An architectural and cultural history of skating rinks and hockey arenas in North America.

Photography book of Minnesota Hockey Rinks

"The Geographic Region Around the North Pole is a Raw and Exotic Area of Untouched Nature and Inescapable Beauty. Building in this extremely cold climate requires an advanced degree of ingenuity and resolve. Ecological conditions, including high winds, snowdrifts, and permafrost, combined with periods of little sunlight present seemingly impossible logistical hurdles for architects. Vernacular buildings have emerged, but like most indigenous structures they do little more than simply enclose and protect. Recent years have witnessed an explosion of exceptional new architecture and a new definition of a Northern building - one that is both extraordinarily responsive to place and aesthetically provocative." "In Modern North: Architecture on the Frozen Edge, author Julie Decker presents thirty-four of the most compelling and far-ranging possibilities of contemporary architecture in the North. These buildings - located in northern Canada, Scandinavia, and Alaska - are united in the way they embrace extreme conditions and provide visual stimulation in places that sometimes offer little more than a whitescape. The book contains innovative structures by both established and up-and-coming architects, including David Chipperfield Architects, Studio Granda, and Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, as well as essays by Brian Carter, Juhani Pallasmaa, Edwin Crittenden, and Lisa Rochon that place the projects in the context of a new architectural response to the North."--BOOK JACKET.

The traditional Persian ice houses were built at villages on the perimeter of the large deserts on the Central Plateau. Their cone-shaped domes, up to 20 meters high, consisted of mud and mud bricks from the excavation of the deep ice pits protected by the domes. The ice houses served as reservoirs that stored blocks of ice in the winter for further use in the summer. The ice was either hauled in from nearby mountains or produced in open basins at the ice house site. Such local ice production plants were typically supplied with fresh water from qanats, the ingenious water supply tunnels, that brought water for human settlements and irrigation from the distant mountains. The ice houses, whose origin is believed to go back more than 2000 years, gradually became obsolete with the advent of electricity and the introduction of the refrigerators to the households. Because they were made of perishable materials, most of the ice houses have disappeared and the rest are facing a grim future. In this book, Dr. Jorgensen, has made a remarkable effort in cataloguing still remaining ice houses and in the process has found other ice houses that are shaped differently. He has developed a typology, described and analyzed the layouts, shapes, dimensions, construction methods, materials, reinforcements, and decorations. He has also studied the operations and origins, and analyzed the preservation aspects. This book describes the first ever comprehensive study of the ice houses of Iran.