Canada’s Ice Huts
PHOTOS Richard Johnson
Growing up along the shores of the Kennebecasis River in Renforth, New Brunswick, I watched as ice fishing huts appeared each winter on the frozen surface. They arrived with the season, clustered closely together—part settlement, part mirage—and vanished just as predictably. I never fished from them. My relationship to these structures was almost entirely visual, formed through repeated observation until their presence became habitual.
That familiarity is instructive. Ice fishing huts occupy an iconic yet ambiguous position in Canadian culture. Architecturally speaking, they are recreational shelters and seasonal dwellings, but more tellingly they are ad hoc experiments in improvised building. Scrap plywood, repurposed two-by-fours, tarps, sheet metal and leftover paint are appropriated as needed, supplemented by whatever else can be mustered—road signs, licence plates, antlers—for decorative expression.
For all their modesty, ice fishing huts have become recognizable features of the Canadian winter landscape, punctuating stark expanses as markers of human presence. Read collectively, they function as temporary infrastructure while carrying the visual language of a vernacular folk art tradition, forming a pragmatic response to climate and place that balances necessity with expression.
The season that sustains these structures has grown increasingly brief, compressing weeks of occupation into a narrower window, and lending the huts an added sense of nostalgia, as conditions that once felt dependable can no longer be assumed.
These qualities are drawn into sharp focus in the new photobook Resilience: Ice Huts and Root Cellars, 2007-2021 (Figure 1 Publishing, 2025) by the late architectural photographer Richard Johnson (1957–2021). Shot across every province, his images treat ice fishing huts as architectural objects rather than just picturesque curiosities. Each hut is photographed frontally, centred within a square frame, with a consistent horizon line marked by the occasional shoreline. The results reveal both sameness and difference. Many huts adhere to the archetypal form, making it difficult to identify a hut’s location without reading the caption, a reminder of how shared climatic pressures and cultural norms can override regional distinctions.
Johnson’s method recalls the typological clarity of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s systematic studies of European industrial structures and Ed Ruscha’s serial documentation of ordinary built environments of the American Southwest, where repetition and neutrality allow meaning to emerge through accumulation. A foreword by Edward Burtynsky situates Johnson’s work within a broader Canadian photographic tradition concerned with landscape, infrastructure and human intervention, underscoring the architectural seriousness of a typology often treated as marginal.
Notably absent from Johnson’s photographs are people. Just as vernacular architecture is often understood as ‘architecture without architects’, Johnson’s images reflect the idiosyncrasies of each hut owner, but with owners rarely visible. Smoke occasionally curls from a chimney and footprints or tire tracks imprint the surrounding snow, but the huts otherwise stand alone, quietly implying human presence without announcing it. They are portraits by proxy.
By allowing each hut to speak on its own terms, Johnson elevates a niche typology into something architecturally remarkable. Resilience captures a distinctly Canadian negotiation between climate, landscape and building, one that values adequacy over optimization and responsiveness over control, while demonstrating that impermanence can be part of architecture’s intelligence.
Mark Bessoudo is a writer, engineer and architectural historian based in London, UK.
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