Zachary Colbert

78°13'N, 15°33'E. Longyearbyen, Svalbard. The northernmost town on Earth. The sky here holds a blue that doesn't lift. Not dawn. Not dusk. A third thing — civil twilight stretched into weeks, the sun tracing the horizon without ever breaking it. A town at the edge of every map. At the centre of everything else. What is extracted here has changed: coal to data. The shape of extraction hasn't. We came in winter to do fieldwork — to map, to measure, to sense, to walk the mine's dark corridor. To ask what it means to build on ground that is quietly, irrevocably leaving. Snowmobile, dog, and ski tracks score the snow in long curves. A script of recent passage, already softening. The snow accepts everything and remembers nothing for long. Long-exposure photographs compress time into a single frame — human presence as light-trail, intermittent, already fading into the field it moved through. In the mountain, the glacier, the fjord, we came undone a little too. We changed what we observed by observing it. And this place — its blue, its cold, its long and particular silence — changed us too.

The sky holds a particular quality of light—neither brightness nor darkness, but something suspended between. Sky and ground refuse their boundary. The mountains dissolve into atmosphere at their edges. Snowmobile and dogsled tracks score the snow in long curves, a script of recent passage already softening. The light is blue—the blue of civil twilight extended for weeks, persisting in sustained atmospheric threshold. This is 78 degrees north. One of the fastest-warming places on Earth. In Svalbard, settlement and landscape are instrumentalized for science, for sovereignty, for geopolitics, for extraction. The town exists not as home but as apparatus—spatial technology organizing flows of power and knowledge. Provisional occupation on ground that refuses to stay still, like the sky that is simultaneously both dark and bright. The photograph captures what the eye cannot hold: accumulated paths of headlights crossing darkness, compressed into a single frame. Human presence rendered as provisional light-trails, intermittent and transitory. We travel here this winter to chart architectural agency at the threshold of the visible, at the centre of extraction. To experiment with fieldwork and sensing techniques, acknowledging that we impact what we observe. To understand what it means when settlements and landscapes alike become instruments.

Civil Twilight in Svalbard. At 78 degrees north, civil twilight during polar night lasts for weeks—a sustained threshold condition where neither day nor night fully arrives, where the atmosphere itself exists in permanent liminality. This February @zachcolbert and I take students to Longyearbyen, collaborating with critical engineer, artist, and activist Julian Oliver, designing and deploying a moving, embodied, flexible mesh sensor network. Unlike permanent monitoring infrastructure drilled into Svalbard’s ground—boreholes penetrating meters into frozen earth, or the Seed Vault tunnelled into mountain—our solar-powered network hovers above the terrain. Nodes communicate wirelessly within visual range, forming a mesh topology that adapts as connections fail and are restored. When equipment fails, the network’s contingency becomes method. It performs its own provisionality—documenting landscape conditions through its ability or inability to maintain coherence. The mesh operates as both instrument and subject, simultaneously measuring environmental conditions and becoming measured by them. Before fieldwork, we’re hosting a multi-day symposium with Susan Schuppli (Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths), Jingru Cyan Cheng (Royal College of Art), Ben Evans James, Bert de Jonghe (Transpolar Studio), and Marco Ferrari (Studio Folder, Design Academy Eindhoven)—people whose work extends architectural perception into environmental listening, climate forensics, data visualization, and fieldwork methodologies. The studio will spend the term developing instruments, techniques, and representational strategies that make visible the otherwise imperceptible operations of utility towns and landscapes. In Svalbard’s extended twilight—that threshold where categories like stable/unstable, visible/invisible, and measured/unmeasurable temporarily suspend their distinctions, we will be learning provisional sensing as spatial practice: failure as data, observation as politics, architecture at the edge of its capacity. The mesh goes live mid-February. ❄️🗻

The Carleton Rights of Nature Studio, 2025 Architecture is never merely building—it is deeply entangled with land, water, power, and the human and more-than-human commons through which place is made. To design is to step into ongoing ecological and cultural processes, to inherit responsibilities shaped by presences that lived and breathed a site long before drawing ever met paper. Beginning form this situated understanding, the studio leveraged the languages of architecture—mapping, orthographic drawing, tectonic modelling, the detail—toward forms of worlding that refuse extractivism’s devouring spatial logics. We sought to draw the Rights of Nature into architectural thought and practice, asking how architecture’s role as agent of enclosure has constrained what it has been, and exploring the possibilities of its becoming through energetic, climatic, and ecological attunements. We turned to Ottawa’s urban edge, where the city meets the living, breathing, carbon-sequestering Mer Bleue Bog: client, collaborator, teacher—its life-worlds speaking, its acidic waters remembering, its deep-time carbon cycles shaping architectures forged from the geologic, the hydrologic, and the biologic. Students asked: What if architecture leaned into discomfort—into co-habitations, exposures, and weathers it so often designs against? What if architecture listened, metabolized, softened to the flows of ecology, climate and energy? What if immersive bog-bathing preceded programming, energetics preceded aesthetics, and partnership, citizenship, and kinship preceded authorship? Across the autumn, these projects became thresholds—mediating between economy and ecology, between community, energy, and the more-than-human worlds that hold us. In this work, trans-species possibilities meet in architectures tuned to climate futures, carbon reciprocities, and the Rights of Nature, carrying forward eternal insistence that land, water, and weather are not resources but relations. With Jerry Hacker, Tom Leung, @alsnorris , @vincenttouran , 52 intrepid @carleton_architecture M.Arch students, 31 generous guests, and scholarly framings by @abdbcb , @andres_jaque , @it_urbe , and Kiel Moe.

Wonderful work from my @carleton_architecture M.Arch thesis students at their second colloquium—each digging into architecture’s intersections with land, power, and agency. @vincenttouran uses street photography and collage to document and reimagine housing alienation in Montréal’s Villeray neighborhood, pointing toward other ways of living beyond property’s reach. @jeremielafleche_ is drawing, modeling, and building a digital twin to rethink the material afterlives of the city—how Ottawa’s brick, wood, metal, glass, and concrete might unbuild, loop, and regenerate. @simon_martignago maps the nuclear supply chain through drawings and models, positioning architecture as a narrator of energies that shape—and shadow—our futures, bringing fission’s vast infrastructures into the disciplinary frame. @anthony.papini turns to time-lapse video to read surveillance and state power against the irrepressible agency of play, using observational tools and material interventions to explore the gaps of unscripted public life. With brilliant insights from @mcn.levesque , @ab.ad.co , @o.saloojee , @studio_moffitt , and @federica.goffi

2025 Carleton Master of Architecture Comprehensive Studio: Climate and Integration The Mer Bleue Forum: A Civic–Ecological Institute for the Rights of Nature What if architecture unlearned its addiction to comfort (Barber)—remembering to breathe, metabolize, and sweat? What if design and architectural media recalibrated to embodied energy (Benjamin), attuning to the deep entanglements of labor, energy, and building? What if buildings shed their carbon form (Iturbe) and bent toward non-linear perspectives (Moe)—a thousand-year carbon cycle, a century-long flood, the slow rhythm of a bog? The Rights of Nature movement reframes these questions, recognizing ecosystems as rights-bearing entities. From the personhood of Québec’s Magpie River (Muteshekau-shipu) to Ecuador’s cloud forests, law and imagination are aligning to treat nonhuman systems as co-constituents of life, of the city. Read against Mer Bleue: What would it mean for this bog to hold rights? Could architecture act as guardian, interpreter, or partner—transforming the urban edge from a frontier of enclosure and extraction into a threshold of care and becoming? In this studio, the bog is no backdrop—it is client, collaborator, teacher. A living presence, breathing and mothering, whose rights stand alongside human rights, demanding not accommodation but allegiance in architecture. With Jerry Hacker, Tom Leung, Amy Norris, and Vincent Tourangeau

I’m very pleased to share a gallery space with @o.saloojee at @carleton_architecture for our joint exhibition, “Field Notes From Elsewhere,” featuring recent work from our research leaves. The exhibition explores how architectural media can generate new understandings of place. On view March 8–28 in the Lightroom Gallery, the work on one wall reinterprets iconic landscapes to reveal the entangled processes of imperial property formation, Indigenous dispossession, and environmental inequity. Architecture and urbanism, as their primary expressions, are deeply implicated in these transformations. Through architectural drawings, photographs, video, archival material, and personal fieldwork, the work on the other wall reexamines the analytique—a drawing problem rooted in the Beaux-Arts method—seeking to destabilize its conventions and open new ways of seeing and representing place.

... "private property" is not about the right to have your own home and belongings. It is about the right of elites to enclose and appropriate commons: forests, subsurface minerals, water, the atmosphere, public goods, even knowledge itself.” ― Jason Hickel

I’m very happy to be included alongside so much extraordinary and important work in the Worlding. Energy. Transitions. Issue of @journalarchitecturaleducation edited by theme editors @joobilly and @_rghosn and editors @norawendl and @o.saloojee . Open Access through the end of November! The essay is a reflection on months of field work by car, boat, balloon, and foot across the Colorado Plateau. 🏜️😎 Excerpts: “The enmeshment of property rights with whiteness is the enmeshment of the climate crisis with whiteness. It is the climate crisis.” “This is precisely the problem of the aerial view. To see the world from high above is a product of military technology, which is a product of conquest, which is a product of property rights, which is enmeshed with whiteness.” #waterinthewest #coloradoriver #coloradoplateau #glencanyon

Nonnezoshe-lapse

“Ideas of nature… are always ways to invite belonging at the same time as they are a means to enforce exclusion.” - Nick Estes

Walk in beauty. Walk in balance. Peace in 2024. Hózhó náhásdlíí’.