This interview with a stripper in Fermont provides an interesting look at the culture there: <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/dpwqzk/life-as-a-stripper-near-the-north-pole-786" rel="nofollow">https://www.vice.com/en/article/dpwqzk/life-as-a-stripper-ne...</a>
I've actually been here: <a href="http://mrgris.com/travel/blog/labrador/2/" rel="nofollow">http://mrgris.com/travel/blog/labrador/2/</a><p>Quite a weird place, though definitely not 50m tall.
Music video filmed there: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI9R2H_KkQk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI9R2H_KkQk</a><p>Such a great song and video, awesome cinematography, and includes some clips of residents shortly talking about it.
I was in Fermont a long time ago. I was driving from Goose Bay all the way south. in the 90s, the Labrador highway wasn't paved, it was just rough gravel.<p>I got a flat tire somewhere near the border, then pulled into Fermont and tried my best high school-level French to find somewhere to fix my flat tire.<p>I asked the guy at the gas station: "Excusez-moi, savez-vous où je peux trouver un garage pour réparer mon pneu crevé ?"<p>He looked at me and said "Fixer le flat, huh?"<p>No amount of formal French prepares you for Northern Quebecois "French" :-)
There is a more modest wall in Newcastle:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byker_Wall" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byker_Wall</a><p>I just measured it on Google Maps as 979 metres long (the Fermont Wall is 1.3 km). Also, i don't think it has continuous internal corridors and extensive commercial space, as Fermont does. It's just an unusually long block of flats. I'm also not sure it's continuous - i think there might be breaks around the swimming pool building.<p>What the two walls have in common is that they were built to protect an enclosed area from an external hazard - in Fermont, it was the wind, but in Byker, it was noise from a proposed motorway which would have run round the estate.
There's also the largest "underground city" in Montréal, Québec to avoid winter. It links up universities, stores, offices, subways and much, much more!
Reminds me of <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City</a><p>Can't imagine what it would be like to live in one of these things. Probably the closest we'll ever get to seeing how real life vault dwellers would play out.
A while ago I saw a tv series 'The Wall' (2019) [0]. Took me a few episodes to understand the name relates to an actual building that really is like a wall.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11577386/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11577386/</a>
If you want to see another example of urban 'planning' against powerful winds, see Mediterranean coast. It's littered with densly packed narrow streets.
I don't understand high density housing in low density neighborhoods with huge empty lawns. Seems an artificial, Le Corbusier style of utopia where the actual inhabitants are forced to conform to the architect's vision of how they should live.<p>When people want to escape suburbia, the natural higher density option is the 2-3 story terrace, rows of individual homes that share lateral walls and have front access to the street and a back yard. Owning your own personal yard and trees is an immense quality of life factor compared to a cramped apartment and a balcony.<p>The next, even higher density option I've seen in some european cities is to squeeze the frontal street, remove all parking there and move it in the back yards. A concrete slab covers the back parking and the backyard is effectively elevated one flood into the air.<p>This produces a dense, walkable urban environment with comfortable individual houses, each with a lot on the order of 150 square meters (1600 sq feet).
Vitruvius, “Ten books on architecture”, talks extensively about city design and how to make it so there are no wind corridors. An excellent reading and most relevant to software architecture: he distills things down to basics shared across time and disciplines.
Reminds me of Whittier, Alaska, another arctic town where almost everyone lives in one building: <a href="https://unusualplaces.org/whittier-alaska/" rel="nofollow">https://unusualplaces.org/whittier-alaska/</a>
I don't know very much about this stuff but it seems to me that the fairly dense housing just "behind" the wall relative to the prevailing winds would suffer from A LOT of snow accumulation.<p>I am sure I would enjoy living in that building and the community design seems good, if not quite as dense as might be ideal given some of the green space placement. If they have concerns about the wind they really need a lot more trees, I would venture a guess that a couple of good windrows of trees would be as good or better than the building -- but then of course trees aren't houses!
Anyone else disapointed that the streetview car reached the entrance and then turned around? Is this a military base or something? <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/Fermont,+QC+G0G+1J0,+Canada/@52.7998796,-67.0929448,2304m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x4cf531c519019a3f:0xcb1ac405340ee4bc!8m2!3d52.7953958!4d-67.0842673?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/place/Fermont,+QC+G0G+1J0,+Canad...</a>
I wish there were photos from inside the building. External views don't show how it feels to be inside, which is an extremely important characteristic of any building.
Seems to have been hugged to death, mirror:<p><a href="https://archive.is/0gcfh" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/0gcfh</a>
Isn't there a podcast episode all about this? I think maybe it was 99pi...<p>...here we go! <a href="https://99percentinvisible.org/article/self-contained-cities-hyperdense-arcologies-urban-fiction-utopian-fantasy/" rel="nofollow">https://99percentinvisible.org/article/self-contained-cities...</a>
Quebec, that’s America in French.<p>Quebec is NOT a piece of France in America.<p>That’s the mistake lots of people make.<p>I know what I’m talking about. I’m in Quebec.
I always wonder how much cumulative value has been generated by remote company towns built around resource extraction. Always a marvel to see civilization at work.
I measured only 911 m on Google Maps, along the roof, and there is a sharp kink in that line and few smaller ones.<p>The Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna, Austria is over 1000 m in a straight line, from one end to the other. Still the longest residential building in the world.