Ice Fishing Hut: Thoughts

The Ice Fishing Hut as a Manifesto came from a desire to build something essential in a place of isolation, exposure, and extreme cold. It’s a place to explore the absolute necessities of inhabitation. While it must be strong enough to stand up to harsh winds and freezing temperatures, it also needs to be delicate and light, stripped of anything beyond the essentials, able to move at the first sign of spring. And so it is also a temporary place, tied to the seasons.

The hut is sited on a small lake, no more than 300m wide, in central Saskatchewan. Clarence Lake is part of a provincial park, north of the prairies, but still within driving distance from the populated southern end of the province. The hut would be located at the lake year round, on ice by winter, and on shore by summer. Its on shore location would provide services to the hut, and act as a loading base for collecting supplies, food, and firewood, before the ice comes in. Through the design process, three key ideas came to the foreground. The first was a question of rootedness, the second was a distillation of essentials, and the third was a focus on shared ritual.

ON ROOTEDNESS:

It’s immediately apparent that an ice-fishing hut implies a temporal existence. It is an independent structure, light and portable, without foundations. Yet the hut is also fundamentally routed to its environment. In every way the hut depends on the place, and would not exist without it. Harsh site conditions create the need for a shelter, while also allowing the very program on which the hut is based. The hut relies on the ice as a foundation, and is connected to the water below as a means for survival and purpose. In every aspect of the design, the hut must respect the nature of its site, for its site is fragile and temporary. This became a key realization for me. The architecture here will remain in material, but the place itself is temporary. The ice will melt and move out, and the precise site, with all of its conditions from wind patterns to uninterrupted views of the sky, will disappear.

For me, the hut raised a question of how architecture can be rooted to a place. Rather than a notion of permanence, physical foundations buried deep in the earth below, the hut is tied to a cycle. Its roots are in its ability to move or change with the seasons. Its connection to the landscape is told by its design, and the experience from within the hut is based on a portal, a direct link to the ice below. 

ON FUNDAMENTALS:

An ice-fishing hut is designed from fundamentals, both in physics and in survival. At first it needs to meet all the physical needs of the site, respecting the properties of the ice, and tailored to mobile and fragile existence. In addition, it’s an ideal place to study the potentials of a minimal dwelling. It has only the weight and space capacity to include the absolute essentials. And its program is distilled to a singular ritual experience. It reduces the components of a dwelling beyond program or spatial assignment, to fundamental elements: heat, light, shelter, walking surface, working surface, and resting place. When the design is thought of in terms of elements rather than programmatic commodities, they can be combined and entangled to build up the experience of one shared ritual, while reducing the volume and complexity of the space itself.

ON RITUAL:

I began to think of a one-man band. An entire musical ensemble reduced to one man, well endowed with a range of instruments or sounds, precisely located around him for access and timing. He places each instrument in relation to both the body part that plays it, and the other sounds that accompany it. The hut must be designed the same way. Its lay out accommodates the rhythms of the inhabitants, and is condensed in such a way that every experience is central, and every element can be used in combination with another.