This project examines the tension between Indigenous and Western cinematic traditions as a lens for reading colonial, sociopolitical, and environmental histories. Aspect ratio becomes a central architectural tool: widescreen formats, rooted in Expo 67’s Polar Life, signal exploration and dominion, while Indigenous filmmakers have since reclaimed 35mm as a counter-practice outside dominant image-making. The building’s poché forms lenses that look both inward and outward, becoming a superimposition of Western and Arctic media traditions. This translates into built form at two scales. The Outpost, a brushed aluminum box hovering above the Igloolik tundra on a gabion base, works as a tectonic instrument—thick walls punctured by calibrated apertures, its section choreographed by ramps and stairs framing views. Rear-projection windows double as screens, layering archived imagery onto the live landscape, registering change across both tundra and media. In Montreal, an archival counterpart houses theaters, a library, an archive, and a residency program supporting expanded Indigenous cinemas. A cantilevered aluminum space frame splays outward toward the Expo 67 islands, while rotating concrete theater boxes break through floor plates along the eastern wall, creating dynamic apertures between program and view. Together, both structures treat wall, window, and section not as mere enclosure, but as instruments through which landscape is mediated, archived, and contested
