Matthew Jull: Designer of Arctic Cities

The roundabout ways of the every-circulating and ever-percolating Internet brought me, quite by serendipity, to the discovery of the pioneering work of Matthew Jull, a graduate student in design at Harvard University's School of Design.

Matthew read about polar cities in a New York Times blog by Andrew Revkin, sent me a brief email to say hello and introduce himself, I called him on the phone in Camridge to say hello back, and then he told me a bit about his work. Turns out that Mr Jull is doing his thesis presentation on the design of arctic cities, with a special focus on a future settlement in Resolute Bay in Canada. It's not science fiction. It's modern design. Inspired by the earlier work of Ralph Erskine, Jull is peering into the future with a keen lens and the results will be available soon in a book.

For now, it's good to know that Mr Jull is using his considerable design talents to thinking about future adaptation strategies, in the case that global warming becomes a worst case scenario. Stay tuned to this page for more images from Mr Jull's website.