With glass-walled conference rooms, lounges, and open desk space, the renderings for the renovation of McMurdo Station could be mistaken for those of a state-of-the art office. Employees will be able to take lunch breaks in a communal cafeteria, pick up their mail from the on-site Post Office, stretch their legs in the gym, and get a trim at the barbershop.
There’s a catch, though. They’ll be doing so in one of the most remote locations on Earth–Antarctica.
Like most research centers in Antarctica, McMurdo was originally viewed as a temporary settlement; the structures weren’t built or planned with permanence in mind. Since it had no master plan guiding its growth, the station has expanded organically over the decades–today it has over 1,000 summer workers and 250 year-round employees. This has led to inefficiencies: It requires a lot of energy to heat, a lot of snow-clearing to travel between structures (and more maintenance staff), and a lot of traveling between buildings in high winds and sub-zero temperatures. As a result, scientists probably aren’t collaborating as much as they could be.
So in 2012, McMurdo’s operators–the National Science Foundation and defense contractor Leidos–decided that the site needed an overhaul to improve its scientific output, quality of life, and efficiency. The hope was that a new design would let the NSF and Leidos spend more money on research than maintenance and operations, and they looked to architecture as a solution.
The master plan’s main conceit is consolidating the station’s 100-plus tiny structures into six larger buildings. As a whole, the station’s current buildings have a high ratio of surface to volume, which contributes to heat loss. Moreover, traveling between the 100 buildings is a logistical nightmare: The food warehouses are sited far from the cafeteria, so employees have to trek outside in high winds and frigid temperatures (which can dip to -18 degrees Fahrenheit), and clearing snow between buildings requires constant maintenance.
To build the structures, OZ knew that prefabrication would be essential since transporting materials to McMurdo is difficult–as is employing construction labor. Petersen and his team designed modular buildings using structurally insulated panels (SIPs) that can fit in shipping containers and be assembled quickly on-site. The SIPs are composed of nearly 10 inches of foam, wood, and moisture-proof membranes that keep cold out and heat in. OZ specified these ultra-insulated SIPs, which have an R value of 72 (a measure of thermal resistance), for the station’s walls, roofs, and floors, which are raised over the site to help reduce heat loss. From the outside, the new station has an angular silhouette, which was engineered to prevent snow drifts from accumulating but also to give the station the appearance of an outcropping from the icy, rocky landscape.
“Think of it as an insulted thermos bottle lifted over the ground,” Petersen says of the design.
Additionally, the SIPs are extra large; some are close to 40 feet long. That’s because the joint between panels is where heat transfer occurs, so OZ designed the building to have as few joints as possible. The limiting factor for this architectural detail was transportation: The SIPs still need to fit on a truck to get from the factory to the shipping port in Los Angeles, where everything sent to McMurdo Station originates. “Trucking regulations influenced the design of the station, which is kind of wild,” Petersen says.
Uniting the station into six modular buildings affords it new structural efficiency, energy efficiency, and logistical efficiency. Yet to Petersen, that’s only half of the story–the supporting characters to the lead role. The design’s architectural efficiency is all in service of intellectual efficiency.
“We all know the best ideas and decisions get made when there are multiple inputs and views; it’s fostering collaboration,” Petersen says. “In the current station, the work areas and the decision makers are often separated. We’ve always tried to make environments where ideas and points of view can be brought together, whether it’s in a coworking space in Denver or if it’s down in a research center in Antarctica.”
OZ tried to make the common spaces feel as special as possible. As harsh as the Antarctic environment is, it’s also what draws many of the scientists to the station, and its landscapes are awe-inducing. The buildings have a low window-to-wall ratio to help with thermal efficiency, so the architects strategically placed glass (which is triple-walled) in the common areas so that people could have a communal connection the landscape.
“We’re looking to engage with the natural environment, but we have to be more sensitive to the natural environment, too,” Petersen says. “It’s truly reflecting this special place, and it can’t be confused with a building in Kansas city or anywhere else.”