Shelburne Museum Ice Shanty Exhibit

Builder: Judith and Stephen Selin, and Tom Rittenburg of Rennline.

Photography: Lindsay Selin Photography

For a special winter exhibition at Shelburne Museum, Selin + Selin Architecture was one of 8 architects invited to design and build a modern take on a building type that dots north country lakes every winter - The Ice Shanty.

We looked at just what might motivate men and women to sit out there for hours and days in the quiet and the cold. What we saw was that ice fishing could on the one hand be a very meditative solo experience, almost church-like, yet also when clustered as the shanties sometimes are, creating mini-cities, it could be a very social experience. So we decided to represent both worlds, a Scandinavian influenced church-like form with a steep roof and backlit stained glass-like cutouts in the walls, and then we made two of them in dialogue with each other to minimally represent the concept of a broader social city of shanties.

Since these structures are always ephemeral, and therefore need to be portable, we prefabricated them in bolt-together panels and put the shanties on wheels. We actually pushed them by hand up the highway to the Museum from the shop in our office. Almost all the materials are reclaimed/recycled, in keeping with they way the actual shanties often are built from scraps. The walls are reclaimed 1 1/4” thick plywood panels from our own office renovation, upscaled with our CAD generated pattern cut by Tom Rittenburg on Rennline’s ultra-precise state-of-the-art computer controlled waterjet cutter machines.

We loved them so much we that after the exhibit closed we rolled them back to perch permanently near our office. Come take a look.