Sweating and Dousing: Designing Climate-humanist Architecture and the Arctic Worker

The discovery of Alaskan oil in 1968 and the ensuing economic integration of the American Arctic renewed the importance of cultural and climatic studies of living in the North. With international oil companies prospecting in the North Slope region of Alaska, the land claims of the recently inaugurated state, its Native inhabitants, and private investors underscored the lack of a settlercolonial legal framework of land ownership and of architectural techniques for aiding settlement in vast swaths of the territory. Together with the looming oil crisis of the 1970s, these events launched a debate on the legal, cultural, and spatial effects of development throughout the American Arctic. Intending to protect Alaskan society from changes that could cause overcrowding, unvirtuous wealth, and potential criminality, pipeline planners reassured state and federal officials that the effects of the pipeline would be temporary. For their planners, worker camps acted as a control mechanism to conceal the pipeline’s cultural, economic, and societal impact by functioning as temporary structures that would climatically and culturally support workers throughout construction and operation.