Intriguing new University of Toronto exhibit explores Antarctica’s architecture of the extremes

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In the most remote point of the Antarctic stands a bust of Vladimir Lenin. The Soviet leader looks out imperiously at the Pole of Inaccessibility, 1,400 kilometres from the nearest sea route, where he was left by a team of Soviet explorers in 1959.

This statue was a pawn in a diplomatic game that extends literally to the ends of the Earth. For more than a century, world powers have been asserting control over the Antarctic, the least populous and least studied place on Earth.

And today, the continent holds both valuable mineral resources and importance as a site of research into climate change.

These tensions are revealed by an intriguing exhibition at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, open now until July. Resolutions for the Antarctic: International Stations & the Antarctic Data Space documents the travels of polar explorers and their physical impact on the continent, and asks probing questions about climate change, science and global diplomacy.

The exhibition was curated by UNLESS, a non-profit agency devoted to interdisciplinary research on extreme environments. Juan Du, dean of the Daniels Faculty, contributed to the exhibition along with 200 other architects, landscape architects, artists and climate scientists.

The show, Du explained, is a model of interdisciplinary collaboration. “It brings together people from around the world, and from many disciplines, because that’s what it takes to understand such a complex range of issues,” she said.

The exhibition includes a short documentary film by UNLESS and tablets with digital access to the Antarctic Resolution Platform, a body of research that was also collected in a 2021 book.

But at the Daniels school’s Architecture and Design Gallery, the show emphasizes drawings and photographs of buildings: those constructed by Antarctic expeditions from the mid-19th century through 2020. “This is architecture of extremes,” Du said. “Each of these stations is both an intimate environment and a way to answer how we can occupy an inhospitable continent.”

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Such buildings represent architecture under the most extreme pressure. How do you build when all the materials must be brought in at once, down to the last nail? How do you make space for people in the harshest climate on Earth, where it is entirely dark six months of the year? And how to make architecture that can be removed, leaving no ruins or waste behind?

Resolutions for the Antarctic thus opens up several major issues in architecture and spatial design. These include prefabricated building components and panels, an idea that holds potential for cost savings and high energy performance. This idea has been present in the Antarctic since 1895. In the 1960s, the Alberta Trailer Company produced modules shaped like shipping containers, for the U.S. government’s Antarctic research – four decades before shipping-container housing became a fashionable topic in architecture. “These structures were ahead of their time, in how they should be constructed and how they should be taken away,” Du said.

Antarctic stations also have to survive harsh climactic conditions. “There’s a big lesson there: How we can understand places that are perhaps not extreme locations but are extreme in other ways,” Du said. Building insulation and airtightness, about which Western architecture has often had a casual attitude, are crucial.

The exhibition demanded extensive research into the design and fabrication of Antarctic buildings from a dozen countries. Du, who taught at the University of Hong Kong before moving to Daniels in 2021, obtained details of China’s Antarctic station, which she suggests the Chinese government would now insist on keeping secret.

That defensive attitude is common; the exhibition reveals that all governments with an Antarctic presence prefer to build their own stations and often to keep the details secret. UNLESS and its collaborators suggest that international co-operation must be stronger and deeper: Both scientific research and the buildings that serve it can be shared. “There’s so much we can do to encourage further international collaboration,” Du said.