When Hugh Broughton Architects won a design competition for the Halley VI Antarctic research station, which officially opens today, the small London-based office had no experience working in extreme environments. But its proposal, developed with engineer AECOM, impressed the jury both for its technical ingenuity and its understanding that for up to 50 scientists, this inhospitable place is home.
British Antarctic Survey (BAS) established the Halley research station on the Brunt Ice Shelf in 1956. Its first four bases were lost to the ice, which piles up relentlessly – over three feet each year – burying and eventually crushing any building sitting on the ground. A fifth was constructed on steel legs that could be laboriously elongated, but after 20 years of service, the legs are encased in 75-feet of ice and break when it moves.
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