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.
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.1 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.
- William Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum” in Burning Chrome. Ed. Bruce Sterling. New York: Ace Books, 1986. Also, see Luckhurst for a discussion of this short story’s function as a kind of manifesto for the then emerging cyberpunk genre, pp. 204. [↩]
