When it’s time to rebuild a research installation in one of the most punishing climates on Earth, where do you turn? To the Mile High City, of course.
This week, the Denver office of international architecture firm Stantec announced that it has been chosen to serve as lead designer for a project that will significantly rebuild McMurdo Station, the primary hub of operations for U.S. research on and around Antarctica. It will be up to Stantec project principal Merlin Maley and his team to take schematic drawings of two critical new buildings planned for McMurdo — a 285-bed lodging building and a “Core” operations center — and work with builders over the next eight years to get those and other structures up and running on the ice-packed southern continent.
The effort is part of the National Science Foundation’s AIMS project. AIMS — or Antarctic Infrastructure Modernization for Science — is focused on updating McMurdo to ensure it can serve the U.S. research on Antarctica for decades to come.
“What’s great about the AIMS project is we’re streamlining the operational cost at McMurdo Station so more of the emphasis can really be put on the science,” said Maley. “The goal of the project is to really start to consolidate the number of buildings on site and get scientists out onto the ice and to the base camps for their exploration and research by reducing the amount of time spent at McMurdo having to gather supplies.”
According to Maley, who visited McMurdo late last year, there are more than 90 major buildings at the station today, a layout that lends itself to energy, water and human inefficiency. The structures were added piecemeal as the mission at McMurdo grew and evolved. The station was founded as a naval base in 1955 before being permanently converted to a science operations hub in 1968.
When the new lodging and Core buildings are completed, dormitories, offices, communal kitchens and dining rooms, emergency operations, field support and back-of-house trade services such as carpentry and metal working will be housed in just two large buildings.
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The Denver Stantec office, formerly RNL Design, was tapped by AIMS project subcontractor Parsons to be its design-build partner for the structures. It will be up to Parsons to get the building built on the patch of bare volcanic rock that hosts McMurdo Station. But Maley has plenty to worry about before the work begins. For one, concrete cannot be poured wet on Antartica, so everything — including chunks of foundation for the two buildings — has to be pre-cast and shipped out of Port Hueneme in California. The first boat for the lodging building is scheduled to depart early next year.
“It’s interesting working on a project where the discussion is always about making the boat,” Maley said. “If we miss the boat, then they don’t get to build anything down there during the next summer building season.”
Maley and the Stantec Denver office have experience designing structures for cold-weather mountain communities in Colorado, Wyoming and elsewhere and have a background in maintenance and infrastructure facilities such as RTD’s light rail maintenance facility in Englewood.
It’s not the only Denver-based company with its fingerprints on the McMurdo Station project. OZ Architecture created the master plan that is guiding the redevelopment effort.
For Maley, working on a project that will have to stand up to Earth’s widest, coldest and driest climate on its most remote continent isn’t just cool, it contributes to a higher mission.
The importance of the research being conducted on Antarctica, especially when it comes to climate change, is “beyond what I can comprehend,” he said.
