All aboard... See you in the Arctic! The Democratic Evolution of the Eco-Logic Architecture of Ralph Erskine

Abstract

The picture of the architect Ralph Erskine that is talking to a group of future users of the Green City for the Arctic in Resolute Bay, Canada, synthesizes a career that we could define as “Democratic Architecture”. Erskine’s philosophy was supported by the logic of place, recycling and participation of settlers in the creative process. The article begins with the travel of Erskine to move from England to Sweden, it continues with the tours he conducted with his office staff in his shipboard by Baltic Sea and concludes on the last destination, Resolute Bay in the Artic. The Canadian Government asked Erskine project for a seven hundred inhabitant’s city, Resolute Bay. It was a regional project. The architect was the interlocutor between the Inuit settlers and residents from the southern cities and he offered an anthropological project, that it was a choice of others proposals such as Frei Otto’s. For Erskine, the plan he designed for Resolute Bay was “Eco- Logic” and the result of mixing this kind of architecture with the participation of the future users in the creative process. All of this was a new concept called Democratic Architecture that is the main question of this article.