UNLESS IT’S MINUS-40 OR SQUALLING, Richard Carbonnier spends most every spare moment on a tundra hill hammering, digging, drilling and trying not to get frostbite. For the past two years, the 52-year-old architect has been single-handedly slogging away on his tubular eco-home in Pond Inlet, a hamlet of about 1,300 people on Nunavut’s Baffin Island. “It’s painful at times,” he says of winter work. “When you touch a tool, it freezes to your fingertips.” Continue reading
architecture
Frontier Architects
With clean, modern designs, architects Jack Kobayashi and Antonio Zedda — aka KZA — are dragging the Yukon out of the gold rush
AMID A SEA OF BEIGE SIDING AND TWO-CAR GARAGES, Jack Kobayashi’s house emerges like a towering middle finger. “It’s a little bit in your face,” he concedes as we pull into the driveway. Half his squarish duplex is a matte grey with an odd, jutting yellow panel and matching door; the other side is a windowed Kensington-blue with a red door. Kobayashi’s home is a nervy response to the blandness of neighbouring dwellings in Whitehorse’s latest suburb, and a reminder that houses needn’t look like they came off a conveyor belt. Continue reading
Jasmine Budak 