Eight buildings that will not exist in June

This is the building that started the category. It has been built at Jukkasjärvi since 1989, and it is rebuilt every winter in a new form, from ice taken out of the Torne River beside it. Nothing about the plan carries over. The walls, the rooms and the art inside them are made again from the beginning each year, then allowed to return to the river in spring.

The material sets the rules. Ice is structural, so spans are short, ceilings are vaulted and every opening is a decision about load.

Because the building is temporary by design, the design brief is unusual: nothing has to last, so nothing has to be conservative. Rooms are carved by different artists, which means one corridor can hold work with almost no relationship to the work next door. In a permanent hotel that would read as incoherence. Here it reads as an annual exhibition that you sleep inside.

The village sits well above the Arctic Circle, near Kiruna in the far north of Sweden, and the season is set by temperature rather than by a calendar. Warm weather shortens it. This is the clearest case in the guide of a building you cannot postpone, because the specific rooms you would be visiting will not exist next year.

Sorrisniva has been building an ice hotel at Alta every year since 1999, on the Alta River in Finnmark. It was the first of its kind in Norway, and the site has kept the same relationship to the river ever since: the material comes from close by, and the building goes up on the same ground each winter.

Alta sits at the top of the Norwegian mainland, in country that is dark for a long stretch of the winter. That changes what the architecture is for. A building made of ice in permanent daylight would be a curiosity; in polar night it becomes a lantern, because the walls carry whatever light is put behind them.

The plan is low and spread out rather than tall. Ice does not like height.

What we watch here is the discipline of doing the same thing for twenty-five winters. The form changes, the carving changes, and the practice of it does not. There is a version of this guide that only has room for the first ice hotel ever built, and we think that version would be missing the more interesting story, which is a craft repeated annually until it becomes ordinary work.

The season here runs from roughly 15 December to 31 March, which is the most precise date range in this chapter and the most useful. Everything else about the building follows from those fifteen weeks. Construction has to be finished before the first date and the site has to be clear after the last, so the working year is inverted compared with any permanent hotel.

Rovaniemi sits on the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland, in flat forest country rather than mountains. The building spreads sideways into that landscape.

Snow rooms and ice rooms behave differently, and the site uses both. Packed snow makes the corridors and the structural mass; clear ice goes into the carved work, where it can hold colour from a light placed behind it. Glass-roofed accommodation on the same site covers the other half of the northern-winter problem, which is that people want to look up at the sky without being outside in it.

We list it because the fixed season is stated plainly. Most of this chapter runs on approximate dates that shift with the weather, and it is worth having one entry where the calendar is written down.

This one is not Nordic, and that is the reason it is here. The Hotel of Ice has been built each winter since 2005 at Bâlea Lake, high in the Făgăraș Mountains of Romania, using ice cut from the lake itself. Altitude does the work that latitude does elsewhere in this chapter.

The site is above the treeline on a glacial lake, and the road that reaches it is closed by snow for the season. Access in winter is by cable car from the valley below.

That single fact shapes everything. Every block of ice, every tool and every guest arrives the same way, so the building has to be made almost entirely from what is already on site. The lake supplies the material, the mountain supplies the temperature, and the structure is kept small because there is no other sensible option.

It also breaks the assumption that this typology belongs to Scandinavia. Southern and central Europe have high country that stays cold for months, and one operator has been proving that annually for two decades. Of all the buildings in this chapter, this is the one most people are surprised to find exists.