“When we arrived it was overcast and so cold and I could hardly imagine spending more than a few hours there let alone a few weeks. But its amazing how it grabs you. The cold is also incredibly enlivening as is the sense of isolation, which is quickly countered by the support offered by a small and very tightly knit community all working with a single purpose.”
Hugh Broughton is an award-winning British architect whose recent project, the conservation of The Painted Hall in Greenwich, has already won a 2020 Civic Trust Award, AABC Conservation Award and Selwyn Goldsmith Award. It is the first time in the history of the British Civic Trust Awards program that one project has received these three awards. But Broughton and his colleagues are famous for another, perhaps more weird, expertise: designing and building award-winning Antarctic bases.
The Antarctic has always been the most innovative continent when it comes to human design—from the earliest days of exploration it was a place where in order to survive, teams of humans had to observe and improvise and make near-hourly design decisions. I caught up with Hugh in his London office by teleconference. He had recently returned from New Zealand where he is designing a new version of that country’s historic Scott Base on Ross Island, Ross Sea, Antarctica. We talked about the challenges of creating human work and living spaces—it’s the coldest, driest, windiest continent. Half the year, the sun never rises and humans and non-humans alike live in utter darkness.
Broughton explained how, in addition to the vast technical challenges of the actual design, he focuses very intently on the experience of living there. How does one design towards the view—Antarctica for all its menace is stunningly gorgeous. Broughton also talked about representing New Zealand’s bi-cultural identity, through privileging the design sensibilities of the indigenous Maori people. The Maori have renowned craft practices, across carving and flax weaving among others, which often feature the organic forms of the curvilinear clouds ubiquitous to New Zealand. (The Maori name for New Zealand is Aotearoa, Land of the Long White Cloud.) He envisions Antarctic bases as a shared home, one that reflects the cultural identities of the home nation, while also supporting community and strong mental health in this notoriously difficult environment.
I asked Broughton if he had been one of those English lads longing to trace the journeys of his famed countrymen: Robert Falcon Scott and Vivian Fuchs, for example. He laughed, “No, actually not at all!” He explained how their first foray into Antarctic design came after their small, west London firm beat out much larger, global firms, to design Halley VI...
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