Connie Samaras,
"America Dreams"
(page 4 of 7)
The new Amundsen-Scott station, now nearing full completion, was
designed in the 90s by the Hawaiian sustainable architecture firm,
Ferraro Choi with construction commenced at the start of the new
millennium. The most ambitious architectural project ever undertaken at
the Pole, it is an enormous structure, many times larger than any of the
previous stations. It is a singular, fully enclosed two-story
four-winged building built on pillars that will eventually be used to
raise the station against the inevitable ice drift. Gone are the human
scale, intimate feel, and the sensed relationship between human habitat
and extreme climate. In contrast to the Dome and the temporary Quonset
huts out on the ice near the cargo area built to house workers, those
inside the new station feel safely tucked in a technological bubble.
Figure 8 Connie Samaras
Tunnels and Cargo
digital print
Courtesy of the artist
The interior itself feels like a cross between interchangeable
non-places like LAX and Southern California shopping malls, mixed with a
set design for a Star Trek episode. Both the design and the
construction materials, particularly in the sleeping areas, are
engineered to repel personal touches. In contrast to the Dome, the
design of the Amundsen-Scott berths resolutely conveys that all traces
of a given occupant will automatically be disappeared once she or he
leaves the quarters with only the timeless presence of the building
remaining. Most imposing though is the outside of the station, which
has become consistently more imposing since my 2004 residency, now that
it has been "skinned" over with a black patina. Resembling a stealth
bomber, it hardly seems ironic that Raytheon, the world's largest weapon
manufacturer currently holds the logistics contract for running the U.S.
stations in Antarctica while Marriott (during my stay) was in charge of
the food services.
Perched like a black alien vessel on the center of the South Pole,
the Amundsen-Scott station is ready for its pre-visualized long shot.
Its predecessor, the Bucky Dome, because of its human scale and
idealistic architectural principles emphasizing a fluid interdependence
between nature and culture, appeared modestly partnered with the
landscape. By contrast, the new station's imposing design evokes the
kind of science fiction imagery specific to U.S. mainstream media, where
far future space exploration, technology and the military inexorably
intertwine. The new station also typifies, despite its remote and
exotic location, the kind of massive, global hyper capital building
projects currently being undertaken in cities worldwide, where
surveillance, military and entertainment technologies are
architecturally imbedded and woven together.
The idea of the South Pole as a place where the future can be
imagined has great appeal and lure. It's become increasingly difficult
to imagine different kinds of futures and other kinds of social
arrangements than the one held out by corporate capitalism. With the
increasing threat of ecological disaster, Antarctica, and the seeming
pristine purity of its landscape, has grown in visibility in the
mainstream imagination, especially among the normally geographically
impaired U.S. population. There is a kind of nostalgia at foot that is
more than just a longing for a perfect past that never existed or a
yearning for new territories to conquer with technological prowess. In
part, Antarctica's recent popularity as an icon of an extreme and final
purity in nature is about a desire to retrieve and recall the
interdependent relationship between the earth and its inhabitants, one
that has been paved over, poisoned, or been divided up among competing
corporations and their host governments. The South Pole, as locus of
extreme remove from humanity, and as a location, since the 1950s, for
increasingly elaborate and futuristic stations, embodies the
contradictions of contemporary globalization and environmental
awareness. The fact though that the "look" of future American
expansion at the South Pole must be redesigned every three or four
decades ultimately underscores the cultural and political preoccupations
of a given present as it immediately folds into the past versus the
desired representation of a prescient and timeless nationalism. While
photographing there, I could not help but be haunted by a William Gibson
story "The Gernsback Continuum," itself a ghost story about futurism
past.[6]
The plot revolves around a male photographer who has been
commissioned by a European publisher to shoot pictures of U.S. "futurist
architecture" from the 30s and 40s. While driving through California,
he begins to find himself hallucinating pieces of these once future
visions in his own present. Like fata morganas, they visually hover
overhead on a simultaneous timeline, throwing into stark contrast the
void and geological drift of the desert landscape.
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