Liquid Commons

Access to educational infrastructure is extremely challenging in remote areas such as Nunavut, Canada. Recent studies have found that more than half of Nunavut’s working-age population and 80 percent of its youth (ages sixteen to twenty-five) struggle with literacy, an issue that Nunavut’s premier suggests is at the root of poor housing conditions, high suicide rates, domestic violence, poverty, and lack of job skills. Liquid Commons provides a new, malleable educational infrastructure composed of a series of boats that travel between the harbors of eleven adjacent settlements, catering to more than seventy-five hundred “unserved” citizens. By disaggregating and transporting educational services, a larger selection of amenities is afforded to these locations. During the fall season, before the Hudson Strait freezes, the boats gather at flexible nodes along the icebreaker shipping route to create a central hub as well as a bridge across the icebreaker’s fissure to allow for connection between these settlements. By utilizing water as a distributor during the summer and as a shared connective platform in the winter, Liquid Commons becomes both a unifying network and a node.