Specificity
The present work aims to reflect on contemporary keys where the specificity of the place is the conceptual trigger in the design stage understood as an indissoluble association of architecture with the environment. It is to interpret a specific reality, exacerbating its main features, its atmosphere.
Antarctica
Currently our discipline transcends borders, working in highly natural landscapes far from our inmediate surroundings, with such different climates, cultures and conditions. It´s a challenge that implies a global perspective. Arises as a territory of exploration the Antarctic continent, more specifically the King George Island where Uruguay has its scientific station along with other countries. Each of them is a product of a particular geographic context as a cultural pole; the territorial dispersion generates a constellation of centers giving rise to cultural and scientific interaction between nations. Taking this phenomenon as an opportunity, The Antarctica Research Center emerges as a new cultural and scientific pole to develop investigation on the future of the white continent altogether.
Form
The project takes the reductionist form of the house as a recognizable elemental model, the original geometry is subjected to a series of operations of translation and deformation radically altering it, giving rise to a new archetype wich defines by repetition the form of the building. Turning out to be a constructive resource that can resolve technical, economic and climate requirements in such a remote place as Antarctica.
The Program suggest an horizontal resolution going from private to public. Spaces for leisure and social meetings are articulators between
research and private activities. Large windows frame and exacerbate the landscape, taming nature from the architecture.
Prefabrication
The building consist of repeatable elements designed and produced in series increasing accuracy during execution, reducing assembly process and footprint in landscape. The design consider logics capable of respoding to various needs for flexibility, growth and staging. The structure of Glued Laminated Timber (GLT) consists of successive inclinated frames that generates slopes capable of evacuating the frequent rains and reduce the volume of snow in them.
Constructive Strategy
The geographical location compels us to resort to a constructive strategy effective and flexible. Interior modules are prefabricated in steel-framing, the selected system allows as to run modules very quickly, even with all the facilities provided and equipped to be transported and assembled on-site. The modules are equal to the formal section of the archetype in a way adapted to the section of the building. They are designed to be transported in trucks to the port of Montevideo, once there, the prototypes are loaded boat along with all the equipment and materials needed to perform the building. Travelling 3500km until reach the final destination. Assembly process will be done during summer (November – March) where the temperature is higher and there are more hours of sunshine.
Camuflage
The longitudinal facades added to the thickness an outer layer of curved glass that unifies the building, their materiality takes the monochromatic nature of the immediate environment. During the hours of sunshine the landscape is reflected and the building vanishes, while during the long nights of winter becomes a electricity device, a lantern in the infinite landscape.
