1972 Ice City Joint Conference Broadside Poster

A unique survival: a fantastic 1972 broadside poster promoting and memorializing the construction and habitation of an ice village, an architectural research project intended to explore the use of ecologically low-impact building systems, primarily ice. The event was a joint workshop held by the architecture departments of North Dakota State University, Carnegie-Mellon University, and the University of Texas at Austin. It appears to have been the brainchild of then - CMU assistant professor of architecture Volker Hartkopf, who accompanied his students to the event. Of it, he said:

We want to stimulate the scientific community to launch extensive research toward development of flexible new building systems... we hope to provide the first full scale realization of responsive environments in architecture... Utilizing (ice) at the workshop we expect to develop and demonstrate processes, forms and techniques which could be used with yet-to-be-developed building materials with similar potential.

Between one hundred and two hundred students from the three sponsoring institutions and an international array of others were to spend two weeks in January of 1973 building - and then living in - a village made of ice. Living units, sleeping quarters, entertainment, and study spaces were all to be constructed according to the architectural concepts of UT professor Wolf H. Hilbertz, using water ice chosen for it inexpensiveness, availability, ease of disposal, and minimal environmental impact. (January temperatures in Fargo ranged from 15 to 30 degrees below zero in the 1970s.)

The Art

The poster - drawn sometime in 1972, prior to the event - is a fantasy of a futuristic ice village. It is screen printed in black on a silver-gray metallic paper. Snow tractors with specialized constructor arms are shown assembling ice domes; small ice dwellings are finished off by men in cowboy hats (and one in a top hat with long hair, whose jacket, bearing the legend 'Frostville Freaks' suggests a countercultural element.) In the distance, ice towers and tents create an otherworldly skyline.

The Artist

The work is signed 'Reavis 72;' the prevalence of cowboy hats in the composition (and the incongruous and no doubt uncomfortably cold armadillo in the lower-left-hand dome) suggest that the artist was a student at the University of Texas.

Publication History and Census

We are aware of no other examples of this poster in any institutional collection, and we have seen no instance of it in dealers' catalogues or auction records.