Jessica Shi
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Jessica Shi, an architecture student from Rice University. I will be your host today.

This fall we are presenting highlights from short conversations with professionals about what constitutes as beautiful in their line of work. We gathered really cool stories and experiences that are not only inspiring but also informative about the kind of projects they work on. You’ll hear what our speakers value most and what excites them about their projects. So, join us as we embark on sharing our curiosity for how individuals define beauty in their fields, where they encounter it, and how it shapes their practices.

In this episode, our guest is Kerim Miskavi, the founder of MAS Architecture Studio in Istanbul.

Kerim earned his architecture degree from Rice University and started his private practice seven years ago. In 2022 his firm won a national competition for a university campus project in Turkey. It is the new campus for the Izmir School of Economics. He is currently designing the architecture school for it, which is kind of a dream job for any architect!

Before diving into how he defined beauty, we first asked if beauty was presented as something to aim for during his college education.

Kerim Miskavi
I think that’s a good question. Yes, it was definitely one of the parameters for our education. I think some of our professors were more explicit about it. And we had one professor who would always come in before the jury last night and say, don’t worry about it, just make it beautiful. So, so it’s definitely something you think about a lot.

Of course, in terms of the education for architecture, a lot of it is just getting the framework and the conceptual approach and understanding how to solve the puzzle of the project. But at the end of the day, it always has to be beautiful, right? Because that’s the world we deal with.

I think of it as very similar to cooking, in a way. You have to choose your ingredients. And you have to know the techniques right, you have to cook things correctly, and make sure everything is done properly in terms of technique. But at the end of the day, it has to taste good, right? And even if it’s technically executed perfectly, if it doesn’t taste good, if it doesn’t inspire you, then you’re left with a dish that you will never remember. So, I think that’s what beauty is, to what we do. I mean, all the things we have to get right technically is always there. But at the end of the day also has to be beautiful to evoke the emotions that we like to aim for as architects.

Jessica
Listen to how Kerim defines many layers of beauty when he is viewing projects.

Kerim
As you work on something, there’s a couple of layers of beautiful, I think. The first level of beauty is maybe, let’s say, a more shallow understanding of it. You look at something, you think it looks nice and you say, hey, wow, that’s beautiful. And I think we all have that response, right? Whether we are trained for it or not, we all look for beauty, whether it’s in buildings, or anything around us. And that’s a very valid response, I think. But when you start practicing, and when you start creating things, as you sort of move through, you start finding beauty in other things as well. Like little moments or details or discoveries that you yourself notice or you come across as you’re designing. Then those are maybe the moments where I’m like, oh, wow, I never thought it would turn out this way but the way the stair ended up being in the space is beautiful, or the way the light hits this little hallway is very beautiful, and I never thought it was going to be this way. So, I think as you sort of get a more trained eye, you start to get us a finer grain of beauty that you discover. And that’s, I think, quite rewarding.

Jessica
Getting a trained eye takes time. How does one develop the criteria to ensure the designs are well received? Is it by always by being mindful of or incorporating certain elements?

Kerim
I think it’s a tough question. It’s a good question as well. I think it’s sort of the process of looking at a lot of things, training your eye, finding things that you like, and then sort of building a library of things that you think are beautiful. And you always have that in the back of your head as sort of reference for things you go back to when you’re doing design as well. But then there comes a moment where you kind of internalize all of that, and you, in a way, you forget about them. And you sort of unlearn everything, and it just becomes a more intuitive process for you. And then it’s almost like you’re the spectator, or you’re discovering things that was done by someone else that you find, as you’re working through your process and you’re like, aha, that’s it. That’s what I’m looking for.

A lot of our work, I think, personally, a lot of my process has to do with this kind of learning and unlearning to find beauty, because maybe it’s also my personality but I like to approach projects in a very logical way. I mean, usually, we’re given a pretty specific brief, we’re given a specific site, we’re given specific parameters, we work with engineers, and everything is quite rigorous in terms of its overall technical expectation. So, you start by solving the puzzle. And you look at things like order, symmetry, rhythm, structure, space, proportion, and all of these basic things as you’re designing the space. But I think there comes a time, it’s almost like when it was analyzed, I think I read this somewhere, there was research on what is beauty in people’s faces. There was kind of correlation between the symmetry of someone’s face, but the symmetry has to be just the right amount. If it’s too symmetrical, then it becomes kind of difficult for someone to register, it becomes too rigid. But then if it’s too asymmetrical, then it also doesn’t involve this kind of beauty. So, it has to be just the right amount of balance between symmetry and authenticity or originality to get that sweet spot, right. And I think that’s what we do a lot as well or I do a lot in my practice. Once you get all the basics and you have a sense of the order and the symmetry then we go back and try to make it more human in a way. Like, introduce some idiosyncrasies to it or specific moments that feel that are unique in it, that create a sense of surprise or the unexpected, so that it feels more personal. Because I think if you go about, it in a very sort of engineering state of mind, then you end up with something that makes a lot of sense, but maybe doesn’t invoke the kind of authenticity or the uniqueness that you’re looking for when you’re looking for that sense of beauty. I don’t know if that makes sense. But I feel like there has to be a place where there’s like, the rule is broken, and something happens. And that’s when you kind of wake up to it. And you say, Oh, wow, that’s beautiful.

Jessica
Is there an interplay with beauty and order, beyond the balance, symmetry, uniqueness that Kerim already brough up?

Kerim
Maybe it’s also a generational thing, I think what we consider to be beautiful, both in architecture but also in the world, changes a lot over time. If you look at the classical sense of beauty, it was all about order and composition and harmony, right? So, the consistency of the rules that were applied and the proportions of the spaces or the designs were indeed the perfect measure of beauty. And the rules were followed very strictly like in the Roman architecture, or Greek architecture, if you look at all these classical examples, you see that they’re always striving for the perfect order, and trying to reinvent the order, but with small steps to find the perfect beauty in it. But I think, now we have moved to a time where perfect order and perfect balance, we know, doesn’t quite exist in the world. Things are a bit more messy. We are not all homogenous. And the beauty arises from there, the sort of idiosyncratic moments that arise in a sort of inherent order. But if everything is the same, then we don’t think it’s what we are looking for in terms of beauty. Because that’s now starting to feel like it’s too, too dogmatic or too classical or too monotonous. So now we perceive beauty differently as well, I would say.

It’s a balancing act, because I mean, you have classical approach on one side and then you have the postmodern approach on the other side, where postmodern approach says, you know, everything is its own thing, and they don’t have to talk to each other, there doesn’t need to be a specific binding order to anything because everything is different. But I think we’ve also moved past that, in a way. So, what I’m usually looking for is this inherent sense of order in the classical sense, but then moments where that order breaks down to create something unique.

Jessica
Where does architecture fit among the current art trends where the artists appear to focus mostly on making social statements?

Kerim
I think for artists it’s easier to take a critical position and say, you know what, what I’m going to create does not have to be beautiful, because that’s not the effect I’m going for. I’m actually trying to take a position, whether it’s nihilist or whether it’s critical, or whether you’re trying to evoke a different kind of feeling, I think that’s something you can do. And I think it’s worth doing, I think it has a lot to say about how that artist currently views the world as well. Maybe they say, you know, while the world isn’t a beautiful place, or we’ve had already a proliferation of beautiful things, and they just get commoditized. So that’s not really what I’m shooting for as an artist.

I think architecture has a bit of that too. But I, I think myself I’m inherently an optimist. I feel like the work we do needs to make the world a better place. And nobody wants to, or I don’t think a lot of people would want to spend millions and millions of dollars on a building for it to be something that’s just purely critical of something, right? So, I think there’s this kind of enhanced optimism in our profession, an idealism maybe in a way to say, well, if we’re going to do something, it needs to be beautiful for it to be worthwhile and for it to stand in the public ground. So yeah, I think for our work, it’s a bit more difficult to take that kind of purely critical stance than some of the current art trends that we see a lot.

It seems like beauty is not something we talk a lot about anymore. We like criticizing things, we like to talk about things that we don’t like that we like changed, but it’s nice to put all the optimist glasses and talk about things like beauty and what does it mean and try to see if there’s a common thread in that because it seems like the common threads are becoming rarer and rarer nowadays as well.

Jessica
We asked Kerim if there is something about his work or field that he wishes more people knew about that may not be visible generally.

Kerim
Yes, for sure. I think for me, one of the most rewarding parts of my work or my profession is the process. So, it’s the process of designing. That to meet a lot of times is maybe more rewarding or more interesting than the outcome itself.

When we design buildings, and they get realized a lot of the times what you see is the final results. But how you got there, what steps you went through, all the sort of lineage of the project from its beginning to the end and all the 1000 steps that are taken, all the decisions that were taken and retaken, and reevaluated and reconsidered, I think make a huge part of how the project came to be. And I think if there was a way to make that more visible or more understandable, then I think similar to art, right? When you look at a piece of art, you look at something and you see the result, but there’s always a story or a technique or framework behind it. And once you understand that, then all of a sudden you look at it differently and you then begin to evaluate or respond to the end result in a different way as well. So, I think if there was a way to get that process to be more part of understanding the outcome, that would be something that would be very beneficial for everyone.

Jessica
As an architecture student, I can definitely relate to how Kerim values the process of designing.

Lastly, a lot of people who haven’t gone to architecture school may think architects as solo workers, but in reality, it appears to involve a lot of teamwork. As we wrap up our episode, Kerim sheds light on this myth.

Kerim
There’s definitely more solo aspect to it. I think design is a very internally oriented practice. You always have to kind of step into yourself and think things through as your own. But I think even from school, you understand that a lot of it has to do with communicating what you have in mind as a designer, whether it’s to your client, whether it’s to your teammate, whether it’s to the other colleagues that you’re working on the same project with, so a lot of it is already from the beginning, based on communication.

And after school, when you start working, then that’s immediately when I stepped into a pretty collaborative practice, where we were always working as a team, even the heads of the studios were designers themselves, so we were working on the designs together. So, I learned that design is not a solo enterprise. It can be but it doesn’t need to be and I think if you work with a team, or with people, from which you have a common language, and you can bounce off ideas, and you can talk through designs, then usually the outcome is very different, and probably much better than what you would end up with, if you are working on it yourself.

[Music]

Longitude  
This podcast is produced by a nonprofit program that engages students and graduates in leading interviews, narrating podcast episodes, and preparing library exhibitions. To view the episode transcript, please visit our website Longitude.site

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

Ali Kazmaz
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Ali Kazmaz, Longitude fellow from Rice University Architecture.
We are exploring the approaches of individuals to contemplation, experimentation, and communication in scientific and creative fields.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Scott Pfeiffer. Scott Pfeiffer is an acoustics architect. He is one of the nation’s leading figures in acoustics. He was an acoustic consultant and collaborated with the architect in the design of the theater and orchestra pit of the Brockman Hall for Opera.

Join me as I engage in conversation about what acoustics work entails in architecture and the unique journey Scott took in this field. Enjoy listening!

[music]

Ali 
How much of a process are you consulting on? This has to be this way, or are you trying to minimize that so that the architect and the client has more freedom?

Scott Pfeiffer
I think I would answer by saying two things. One is all of this, all of the risk taking, and the creation of a new idea and the following of the client’s ultimate desire for the outcome requires an enormous series of collaboration, an overused word, but we have a series of things to solve for us. The structural engineer has some work to do, the mechanical engineering, you know, and we all have a budget, and the architect has work to do. So, under the best of circumstances, we identify ways that we can take those risks together, that, that a new structural idea could enable a new acoustic idea that could enable the outcome to be more successful.

So, our goal is to is not to prescribe what must be, but instead to inform the team as best we can with all the tools. Not leading with a stick to say, don’t do that, but to say, here’s what we’re trying to accomplish. In order to accomplish that we need a surface in here, you know, wherever this is, and we need that to be massive, and we need it to be shaped in a certain way, or within a range of texture that is available to you. And if we do that, really well, we may get to the point that the architect says, But you know, to solve exiting, I need this other thing. So, we have to push and pull a little bit and that’s fine. And the structural engineer says, Well, I can, you know, I can help you with that. Because, you know, I don’t need very thick structure here, I need it up there, or whatever those series of options are. And if we do our job well, we give over the understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish, not the thing that we want, but the why of what we want, so that they can use that to come back to us with an idea that we would not have thought of on our own. And that is that’s where this work is super exciting, that we’re creating something that none of us would have created by ourselves.

Ali
What’s the variety of clients and types of projects you work with, and then do you do any studies on the effects on people?

Scott
We work on quite a wide variety of projects, although the bulk of our work is in cultural buildings. They hire us for the auditorium, but we take that opportunity to make sure that they’re thinking about the acoustics of all the spaces that are under the roof, or, or even those that are outside, so that we’re around having an impact. With each new relationship with each new architectural relationship or design team, we look for the opportunities to visit with them outside of the progress of the project and talk with them about thinking about sound as an influence and all of their design, whether or not we’re on the project or not. We do some research and development work in our office but mostly we’re staying in touch with the scientists and researchers so, it keeps us abreast of what people are learning about the effect of noise and an uncomfortable sound on the brain.

Ali
And does new information pop up all the time?

Scott
It does, actually. I mean, there’s another organization we’re part of that is the Academy for Neuroscience and Architecture. And while they have focused on a lot of the impacts of the environment, you’re in, there has not been a deep focus on sound as a part of that. It’s mostly been visual because of architecture is sometimes more visual than acoustics. So, And so by participating in that conference, we’ve been in a position to help, I think influence the direction of that conversation and include noise and sound, and essentially the soundscape. That you can really weave in the idea of a soundscape into your building. So that you intentionally create a little bit of noise where you want it to reduce the amount of awareness of other activity, like in an open plan office area, or the kind of noise that might be welcomed, like fountains, or natural sounds that can sometimes help to drown out the non-natural sounds that are in the immediate environment. So, by replacing traffic noise was a little bit of a fountain, you find a more calming space.

Ali
You got into acoustics, right around your senior year of college…

Scott
You know, I actually learned about the existence as a field before I went to college. And I did not find a direct program in acoustics so I ended up studying physics and music, though I was able to take more classes in multiple places without overloading my schedule.

Ali
That’s incredible. So even in high school, you had a very good understanding of what you wanted.

Scott
So I was always into music, and I was a performer. I performed in all the musicals in my high school.

Ali
Was it vocal performance?

Scott
Vocal Performance, yeah, I was a, I am a baritone. And it was pretty good. I mean, I did alright. But I came from a small town and so I figured out pretty early on when I went off to, the district choral competitions and the other kinds of things where you see yourself against a broader range of the world, and you say, Oh, well, I’m not going to make my living as a singer, you know? So, but I was also a pretty good scientist. And so, I thought, how can I keep my involvement in music but use my skills in science. I was working as a stereo salesman at a catalog showroom. One of those places where the warehouse is upstairs, and you pick up the thing when it comes down the belt and take it with you. So, we had a listening room. And, you know, I was learning, reading about the products I was selling and learning about the acoustics of loudspeakers and, and the digital signal processing tools that were in electronics. And I thought that was the path I would be heading for, you know, either becoming a loudspeaker designer or, or electronics, music electronics designer.

Right around that time, Yale did a profile on Russell Johnson, who was the founder of Artech Consultants in New York, and Artech did the work that I do now. They worked on concert halls. And so, it was through that introduction from Yale magazine and this alumni story that I learned that this field even existed. And once I knew it existed, I felt like this is what I need to do.

Ali
Acoustics does feel like in the background, but over the years, you’ve probably developed an ear where when you’re walking through the space, you’re more attuned to the changes in acoustics. So, did you have a shift, maybe, as you slowly further got into it, where you sort of discover a new world, and like another dimension, when you’re walking through spaces?

Scott
Yeah, you can’t. I mean, it gets to a point where you can’t turn it off, if you wanted to. Part of it is that you, you know, acoustics and listening, you know, we don’t have a good memory for what we hear, just like we don’t really have a good memory for taste or smell. And the way we get around that is you develop language to describe what you experience.

There is a linguistics class I had 30 or more years ago, where they discussed the idea called the Warfield Hypothesis. And that was that you weren’t able to own an idea or a concept until you had the language to support it. And I feel like the in wine tasting and coffee, connoisseur tasting and, and in in these other areas, we come up with the language so that we can experience something, describe it in the moment, and then use that description to compare it to the next time. You don’t really remember the taste. But you remember, you’ve categorized on the signs that experience into words that you have developed a really keen sense for. So, when people say you must have a great ear, it’s not really about the quality of the apparatus on the side of my head. But it’s about the tractatus, of turning that into language, and being able to listen for something in particular, and categorize that and hold on to it to be able to compare it to the next experience.

Ali
So your understanding of a word develops over time as well.

Scott
Yeah, it does. That’s right. Yeah, absolutely.

Ali
So one thing that I was interesting to me is perfect acoustics versus good acoustics. What are some of the notable examples that you’ve experienced, personally you were inside of it, and you just realized there was something different, what made it really unique?

Scott
You know, I would say one of the times that I had that experience where I felt that I was in a very, very special place was just a very tiny stone church in Denmark. I studied in Denmark for my graduate program. I was out for a bike ride because that’s what you do in Denmark and I came upon a small stone chapel that was open and so I just wandered in. And it was one of the few times when I felt the experience of support my own sound of speaking or singing in an empty room that nobody else was there. That came from the fact that the walls were five feet thick, and it was, you know, a stone structure with plaster directly on the stone. So, it was very, very massive. And so, we make the argument in acoustic design how important it is to make heavy structures to support low frequency sound. But we’re typically arguing about, you know, extra layers of drywall, you know, so not, let’s make it two or four layers of drywall instead of one or, or let’s use real plaster, you know, which is something that is harder to get these days. But you know, an inch of plaster has a fair amount of mass compared to a normal drywall partition and so we are talking about that. But in this case, we’re talking about feet of stone and plaster. And so, the delta in in the stiffness of that surface is so much greater than anything that we might build in modern construction, that if you can fully support low frequency, in the way that a room like that does, you can really change the experience for the people who create sound, whether it’s a performer or otherwise.

Ali
So, in terms of Brockman Hall, what was the strategy?

Scott
So, the drum of the Opera House, the walls that formed the sort of horseshoe shape of the room itself, are grout filled masonry. So, it’s quite heavy.

Ali
How thick was it?

Scott
It goes from 12 inches low in the room down to 10, as you get higher. And then, you know, at eight or 10 inches thick, that’s a pretty massive, heavy wall. And then the plaster is directly applied to the inside of the masonry. So, so the walls themselves are quite massive for that purpose. We want to support the base as readily as we support the soprano. And without that kind of mass, you can favor one over the other, and that’s potentially really problematic. The bases have the hardest work to do to be heard in that way sopranos have.

Ali
It’s not. It’s not favorable.

Scott
No. So if you support the basses, then you take care of the sopranos as well so that’s good, so that works really well. And then, you know, as you move into the room, the ceiling is a bit lighter, of course, you have to support it but it’s still relatively massive. But by the time you get to the balcony face, that surface is quite small and so, it doesn’t have the ability to reflect low frequency anymore, because the wavelengths of sound are quite long, and at the lower end. So, it’s not a contender for being able to support that low frequency so it’s okay to let that get a bit lighter.

Ali
Are you an opera enthusiast?

Scott
I am, yeah, you know, part of my music education was studying voice and then learning opera arias and things. So yeah, I’ve learned a lot about it along the way. And I do enjoy. I enjoy it as an art form.

Ali
Your studies did lead you to Denmark?

Scott
Yes, they did.

Ali
Was it something specific that led you to Denmark, or was it Denmark was leading in that time for acoustics?

Scott
Yeah, they are. I mean, the Scandinavian countries in general, a lot of acoustics research comes from the laboratories there.

Ali
Is there a reason?

Scott
I believe just that it’s government supported. And they have a tradition of it. And so, it continues. Part of the undergraduate program I was in was to do a thesis, an undergraduate thesis. And so, I took my physics, education and my music education and I put it together to make a project that was a two-semester project, kind of like a capstone that you would do in architecture. And my subject was, I studied the performance halls that were on the campus at Moravian College where I was at school. And a lot of the research that I was finding to use to help inform that study came from the school in Denmark. And so, when I completed the work, submitted the project and thesis, I was looking to thank all of the people who helped me and among those that helped were some of the faculty in Denmark, whose papers I had downloaded or found. I say downloaded. They weren’t available electronically back then. I had to go to the library and get them and print them out, but anyway…

Ali
Were they in the form of books or something else?

Scott
They were typically research papers published in, in the Acoustical Society of America publication or the Journal of the Acoustical Society, or other the European Acoustical Society. Some of the papers were clearly very applicable to what I was trying to accomplish and were only available in Danish. And so, I wrote to the professors, and I said, Hey, do you happen to have an English translation? I don’t know how to speak Danish. They were very kind and supportive and they got copies of the papers to me in English. And, and so I’ve corresponded with them through the year. And as I finished the project, and was just sending out thank you notes, because that’s what I was taught to do. I wrote to the faculty there, and I thought, well, what can I say? What do I have to offer them besides my gratitude, I thought, well, I’m a student, thank you for all your help. I’d really love to study with you based on what I’ve learned from reading these papers. However, of course, I don’t speak Danish. You know, it was really just a way of complimenting them, and you know, I didn’t actually think I would go study in Denmark. And they responded to my thank you note and said, Well, we have courses in English, and we have a guest student program, and here’s how you apply, and so come on over. And so, I did. That’s how I ended up in Denmark, but it was, it was the combination of the fact that there’s a lot of research available from there. And then the connections I made in that process that led to my study.

[music]

Ali
We hope you enjoyed our episode. What stood out for me from this conversation was that in the creation of an architectural work, what is most important is to understand why something is demanded or required. If the why is accurately understood, then the parties involved can better participate in a collaborative effort that results in a design that could not have been imagined in the initial conversations.

[music]

To view the episode transcript, please visit Longitude.site. If you’re a college student interested in leading a conversation like this, visit our website Longitude.site to submit an interest form or write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Angela Xie
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I am Angela Xie, a student at Rice University pursing a degree in Architecture.

Jessica Shi
I am Jessica Shi, also an Architecture student from Rice University.

Together we had the opportunity to speak with Hugh Broughton from Hugh Broughton Architects of London for this episode.

Angela
We were curious about the architecture and challenges of building research stations in Antarctica. There are over 70 research stations from 29 different nations. The British Halley VI station stood out to us because of its unique colorful and modular style.

Jessica
Hugh Broughton Architects developed this station, as well as many other stations in the polar regions.

Their work in Antarctica started when the Hugh Broughton Architects won a competition to redesign the Halley station of the British Antarctic Survey.

We started by asking Mr. Broughton about the competition, what was expected from the participants, and the key considerations they had to take into account when designing for such a special environment.

Enjoy listening!

[music]

Hugh Broughton
The competition was run by the Royal Institute of British Architects. That was open to all architects and designers from around the world. It was launched in 2004 so quite a long time ago now. At the time of the launch, they put forward a proposal as to what kind of team they were looking for. And they said that they were looking for a large architectural practice with multidisciplinary experience who had lots of experience of working in extreme and remote locations and who was also very knowledgeable on principles of sustainability. And I remember there was an interview on National Radio In the UK, and the President of the RIBA and then head of the British Antarctic Survey were on the radio. And they were setting out all these criteria. And I was listening to it and I thought, Oh, my goodness, I can’t do a single one of those things. But they said that that morning, they were going to launch the competition and show some films about Antarctica. And I thought, that sounds really nice so I’m gonna go along and listen. And so, I went along and listened. And when I was there, I met an engineer, who I’d worked with before, and he said, oh, let’s team up. They had a really large company with offices all across the world. And it just happened that it was like the kind of combination that the British Antarctic Survey were looking for, large engineering practice who could bring lots of kind of global knowledge. And at that stage, young, younger and more innovative, but small-scale architectural practice, who would bring new ideas to the idea of living in Antarctica.

Angela
So, how much did you know about the environment in Antarctica at that time?

Hugh
So, when we started, I mean, you know, you can have some kind of appreciation of the cold, but many of the features of the site were pretty much unknown to us at the time. So, for example, at Halley Research Station, the temperature never goes below freezing. If they get windblown snow or even snow through precipitation, the snow level rises and rises, and it never melts. In addition, because it’s down on the coast, they get very high winds, because cold air drops from the main Antarctic Plateau, down towards the sea. And as it drops, it picks up in speed. So, you get these very high winds called Katabatic winds. Then the other kind of key feature of working at Halley is that it’s actually not on land. It’s on a floating ice. So, it’s where the ice is flowed off the main continent and is supported on the ocean. So, the site is moving all the time, because the ice is constantly flowing out to sea. Those three features in themselves were not something I’d ever come across before. So, we kind of like had to learn from scratch, all about the Antarctic environment and the extremes of weather. And then not only was there the climate, but there was also the remoteness. Halley is 14 days sailing from the nearest mainland port, either at Cape Town in South Africa or in the Falkland Islands. And also, it’s dark, for three months of the year, 105 days of the year, the sun doesn’t rise above the horizon. So there’s a big psychological stress for people working there. So, you know, we were finding out a lot about climate challenges, geographical challenges, logistics challenges, psychological challenges.

Jessica
That’s very interesting. And with that in mind, would you like to share about kind of the idea exploration process of your team? It’s always like the most interesting process and the architecture developments.

Hugh
Yeah, sure. So, one of the key principles of the project was that it needed to be able to be easily built in Antarctica, and also easily relocated. Because as I mentioned, the site is on a floating ice shelf and the ice is constantly flowing, a bit like water, but flowing out to sea. So, the site is quite dynamic. And at two extremes of the ice shelf, in one, it’s grounded on a rocky outcrop, and at the other, it’s grounded to the main Antarctic continent. That introduces stresses in the ice shelf. So, every now and then, giant cracks appear and large iceberg shear off.

There had been five versions of Halley research station built, and each one of them had been lost when the ice shelf had carved off as a giant iceberg. So, one of the key requirements of our brief was that we should design a building, which could be relocatable. So, if there was ever a risk of it disappearing on an iceberg, we will be able to move it in land to a safer location. So very Early on, in fact, we therefore came up with this concept of a repeating building module, which was elevated up on giant legs, and then supported on skis. So that it was modular so that it could be easily constructed. That modular so it could be small enough that it could be relocated, and then raised up on skis so that as the wind blows underneath, it stops snow from drifting around the buildings, and then supported on skis so that the modules could be towed each in turn, further inland. Those kind of three core concepts of modularity, elevation, and ski based structures sort of underpins the whole kind of design process.

And then we went through looking at all the sort of programmatic requirements. And planning those around the modules to come up with the ultimate sort of module size, which we worked out was around 1600 square feet. And within that, we could fit eight bedrooms, and then either some bathrooms or storage, and then everything kind of flowed from there. Then we started looking at labs, and we started looking at places for producing water and power and other operational areas, and everything kind of fitted rather neatly within the 1600 square foot modules. That became the kind of base building block of the whole kind of project. And the only time we needed to vary it was when we were looking at the design for the main living spaces. And for there, we needed dining space for the whole crew. And that could be up to 60 or 70 people in the summers. We needed to have dining space for them, we needed to have social space, place for them to watch TV, a whole sort of range of different recreational and sort of just like living type spaces. And for those, we couldn’t fit those into a standard module, we needed something quite a bit bigger. So for them, we invented a special double height, much larger module of around three and a half to 4000 square feet. So quite a bit bigger.

Angela
That’s very interesting. It has like, have a science fiction look. So, is the form of it or like the look driven mostly by this functional need and this need of being in this harsh environment? Or is there anything else that inspired the design?

Hugh
Obviously, the functional requirements come first. So, the ability to withstand the rising snow level, to be relocated, that drives the elevation and the ski bases. And the size, you know, of the building or the weight of the building became also important because they had to be pulled by bulldozers into a new site. And then we did when modeling and snow modeling to reduce the amount of snow drift that would build up around the buildings. But inevitably, there’s a kind of moment when you’re also developing the outside appearance. Yes, so we did look quite a bit at some of the kind of buildings in Star Wars for a few ideas and forms of inspiration.

Jessica
As we know, Antarctica is like such a harsh environment, but yet, many nations have built research stations there. And you have worked with the British, the Spanish, the Australian and the New Zealand teams. So why do you think is it so important to build like research bases and Antarctica?

Hugh
Well, a lot of the sort of systems which govern the Earth’s climate originate in the Antarctic. So, because of the kind of extremes of cold temperature, it sets up air currents that then drive marine currents that then determine how cold air and cold water moves around the planet. So, the weather systems that exist in the Antarctic, are central to weather systems, which exist all over the planet. So, understanding how they operate, and what the impact of climate change is on those systems is really important for understanding how the world is going to change as a result of climate change, and what we need to do in order to prevent some of those changes happening. So that’s why the research there is so important.

I mean, there is also a geopolitical angle to it as well. You know, everybody wants to be in Antarctica because everybody wants to understand what’s going to happen. Nobody wants to miss out on the knowledge of what’s going to happen. So, you know, that’s another reason why there are so many stations there. But I think, you know, the underlying reason for people being there is to understand, the sort of global Earth atmospheric systems, which are driving climate change.

Angela
That’s very interesting. So, talking about climate change, is there any considerations in the process of design that takes into consideration the impact on the environment in Antarctica?

Hugh
For sure, yeah. So obviously, in large part parts of Antarctica, the temperatures are rising. And in fact, on, I think it was on King George Island around two years ago, their maximum ever temperature in the Antarctic 18.5 degrees Celsius. So, you know, that’s the kind of temperature you’d expect in a very temperate kind of zone, not in the coldest place on Earth. So temperatures definitely around the Antarctic Peninsula in particular, are rising. And as a result, the kind of weather that’s taking place there is changing. So, you know, rain, for example, is now not uncommon in the Antarctic, whereas 50 years ago, it was almost unheard of. So, buildings need to be watertight, where previously they needed to be snow tight, or frost tight, but now they need to accommodate water running over the surface. Wind speeds are also changing in some places increasing, so they need to be more robust to deal with increased wind speeds. And then there’s also the risk of both sea level dropping, and also sea level rising. So now, whenever we’re looking at any of the coastal sites, we always work with the National Meteorological Office to try and gain some understanding of the behavior of sea level, to see whether the building is sitting in a safe enough position to account for 100 years of sea level rise, for example. So yeah, because it’s right at the kind of forefront, you know, of climate change in a way in the Antarctic, the changes are most severely felt in the Antarctic and the Arctic, it has a big impact on the way that the buildings are designed.

Jessica
Yeah, that is like a very thoughtful process of how to make the building actually, like resilient and adaptable to the changing conditions over time. And yeah,

Angela
I’m also kind of curious, so you mentioned earlier that you’re collaborating with an engineering company. Can you talk a little bit about how you cooperate with them?

Hugh
When we’re designing Antarctic research stations, it’s the engineering and the architecture are like totally hand in hand because you are so reliant on the engineering systems for your survival. So, whether that’s the robustness of the structure to withstand high wind speed, or whether it’s the resilience of the power generation systems to ensure that you’ve always got electricity. Because if you lose the electrical supply, then you probably will lose your ability to heat the building, and also your ability to produce water and treat sewage. So, making sure that we’ve got robustness in engineering systems that we’ve got redundancy in the engineering systems, and that we’ve got sufficient space to be able to adequately maintain them is really key to the whole successful operation of one of these research stations. So, you have to work very closely with the engineers to provide them with enough space to make sure you understand how all the systems work to in order to be able to design around those. So, and at the same time, you know, the more they work on these projects, the more they also have ideas about what is necessary to provide good space to support people’s physical and psychological wellbeing, whether that’s light, air quality, acoustic isolation, all the all these things, so there’s a lot of specialism that comes into the design process.

Jessica
With that, I’m just curious if there’s any surprising findings or like experiences during the development of the project?

Hugh
I guess there probably are, you know, just like you find what’s the thing that annoys people the most when they’re living in an Antarctic Station and you imagine it’s going to be the wind or the cold or something like that. And it isn’t. It’s people closing doors. They actually find the interruption to their sleep if somebody closing the door, and it just slams them, and they can hear it all the way down the corridor drives people completely mad. So, it’s kind of interesting, you know, just discovering that, actually, it’s very sort of normal human reactions to the environment, which drive people the most crazy. It’s not actually the cold or the wind, or the isolation. They come pretty well prepared for that. They’ve thought about it pretty hard. And then they get there and find it’s the normal things in life that still drive them crazy.

Angela
That’s very interesting. So during the process of design, did you get to work with some of the researchers that actually will live in this research station? Or do you just get to meet with them a little bit after you built the project?

Hugh
No, no, there’s the engagement with the people who live and work there. It is a really key part of the design process and we will do that right from the beginning, even before we come up with initial ideas, to find out what their requirements are, what are the things that make living in Antarctica positive experience, what are the negative experiences and so on, so that we can try to address as many of those in the design as we can. And you know, a key part of that is also visiting the sites of the existing stations to see them in operation, and taking lessons learned from those site visits and applying them to the designs of the new buildings.

Angela
Can you also tell us a little bit about how Halley ended up appearing in the movie “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?”

Hugh
Yeah, sure. So, so I don’t know if you’ve ever read that story. But the kind of basic premise of the story is that Bernadette is an architect who is kind of lost her way in life. And she is no longer inspired by the profession of architecture, or indeed, inspired by life as a whole. So, she decides to go on a tourist trip to Antarctica. When she’s there, she meets people who are running an Antarctic research station. And she tells them, she’s an architect, and they say, oh, we’ve got a big challenge, because we need to redesign our research station, please, can you help us? And so she rediscovers her kind of mojo by designing a research station on the back of her trip, her sort of tourist trip to Antarctica. So, as a result, the producers of the film got in touch with us and said, is there any way we could use your drawings and pretend that they were done by Cate Blanchett, who was the star of the movie? And so, we said, Yeah, fine. So, Cate Blanchett pretends to draw some sketches and they are actually the sketches that we did Halley VI.

Angela
That’s so interesting.

Jessica
As we also know, Hugh Broughton Architects also have a lot of beautiful projects on like art and culture, like heritage, commercial, education. And we’re kind of wondering if there’s like any lessons or takeaways, words, that’s like in harsh environments that could also be like applied on to like the mainstream architectural designs?

Hugh
Well, obviously, nowadays, there’s a strong environmental angle, which is always important in all projects. And I think some of these Antarctic projects are working at the sort of forefront of environmental sustainability. So, we try and cut down water usage, power usage, increase levels of air tightness, and insulation. So those are always good lessons to take to any project. But I think the main, sort of two areas are a concern for the occupants. So, you have to design very much around the requirements and the needs of the occupants. Now when we work on any project, we always really major in on engaging with those people who are going to use the projects to understand what their requirements are, so that we don’t end up with something that looks great on day one, but we end up with something that looks great for years and years afterwards.

And then the other area is just making sure that you understand how all the components fit together in terms of the construction, because when you’re designing in the Antarctic, if something goes wrong in terms of the construction, there’s very little opportunity to set it right, because there’s no hardware stores around the corner or anything like that. So, you’ve really got to test and prove that everything’s going to work well. And I think that same kind of attention to detail is what we bring also to the heritage projects.

But at the end of the day, they are kind of different. They are different areas. And they probably reflect different interests that we have within the practice. I guess that kind of concern for the individual and the end user is definitely a common theme between both project types and something which interests us a lot.

Angela
Can you tell us a little bit about what led you into the field of architecture?

Hugh
I don’t know. I guess it was just a little haphazard thing. I just used to enjoy drawing and then I discovered, oh that’s what architects are supposed to do, a lot of drawing. So, it seems like a fun career to get involved with. Then transpires that there are a lot of times that you don’t do drawing, you do drawing for a bit, and then you spend a lot of time just trying to make the projects actually happen.

Jessica
What would be some advices that you would give to like young architects or designers who was interested in working in like, either harsh environments or very specific fields?

Hugh
Yeah, ask every single question. Never be afraid to ask a foolish question, because there is no such thing. And always, when you think of an idea, try and think about what the reverse idea might be. So, try to turn everything around 180 degrees at least once, and to make sure that you’ve come up with the best solution.

Angela
Do you have any other really fun moments to share in your experience of working in Halley station and architecture in general?

Hugh
You know, it is a pretty unusual place to find yourself working as an architect. I never thought as an architect that in, in my job, I would end up you know, sitting amidst colonies of penguins, or watching whales out in the ocean, or visiting some of the incredible places that we’ve had to visit along the process of making these buildings. But I think that’s one of the great things about architecture, is that every now and then it takes you to really unusual places that you suddenly have to totally absorb yourself in and find out all about, and then you know everything about it. And then before you know it, you’re off to some other area of investigation to find out about it. So, it’s pretty varied like that. You know, that’s one of the great excitements of the profession.

Jessica
Yeah, I totally agree. Like one of the most amazing parts of architecture, it’s like, it has infinite possibilities. And it is exposing you to all sorts of different things that will amaze you.

Hugh
Never, never forget that the limits of a concept is only the limit of your own ideas. Just think of as many different ideas as you can and try them all out. There’ll never be a silly one.

[music]

Jessica
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