Jimmy Grey needed a project. He’d been out of work for a year and he’d been going stir crazy with the combination of heavy snow and unemployment. So the twenty-five year old started building an igloo in his family’s yard in Aquilla, Ohio, about thirty miles east of Cleveland.
Jimmy’s igloo has four rooms, six foot ceilings and a fully stocked entertainment room. He powers his television with an extension cord plugged into an outlet in the garage. He’s also run wires for cable into his creation and set up surround-sound stereo.
Grey says candles make it a perfect hang out with friends, and the fact that it’s made of ice and snow means the beer never gets cold.
Igloos were originally built by the Inuit. Iglu is the Inuit word for house, no matter what that house is made of. Iglu’s made of snow are generally built in the form of a dome. Many of the peoples of Canada’s Central Arctic and Greenland’s Thule area use snow as an insulator for their homes. Snow makes a good insulator because the air pockets trapped in it hold warm air inside and snow insulated buildings can raise indoor temperatures as much as fifty degrees when warmed by body heat alone.
The largest of traditional igloos have up to five rooms and house up to twenty people. They may also have been constructed from several smaller igloos attached by tunnels, giving common access to the outside. Architecturally, the igloo is unique in that it is a dome that can be constructed out of independent blocks leaning on each other and polished to fit without any additional support during construction. If correctly built, an igloo will support the weight of a person standing on its roof.
