One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.1
—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949)
The Ground Gives Way
Permafrost is a paradox: the frozen bedrock of northern worlds is both a repository of ancient carbon, microbial life, and ancestral memory, and, in its thaw, a database of deadly instability. As global temperatures continue to rise, the once perma-nent ground is quietly liquefying, drowning thousands of its inhabitant species and rendering them extinct. Its death rattle is full of catastrophic volumes of methane and carbon dioxide, exhuming long-buried viruses from deep time.2 The very substrate upon which architectures, settlements, and their many global cosmologies were anchored is dissolving beneath our feet. This is not merely a geotechnical crisis; it is an ontological unmooring.
In what is termed the “circumpolar North”—across Sápmi, Nunavut, Siberia, Alaska, and the Finnish Arctic—villages slide toward rivers as embankments collapse, ice cellars rot, reindeer migration routes shift, and ancestral burial grounds buckle into wetlands.3 Within these regions, prevalent animist belief systems do not separate humans from nature. Consequently, what’s happening is an act of violence against the self, a betrayal, or as Sámi scholar Elina Helander-Renvall describes it, against the sentience of waters, land, and other beings that are, according to Sámi cosmology, grounded in relational, animated landscapes.4 “Perhaps the most shocking of all was that the very ground beneath our feet was no longer solid,” notes Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier.5 And with it, all cosmologies tremble. These are not isolated events but symptoms of a planetary metamorphosis.
This liquefaction of the ground is deeply entwined with what Glenn Albrecht first called “solastalgia”: the psychic distress of ecological collapse witnessed in place.6 Solastalgia is grief without departure, homesickness without exile. It is the ache of remaining as the familiar becomes unrecognizable, the sorrow of watching a beloved landscape mutate into something strange and estranging. In permafrost regions, solastalgia is inscribed in tilting homes, collapsed shorelines, and thawing cemeteries. It seeps into the architecture of daily life as foundations shift and roads ripple. And yet, solastalgia is planetary, extending far beyond the Arctic to doomed coastal cities, wildfire-ravaged suburbs, and drought-stricken farmlands. It is the signature emotion of the Anthropocene.
To think of architecture amid such groundlessness is to abandon fantasies of permanence and control. The traditional tools of the discipline—foundations, fixity, monumentality—falter in a thawing world. As Finnish architect Anu Soikkeli argues, integrating traditional knowledge into planning re-orients Arctic village design and relocation, making it more responsive to local cultural and environmental conditions.7 In essence, arctic design must now move with the ground, embracing flexibility, provisionality, and reciprocity as core principles. What is needed is not adaptation as mitigation, but adaptation as metamorphosis: architectures that are not built against environmental change but with it.
It is in this terrain—both literal and conceptual—that solastalgic architectures take shape. They are architectures that mourn and metabolize, that accompany rather than dominate, that refuse salvationist fantasies. They emerge from a recognition that the age of climatic “events” is over, superseded by an era of ongoing, unfolding collapse. Melting permafrost is not merely a substrate but a symptom that exposes the entanglement of colonial extraction, capitalist excess, and planetary grief. It is both cause and consequence, material and metaphor, ruin and revelation. Architecture’s most urgent vocation in this epoch is not to solve but to stay: to hold space for endings, to metabolize ruin into ritual, and to design for the poetics of collapse.
Designing the Threshold: Architecture as Death Doula
Design in the Anthropocene increasingly requires designing for death.8 Not only the death of individuals, communities, or species, but the death of landscapes, cultural continuities, and climate stability. The task before us is not how to avert these deaths—many of which are already in motion—but how to accompany them with dignity, attentiveness, compassion and care. The practice of a death doula is to be attuned to the liminal space between living and dying, presence and absence, structure and entropy. In end-of-life care, the doula’s role is not to cure but to accompany, to hold vigil, to help navigate transition. Architecture must learn to inhabit this threshold, to become a doula for the dying infrastructures of a warming world, for the landscapes unraveling under permafrost thaw, for the futures that will never arrive.
This requires not defeat but attunement. It is a recalibration of authorship away from mastery and toward accompaniment. Here, Indigenous epistemologies offer critical guidance. Sámi scholar Rauna Kuokkanen describes a worldview in which land is not property but kin.9 To build on such land is not to impose form but to enter into relation, to cocreate in dialogue with the agency of earth, ice, and water.10 Designing as architect-death doulas means designing for endings without fetishizing ruin, for mourning without monumentalizing loss. It means creating spaces that allow for ceremony, for witnessing, for the slow work of collective processing. It also means confronting architecture’s complicity in death.
This reckoning is not an abdication of disciplinary agency. Instead, it is a reclamation of it: a refusal to participate in denial, a commitment to truth-telling. To design as doula is to cultivate spaces of beauty, care, and coherence amid pain and collapse. Consider the thawing cemeteries of northern Alaska, where coffins are surfacing as permafrost melts.11 These auguries invite architecture to respond not with denial—not with concrete pilings and steel reinforcements to hold back the inevitable—but with adaptive, relational design and a readiness to simply let go. Perhaps burial grounds become floating sanctuaries that rise and fall with seasonal thaw. Perhaps memorial structures are built to decompose, merging with shifting soils.
Across the Arctic, communities are experimenting with mobile structures that can migrate as the ground beneath them transforms.12 They are, in their way, doula-like: accompanying the environment through its transformations, holding space for what emerges. Language, like permafrost, is not permanent; it also melts, shifts, and reconfigures under the pressures of new realities. Solastalgia has been one attempt to articulate this condition.13 Yet in the age of permafrost collapse and biospheric unraveling, even this term fails to encapsulate human and more-than-human responses to planetary transformation.
The etymology of solastalgia, from the Latin solacium (comfort) and Greek -algia (pain), renders grief as a human psychological state, not as a planetary or multispecies phenomenon. “Solastellusalgia”—a neologism that fuses solacium (comfort) with the Latin tellus (Earth) and -algia (pain)—reframes grief as planetary rather than purely human. To name planetary grief is not a metaphorical flourish. The Earth mourns because the Earth is alive. The permafrost’s thaw is an ancient exhalation, a planetary sigh of loss. Methane escaping from melting soils is not only a chemical process but an atmospheric lament.
“Solasnaturalgia” similarly names comfort lost not just to Earth (tellus) but to natura, a Latin term appropriated here to mean the broader entanglement of multispecies life. Solasnaturalgia situates grief as shared across ontological registers: rivers that no longer freeze, salmon that cannot spawn in warming streams, birch forests collapsing under invasive pests. Solasnaturalgia insists that spatial practice must participate in multispecies mourning, designing not just for humans but with and alongside more-than-human worlds. Sámi herders experimenting with mobile infrastructures that migrate alongside reindeer exemplify this. Their lightweight structures acknowledge grief as a shared, relational condition and design with it.
Towards an Architectural Lexicon of Planetary Loss
Thawing permafrost is more than a geophysical event—it is time made liquid. Solastellusagia calls architects to design with and for that mourning: structures that anticipate and ritualize their own collapse, that mark subsidence as part of a building’s life cycle rather than its failure. To practice solasnaturalgia is to ask how we might build in ways that honor the grief of other species, such as seasonal infrastructures that disassemble as migration routes shift, or shelters that compost into soil to nourish the habitats they once occupied.
No insulation can protect us from a ground that exhales ancient atmospheres. No wall can contain the seepage of geologic time. Comfort, once a refuge, becomes a trap—one that binds us to fantasies of control. The task now is not to abolish comfort but to reimagine it as consolation: not insulation from grief, but the capacity to hold it. Perhaps in learning how to die well, architecture will remember what it means to live well, too—tenderly, truthfully, and always in relation to a world that will not remain.
Appendix: Two Provocations
The following speculative architectures are provocations—design fictions that seek not to preserve comfort but to reconstitute it as relational, planetary, and mortal.
Spatial Necroecologies accept that architecture’s client is ultimately always the dying Earth itself. Buildings therefore become metabolic infrastructures that assist decomposition rather than resist it: fungal architectures that digest petrochemical residues; ossuaries that sequester carbon and bone together; wetlands constructed atop ruins that purify toxic leachates as they decay. In such spaces, the architect becomes both coroner and cultivator: a designer of ceremonies for the Earth’s dying processes and a midwife to the emergent ecologies that follow.
Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that “all flourishing is mutual” and that, “our taking returns benefit to them in the circle of life making life, the chain of reciprocity.”14 Necroecological design embraces this reciprocity, transforming built environments into sites of return, spaces where decay is not something to be deferred or disguised but honored as a vital planetary process. These are not memorials but metabolic rituals. They are infrastructures that die “well” so that other forms of life might continue. In the compost of collapse, architecture can become ceremony—a practice of care for what is passing and a quiet invitation to what is yet to come.
The ruin has long been architecture’s memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of decay. Yet ruins have often been romanticized—ossified as picturesque remnants of lost grandeur rather than dynamic sites of transformation. Terraforming Ruins instead rejects this nostalgia and designs structures that anticipate and participate in their own disintegration. Imagine scaffolds embedded with microbial consortia that metabolize steel into soil nutrients over decades, or facades engineered to flake and seed moss and lichen as they erode. The decay of these structures is carefully choreographed to support emergent ecosystems. In this post-human regime, the architect relinquishes authorship to time itself, turning the temporal arc of entropy into an integral element of form.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River
(New York: Ballantine, 1970), 197.
Sareen Ali et al., “Arctic Vulnerability: Examining Biosecurity Risks Amidst Climate Change,” in Emotional and Ecological Literacy for a More Sustainable Society, ed., Giuliana Panieri et al. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). 157–69.
Maria Polovtseva, “Blessing and a Curse: Melting Permafrost in the Russian Arctic,” The Arctic Institute–Center for Circumpolar Security Studies, November 3, 2020, ➝.
Elina Helander-Renvall, “Animism, personhood and the nature of reality: Sami perspectives,” Polar Record 46, no. 1 (2010): 44-56.
Sheila Watt-Cloutier, The Right to be Cold: One Woman's Fight to Protect the Arctic and Save the Planet from Climate Change (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 191.
Glenn Albrecht, “Solastalgia: A New Concept in Health and Identity,” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 3 (2005): 41–55.
Anu Soikkeli, “Human–environmental Relationships in the Arctic: Mapping and Analyzing Shishmaref,” Journal of Rural and Community Development 16, no. 2 (2021): 43–44.
Or rather the Capitalocene; capitalism-driven planetary destruction. See Jason W. Moore, “The Rise of Cheap Nature,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland: PM Press, 2016).
Rauna Kuokkanen, Restructuring Relations: Indigenous Self-Determination, Governance, and Gender (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Soikkeli, Anu. 2021. “Arctic Architecture: Adapting Built Form to a Changing North.” Arctic Design Lab Journal 12: 55–68.
Teresa Cotsirilos, “As Permafrost Thaws, Village Cemeteries Sink into Swamp,” Alaska Public Media, October 2, 2017, ➝.
Katherine Landers and Dmitry Streletskiy, “(Un)frozen Foundations: A Study of Permafrost Construction Practices in Russia, Alaska, and Canada,” Ambio 52, no. 7 (2023):1170–83.
Glenn A. Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 42.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 36-37.
