Architectural Consideration to Planning in the Extreme Environment- Antarctica

Extreme environments in Polar Regions share similar facilities and operations, design, and planning challenges: extreme cold temperatures, structural problems, high standards for materials, resource limitations (including people), transportation, and logistics. Nevertheless, they differ depending on local cultural and social traditions and climate challenges specific to a particular region. Environmental hardships create challenges that reflect on sets of architectural requirements. The paper discusses these challenges and their influences on form-developing factors, site orientation, and circulation, – factors that affect budget considerations as well. The paper also discusses the criticality of addressing such impacts at the programming design stage, especially in challenging environments, to avoid costly adjustments at later development stages. The paper argues that integrating an architectural approach into the planning of construction and related activities in Polar Regions is critical for enabling sustainability and resilient strategies there. The importance of such integration comes from the fact that engineering-oriented developers strictly follow industry-specific technical regulations and standards. Simultaneously, planning construction work and design in extreme conditions becomes a more complex process that calls for a new methodology, which would differ from common regulatory “checklists” that most companies implement in their practices there.