Buildings cut from snow and ice, put up on the same ground season after season and shaped anew each time, standing beside heated lodging that belongs to the same operator and stays through the year.
A snow vault is raised over a form. Snow is packed or blown onto a curved frame, left to set, and the frame is drawn out from beneath; ice for walls, furnishings and carving is cut separately and set in place. The result carries its own weight and nothing else, which is why nobody hangs anything from it.
Such a structure is not repaired when it fails. It is repeated. Each season the drawings are made again, the plan shifts, the carving takes a new subject, and the house that stood last winter is not the house that stands this one.6 Continuity lies in the operator and the ground, not in the fabric.7
Raised on ground at Lainio in Finnish Lapland and given a fresh design each winter, so that the plan of the corridors and the carving inside them changes from one season to the next. Warm lodging belongs to the same operator and stands on the same ground.
RaisedSnow and ice, planned anew for the cold months; dates come from the operator
Built beside the Alta river from ice cut nearby and from packed snow, with carving that follows a chosen theme through the rooms. A heated lodge belonging to the same operator stands on the same ground and receives guests when the cold building has gone.
RaisedRiver ice and packed snow beside the Alta; dates come from the operator
What the thaw takes is the whole of it: vaults, corridors, carved surfaces, the beds and their blocks. What remains is the ground, the service buildings and the drawings. This is worth stating plainly, because a photograph of such a place is a photograph of one season only, and the room in it cannot be visited again.8
Snow domes set high on the Davos slope below Weissfluhjoch, linked to one another by cut corridors and served by a restaurant and washing rooms within the same structure. The approach is a climb into cold air and follows the operator's own timetable.
RaisedLinked snow domes on a mountain slope; dates come from the operator
Nearly every site of this kind carries warm buildings too, and honest operators say so. A heated cabin, a service house with showers, a glass structure warmed through the night: these are ordinary lodging standing on the same ground, and they are what makes the cold rooms usable.9 A glass igloo is a warm building with a transparent roof. Calling it a room of ice would be a lie of the simplest kind.10
Rooms of ice and snow stand near the fjord outside Kirkenes, on ground the operator also fills with heated timber cabins. The cabins are ordinary warm lodging and are described as such; the cold rooms are the part that goes when the season turns.
RaisedCold rooms beside heated cabins on one site; dates come from the operator
A snow building outside Rovaniemi, put up on ground that also carries heated glass igloos and a warm service house. The glass igloos are permanent and warm, and the operator does not present them as rooms of ice.
RaisedSnow building with heated glass igloos alongside; dates come from the operator
An operator's calendar for such a site is a statement of intention, not a promise. It depends on frost arriving early enough to build, on the structure holding, and on the approach staying passable — which, on a mountain site, means a lift or a cable car running in the weather of that day.11 The dates are the operator's to publish and to change, and they are not repeated here.
Built each winter beside a glacial lake high in the Făgăraș range, with sleeping rooms and separate domes standing on the ice. The mountain road above the waterfall is shut in the cold months, so the approach is by cable car and follows the weather.
RaisedIce and snow beside a mountain lake, reached by cable car; dates come from the operator
Winter structures are put up for the cold months and taken back by the thaw. Opening and closing belong to the operator and to the weather, and no dates are given here for that reason. Warm buildings on the same ground are named as warm buildings. Settle everything with the operator before travelling.