For more than fifty years, Halley Research Station—located on the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea—has collected a continuous stream of meteorological and atmospheric data critical to our understanding of polar atmospheric chemistry, rising sea levels, and the depletion of the ozone layer. Since the station’s establishment in 1956, there have been six Halley stations, each designed to withstand the difficult climatic conditions. The first four stations were crushed by snow. The fifth featured a steel platform, allowing it to rise above snow cover, but it, too, had to be abandoned when it moved too far from the mainland, making its habitation precarious. Completed in 2012, Halley VI is the winning design from an international competition organized by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). It is the world’s first fully relocatable research station, comprising eight modules fitted with hydraulic legs and skis. This book tells the extraordinary story of this iconic piece of architecture’s design and creation and the challenge of building in an extreme environment, illustrated with drawings, sketches, and previously unpublished photographs.
