Designing Sustainable Buildings for Arctic Communities

Arctic communities are experiencing dire impacts to infrastructure due to extreme environments, remote locations, and climate change. How should we best design, build, and monitor buildings so that they are durable, affordable, healthy, and sustainable for Northern communities? Aaron Cooke is a licensed architect and project manager at NREL's Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Fairbanks, Alaska. He manages the Sustainable Northern Communities Program, which designs and deploys emerging building technologies and approaches in the Arctic and Subarctic.