw meat” – as some people believe, and in my opinion that would be a compliment to their spirit not an insult.

The likely story is that: Once upon a time, in a land far far north from here a group of young hunters wanted to continue the expedition another day or so. They were not stuck in a blizzard so their was no rush to dig down. Instead they cut out a perfect circle, and laid the blocks carefully to the side, the snow was dense, so dense in fact that the blocks resembled square edges stones – sort of like the pumice their cousins on Baffin Island built out of. They laid them sort of a bit wrong, and created a slope, as they stacked blocks on, one in front of the next, going around and around they found the igloo coiled around sort of like the pottery of the time; before the spinning wheel. Once it was more or less complete, they fixed their errors by cramming loose  snow in the cracks like how the UK DIYer does “Try your best and caulk the rest!”.

The next night they tried the same idea, but this time the spiral was intentional. The long hunting knives called the Ulu worked perfectly to shape these blocks with precise bevels and chamfers as they went up and up aiming to complete the igloo right above the very middle of the circular foundation. It worked, and all that was needed was a carefully cut hexagon, an irregular one highlighting the imperfection of the process.

 When the sun was out the igloo melted slightly but it did not collapse. The perfect kuuniq, or as we say catenary curved dome protected the Eskimo from the harsh blizzards, the high winds of up to 250mph simply glided over the slippery and strong surface – building made of manufactured straight cut lumber generally took on a similar shape too; fig X. At night time, even at the height of summer the igloo would refreeze again creating a perfect monoblock.

A skilled Eskimo working alone can build an igloo in 20 minutes. That is according to this British Pathe film from 1962. It is quite hard to find many photographs of real igloos, you can see how much skill is passed down from father to son, just look at the igloos that the American Army made on a training exercise.

 I’ve always been fascinated by the igloo. It is of course the 9th word you learn in a “Learn the alphabet book” so as I am sure we all do and most of us in Europe have watched “Pingu”.  It is not just the way the Eskimo cuts the door out from the inside after fully building from the inside. It is not the perfectly recycled nature of it, made from what’s on the floor, and left to reintegrate.

What fascinates me is that this type of ‘vernacular architecture’ is close to perfection. The way the wind is so ineffective against it, the way the heat radiation bounces of it like a heat-lamp/parabolic lamp, the way – most importantly that it is made from insulation. It is not an afterthought. It is made to be warm. In architecture was over use the word “Functional” sometimes I think people are using it a synonym for “Squareish”. Nobody ever asked me what function I want out of a building. Yes I want it to be somewhere I can fit furniture that itself is looking for a right angle, and shelves that are looking for a straight line – but that is not my definition of ‘functional’ it is my furniture’s.  What I really want, is a place that is warm enough in winter, and cool enough in summer. The Musgum huts of West Africa is the exact same idea.