Sometimes its only when you’re a long way from home that you realise what home really is. And there’s nowhere less like home – wherever you live – than Antarctica. Antarctica’s remoteness and relatively pristine state make it a special resource. It is place where we can study our planet in ways that are impossible elsewhere. There we can to look into Earth’s past, record it’s present and speculate on it’s future. But its remoteness also makes it as unheimlich as one can be on earth, the closest one can get to an alien landscape.
It is a landscape almost unadapted by human inhabitation. On much of the planet even the things we think of as nature are actually the product of thousands of years of human striation of the land. Landscapes we associate with an essence of nature are often entirely synthetic products. The land has been toiled, arranged, fought over, valued, enclosed, bought and sold, legislated over, built on, ruined, buried, excavated, exploited, preserved, restored, polluted and cleaned. Architecture, as it is usually practiced at least, is created in dialogue with these layers of human history.
Architecture is concerned with issues of context and tradition, wether it be for or against, point or counterpoint. It is an act that is always intricately enmeshed and shaped by the political social and economic forces, and that architecture occurs when these issues converge with the demands of shelter and enclosure. That’s to say, architecture occurs at the intersection of environmental, social, cultural, legal, economic and political issues. And that it can never exist outside of these frames. In Antarctica, it’s not only climate that makes these issues stranger than anywhere else on earth. To understand its architecture we need to understand Antarctica’s own strange conditions.
Antarctica was first seen only in 1820. The first human set foot on it perhaps a year later. That’s to say, the continent only enters the human world as fact – rather than speculation, supposition or myth – after the industrial revolution. Antarctica’s human history is short. It was uninhabited, the only continent on Earth without indigenous human inhabitants. Its population now varies between 1000 in winter and 4000 in summer.
Antarctica isn’t a place in the way we understand the world. Even its name reveals something different about its status as a territory. Etymologically derived from the Greek antarktikos meaning opposite the north. It was a place always imagined as different, as an opposite of normal territorial conditions. And it remains outside of our normal definitions of place.
On Antarctica the striations ingrained by human habitation in the surface of earth are fainter and more provisional. Their lightness is explicitly preserved through international agreements contained in the Antarctic Treaty System, a series of international agreements limiting activity on the continent. These international agreements define Antarctica as a scientific preserve and ban military activity (the continent was subject to the first arms control agreement during the Cold War). The treaties ambition is set out in its guiding phrase: “in the interests of all mankind that Antarctica shall continue forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and shall not become the scene or object of international discord.”
Yet Antarctica is not entirely free of worldly concern. Seven states maintain territorial claims in Antarctica, not all in agreement. Geopolitics rests lighter on the surface of Antarctica, less embedded, less marinated into the continents geology. Concepts of state, ownership and threshold juxtaposed like a pie chart against its topographic landscape.
Antarctica’s difference is also told through the history of its inhabitation. The first structures built on Antarctica were huts, simple wooden cabins. Borchgrevingk’s Huts assembled on Cape Adarie in 1899, Discovery Hut, built in 1902 on Ross Island, Shakleton’s and Scott’s huts were all basic timber shelters. They demonstrate some fundamental issues of building in the Antarctic. The continent lacks local material (except, of course, ice) which means that construction materials must be shipped from elsewhere. They also show how these issues generate a kind of essentaillism: An architecture limited by resources and logistics, but one that must perform against the extreme climate.
Just as one marvels at the idea of the first human footstep onto the surface of Antarctica (or, for that matter, the Moon), it’s also mind boggling to think of the first building on a continent. The sheer scale is awesome: a tiny timber shed alone in a landscape of 14,000,000 km². These early Antarctic huts are architecture right on the extreme edge of the possibilities of civilisation, thrust forward by science and industry. Yet, by necessity, primitive.
The image of a solitary piece of architecture alone in a pristine wilderness binds narratives of exploration, progress, nature and culture with architecture’s own history. It recalls the myth of the primitive hut that figures large in the stories architecture tells about itself.
This idea of the primitive hut has resonated through centuries of architectural thinking. For Vitruvius, the Roman architect, the primitive hut presented a kind of architectural essence. He saw the limitations of technology and material giving the structure an essential order. Developed by the 18th century French architect Mark-Antoine Laugier, the primitive hut came to represent the origin of architecture, a structure that contained the principles from which all architecture follows.
In Gottfried Semper’s The Four Elements of Architecture (1851), the primative hut comes to represent the point at which man and nature seperate: “as when the first men lost paradise, the setting up of the fireplace and the lighting of the reviving, warming and food preparing flame. Around the hearth the first groups assembled; around it the first alliances formed; around it the first rude religious concepts were put into the customs of a cult.”
The primitive hut represents both the loss of innocence and the foundation of human culture. He describes how its qualities of shelter, of its space artificially heated and lit so that is becomes a separate, synthetic climatic condition create a space that enables ritual, language, society and knowledge.
The idea of the primitive hut provides a lens through which helps us view the architecture of Antarctica. Here we find architecture in the last earthly wilderness, a place almost untouched by human inhabitation. Amongst this lansdcape each station acts as a shelter, a bubble containing and enabling society. Each station formulates, through architecture specific outposts of culture, behavior and knowledge.
This is true even for the most contemporary of stations, even the structures that seem centuries in advance of the first simple Antarctic huts. Indeed, the history of Antarctic architecture seems a hyper accelerated history of architecture itself: from the hut to the space station in just over a hundred years.
Take Halley VI, the new British station. Halley is sited on the Brunt ice shelf, 75 degrees south. In winter the temperature drops to -50. It’s blasted by 100 mph winds and endless snowfall. It is around 700 miles from the nearest human settlement. It is home in winter to around 14 staff, and in summer to around 70. Supplies come annually, shipped on the RRS Ernest Shackletonthat also takes away waste. It is, in all these senses raw.
Yet it looks like a thing just landed, a bright chain of blue and red pods jacked up on ski-legs. The colours of the pods have the jolly pop-nationality of an unfurling James Bond Union Jack parachute. They cast Antarctica’s endless and endlessly snowy landscape as the white glue to the coloured segments of station-as-flag. Continent and architecture thus joined in iconographic pageantry – a way to, symbolically at least, make this inhospitable place, a place where concepts of statehood and territory are less defined, read like a piece of England.
Halley looks like architecture as equipment – like the cabs of some unknown machine, like segments of a train, like pieces of plug and play infrastructure. It’s architect Hugh Broughton suggests the buildings affinity with science fiction – and British science fiction in particular – in citing Thunderbird 2, International Rescue’s transporter, as an influence. He says “I love the idea that 50 years down the line, in Antarctica, some of that conceptual thought from the 60s comes true.” In citing this, he also, by inference casts the British Antarctic Survey – and perhaps the international presence in Antarctica as a whole – as a special kind of heroic global organisation – a global force for good.
Others might also see echoes of Archigram’s Walking City in the way that Halley is conceived as movable settlement, a habitat-vehicle that whose ski-legs allow it to travel across the landscape. There are shades of early High Tech rhetoric, of Reyner Banham’s A House Is Not A Home in Halley’s appearance as a series pod whose environmental services are “the junk that keeps the pad swinging”. In all of these references, we can read a particular relationship of architecture to nature, of technology to environment. High technology, in these examples, is figured as a way to return us to a state of paradise, a way of uninventing, perhaps, the schism between man and nature that Semper’s primitive hut had marked.
Halley’s pods may seem machinic, but their module is distorted by the social functions they contain as much as their environmental or mechanistic performance.
They are modified not only by mechanical performance but by their social performance. The red cell, for example, is the social area. Its ceiling height accommodating its more public social role.
Halley VI embodies a particular strand of British thinking about architecture, technology and the environment. This becomes more visible when Halley is contrasted with the stations of other nationalities. McMurdo Station, for example, is one of the two U.S. base’s (the other sited, provocatively, at the South Pole itself). It is a sprawl of around 100 buildings, many big box industrial sheds, that include a deactivated nuclear power plant, Antarctica’s only ATM, and the Ross Island Disc Golf Course. It’s scale, design and extent make it read as a piece of Antarctica given over to North American sprawl.
Korea’s Jang Bogo Station, currently under construction at Terra Nova Bay, reads like a three pronged star, each limp projecting from a central hub. Like Halley VI, it architecture conceived through the lens of a vehicle, its aerodynamicism a reaction, presumably, to Antarctica’s high winds. It’s surface is inlaid with solar cells, Jang Bogo’s futurism is sleeker, more futuristic even than Halley’s very British sci fi. It seems to sit as a projected image of the fast paced technological revolution that is central to Koreas contemporary narrative.
The demands of Antarctica force architecture to think ingeniously about itself. If Halley VI and Jang Bogo express their technology, India’s Bharathi Research Station seems to ingest it, using the shipping containers that transport as the building blocks of the station itself.
Architecture is always more than the sum of itself. Its form, material and performance sit as contextual response, so too is it here. The Antarctic Stations are becoming ever more technologically and materially advanced yet they remain outposts of human inhabitation. This quality is a function of the qualities of the continent itself, its special international status, its history of uninhabitiation and its remoteness. Their extremity means they remain primitive huts – in the architectural sense – despite their closer affinity with space stations than other earthly architecture. We use Antarctica to scientifically explore global issues. Yet simultaneously, the stations themselves reveal something about the essential qualities of how architecture helps form human culture.
First published int he catalogue of the exhibition IceLab: architecture and science in extreme conditions