Territorial Instruments

Abstract

This thesis investigates the reciprocal relationship between architecture and territory. How are discrete architectural instruments shaped by the territories which they inhabit? In what ways do these instruments structure and order the territories in which they are found? How can architecture be conceived as a fulcrum between built and un-built, between object and void, between building and territory? Tuktoyaktuk, NWT was established in the 1950s, around a Distant Early Warning Line station - one in a series of radar stations constructed in the Canadian Arctic to detect incoming aerial threats from across the north pole. These decommissioned artifacts, like other architectures of distance, oscillate between the technical as well as the ordinary and the local and the global. This thesis proposes three buildings for this town at the forefront of an environmentally and spatially changing Arctic: a small airport, a research station, and a road maintenance depot. These instruments leverage a historical analysis of technological and representative tools to imagine new modes of understanding, responding to, and establishing territory.