Our first building work in Antarctica. We jumped at it.
When the Australian Antarctic Division advertised a tender for the Red Shed Cold Porch & Deck Extension at Casey Station, we did not hesitate. The Red Shed is the heart of Casey - the main accommodation building for up to 120 people, housing sleeping quarters, a commercial kitchen, lounge, cinema, bar, doctor's surgery and shared bathrooms. Its cold porch is the threshold between inside and outside, the space where every person on station dons and doffs their cold-climate gear before stepping into conditions where winds can exceed 220 kilometres per hour. The existing porch was managing around 35 people comfortably and 45 uncomfortably, and over the busy summer months that number was routinely exceeded.
If the ship sails without it, you wait a year.
Our scope covered an internal renovation of the cold porch room, new joinery, a new multipurpose entry door to improve thermal performance and cargo transfer, and a new structural steel deck with staircases and handrails - providing both a working platform for moving goods into the building and an outdoor seating area for personnel during calmer weather.
Every element had to be prefabricated in Tasmania and shipped to Antarctica aboard the RSV Nuyina as part of the spring voyage. There was no flexibility on the deadline. If the materials were not ready when the ship sailed, they would not arrive for another year. The design minimised on-site effort through prefabrication and modular specification wherever possible, and the new deck structure was designed to utilise existing concrete footings poured for an earlier proposal in 2019, avoiding new ground works in one of the most environmentally sensitive construction sites on earth.
Construction on the continent's clock.
The deck extension has now been completed. The internal fitout works are under way now that the summer team has departed and the building is quieter - a reminder that construction programs in Antarctica follow the rhythms of the continent, not the calendar.
It is a modest project in scale, but it carries everything we care about as a studio: careful prefabrication, considered materials, a genuine improvement to the daily lives of the people who use the building, and the privilege of working on a site unlike any other. We are looking forward to sharing more images as the internal works progress. In the meantime, you can check how the deck is holding up against the elements via the Casey Research Station webcam
