Current building strategies in Greenland

Eva B Møller,Tove Lading

doi:10.1051/e3sconf/202017219004

Abstract

Most buildings in Greenland are built within the last 70 years. Within this relatively short period, the building styles have often changed; from small wooden houses in the 50ties to also encompass more industrialised buildings in the 70ties, and later more diverse technics. This paper describes the major tendencies in building construction of today. Apart from an extreme climate, one of the challenges in Greenland is the lack of building materials; almost everything has to be imported. Greenland is an island-operated community, with no interlinking road grid between towns and settlements. Therefore, everything must be transported by ship or plane. Furthermore, severe mould growth is a big problem. Consequently, three building strategies are currently prevailing. 1) In-situ concrete gables and partitioning walls, and facades with wooden studs. 2) Focus on non-organic material and therefore concrete structures with exterior insulation. 3) Strategies focussing on the process e.g. mainly using prefabricated elements. The paper describes the pro and cons for the different strategies seen in a Greenlandic context. The harsh climate makes Greenland a good test site for assessing new building designs. Furthermore, assessment of sustainability might be very different in Greenland from countries where resources and transportation is very different.

Highlights

Building in Greenland entails several challenges; is the climate harsh, it is an island-operated community
Most of the 56,000 inhabitants live on the west coast, approximately 3,000 people live on the east coast
Placing sensors in walls will only tell the hygrothermal conditions in one single point and this may not be in the area where a mistake was made on site, the mistake may be located one meter away and is unlikely to be discovered by the measurements

Summary

Introduction

Building in Greenland entails several challenges; is the climate harsh, it is an island-operated community. 1.1 The Greenlandic setting Greenland is the largest island in the world (2,600 km from north to south, and 1,050 from east to west), most of it is covered with ice, and the people live along the coast. In the Building Regulations [3] the energy demands are divided in two zones; north and south of the Polar Circle. The wind speed is shown as maximum 10 min values per day, precipitation as mm per day, while temperature and relative humidity are shown as mean daily values, supplemented with running mean monthly values (smooth lines)

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