Something Darwinian seems to have been going on in the far north. Swedes forced to live through long, Arctic nights have developed an unwholesome tolerance for tedium. Anybody who’s suffered through the I Am Curious movies waiting for sex to happen, or Wild Strawberries waiting for the damn thing to just end, already knows what I’m talking about. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Swedish Lapland where every winter hotel workers venture out onto the frozen Torne River and quarry blocks of ice to drag ashore. They stack them into walls, smooth them into floors, arrange them into barrel-vaulted roofs and, come December, have a hotel ready to accept its first guests. By late February the hotel has grown to include a main corridor opening onto four long hallways, each lined with rooms. Then spring comes the whole thing melts back into the river. For the few months the hotel is there, it’s not just the building that’s ice: Everything about it is ice.