Sastrugi Sanctuary
Type: Pavilion
Medium: Midjourney
Material: Fabric Skin with Sprayed Water Ice Shell,
Steel Support Structure, Fiberglass Anchors,
Multi-Coloured Light Pedestal
Year: 2025
Medium: Midjourney
Material: Fabric Skin with Sprayed Water Ice Shell,
Steel Support Structure, Fiberglass Anchors,
Multi-Coloured Light Pedestal
Year: 2025
On the prairie, wind is sculptor. It carves sastrugi, rigid ridges and sharp edges that make winter hostile.
This pavilion inverts that violence into shelter.
The form captures windswept ice mid drift, frozen at its most fluid. Walking between undulating walls,
visitors enter a space where prairie wind cannot reach. Here, ice performs its ancient paradox: frozen
water becomes insulation, just as in the igloo. No mechanical heat, yet the structure cradles warmth
through stillness alone.
Inside, shifting light activates the translucent shell. Colours migrate through frozen surfaces, amber
to violet to blue, visible from across the frozen river as a glowing beacon, intimate when experienced
within. Small groups gather in this unlikely refuge, faces lit by chromatic glow, discovering that warmth
is not always thermal.
The same elemental forces that create barriers on Winnipeg’s winter river become the very materials
of gathering and wonder. Hostility, reimagined as sanctuary.
This pavilion inverts that violence into shelter.
The form captures windswept ice mid drift, frozen at its most fluid. Walking between undulating walls,
visitors enter a space where prairie wind cannot reach. Here, ice performs its ancient paradox: frozen
water becomes insulation, just as in the igloo. No mechanical heat, yet the structure cradles warmth
through stillness alone.
Inside, shifting light activates the translucent shell. Colours migrate through frozen surfaces, amber
to violet to blue, visible from across the frozen river as a glowing beacon, intimate when experienced
within. Small groups gather in this unlikely refuge, faces lit by chromatic glow, discovering that warmth
is not always thermal.
The same elemental forces that create barriers on Winnipeg’s winter river become the very materials
of gathering and wonder. Hostility, reimagined as sanctuary.
