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September 21, 2001
Yellow is a bright idea
Architect explains
the logic underlying the colour of Iqaluit’s airport
ALISON BLACKDUCK
Nunatsiaq News
Architect
Alain Fournier.
(PHOTO BY ALISON BLACKDUCK)
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IQALUIT — Nobody can ignore Iqaluit’s brilliant yellow
airport terminal — and that’s the point.
“There is no name for it,” Alain Fournier says of the
terminal’s striking colour. “Each company has various
names. Those yellows were used specifically for plastics.”
Fournier is one of the two architects who masterminded the terminal.
He and his partner, Dana Kephart, designed the building in 1982
while working for Gerin-Lajoie, a Montréal-based company.
They oversaw every design aspect of the terminal, including its
colour.
“It’s like a kitchen recipe,” Fournier says of
the pigment. In the construction industry, it’s known as
a gel coat for fibre-reinforced polyester.
“(You have to) put some (colour) in that will resist UV
rays, frost. You have to balance. We looked at the colours blue,
red, orange. But those colours change. They’re unstable under
the sunlight, they fade.”
Faced with that fact, Fournier says he and Kephart had to choose
from a limited palette of yellow, white or beige. But before deciding,
they considered which colours dominated the townscape of what
was then Frobisher Bay.
“The schools were white,” he says of Nakasuk School
and Inuksuk High School, then known as the Gordon Robertson Education
Centre.
So, they decided to be bold.
“You use a strong colour and in the white of winter, or
even in summer, you can see it,” he says. “The landscape
is so uniform, so you need a landmark… An air terminal is
a gateway; it’s the first thing you see, it greets you.”
Once that was decided, the next step was selling their bright
idea to officials with Transport Canada — a sometimes onerous
task, Fournier says, especially for architects.
“When we presented the model to Transport Canada —
they have to be the straightest people — we thought they’d
flip,” he recalls, laughing. “These guys were engineers,
so they had no (perspective) on colour.”
However, the engineers approved their model, and things took
off in 1983, but only sort of.
“The panels were made in Mississauga, Ont.,” he says.
“Everything was tailor-made.”
Fournier remembers that delivering the panels was a “pretty
crazy” undertaking.
“They delivered half the panels by plane,” he says,
rolling his eyes as he remembers the exorbitant cost. “The
feds had to spend money by the end of the fiscal year, so they
spent it on that.”
By the autumn of 1984, Fournier says everything seemed well underway.
There was just a little problem known as bankruptcy.
“It was a company out of Edmonton who got the construction
contract, but they went bankrupt after one year,” he says.
“The project was taken over by the bonding company.”
The terminal was completed in 1986. Fournier says most residents
told him that they liked the colour because it wasn’t brown.
Today, Fournier owns an architectural company in Montreal. He
still designs buildings in the North, mainly in Nunavik. He’d
like to do more work in Nunavut.
Fournier says he heard recently that the terminal he designed
almost 20 years ago will probably be replaced by another in the
next three to five years. He says the news didn’t sadden
him because things are meant to change.
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