Leaving Cape Town - 25 January 2008

25 January 2008
Cape Town, South Africa
Sunny, +35 to 38 deg C

For the past three and a half years we have been working continuously on the Halley VI Antarctic Research Station for the British Antarctic Survey.  It has certainly been a tough project from the start and we have had some really difficult hurdles to cross to help ensure the project reached this stage. 

Time has flown by so fast I dare not blink. The Halley VI project has been an inspirational adventure and promises to continue to be so.  Most of my time has been spent developing cladding details and interfaces with glazing, steelwork, services and internal finishes to ensure that the cold and snow is kept out, the warmth is kept in and that everything fits together snugly. 

This has been a real adventure and a great amount of fun because, despite the fact that this is one of the life-critical areas of the project, most of the design has been developed from scratch.  We've been playing with glass reinforced plastic (GRP) cladding panels, structural GRP support systems for large glazed walls, complicated and expensive curved glazed roof lights, cladding brackets made out of silicone blocks, nanogel technology and silicone rubber gasketry just to mention a few things.
 

 

The project has also taken us all over the world in pursuit of people with cast iron nerves, willing to tackle a project like this, and supply us with all our bespoke components. The inter-modular 'train' connectors have been sent from Derbyshire. Much of the glazing has come from Holland and Germany. The steelwork and cladding are being made in Cape Town, South Africa. It's been a joy to work with people who can plug into an idea and creatively help work a solution through.

Now all our efforts are coming to a head and we step back from the coal face to see the wider picture of what we have contributed to: two mock-up modules at an industrial yard in Cape Town in November 2007 herald the beginning of a much bigger task to actually build Halley VI on its ice shelf home.  Although we have been up and down the world, nothing feels so daunting as the prospect of heading to site in Antarctica! The contractors are currently there and incredibly busy putting it together. They are now about half way in to the first build season. Tomorrow it's my turn to join the crew on site.  We set sail with the RSS Ernest Shackleton from Cape Town, heading south-west to Halley. We should hopefully be there in ten days...and then comes the really exciting part of putting the base together.
 

 

My role this build season is to be resident site architect.  My deal, I think, is really good: I have the roles and responsibilities of the site architect, pretty much as set down in the Architect's Job Book (7th edition, December 2000, pp 213-255), but because labour resources are limited, and construction deadlines are absolutely fixed, I have to pick up a podger and help the guys put the components together. Fantastic!  It brings back fond memories of working with steel crews on building sites in Gateshead when I was 18.  I tell you this project has everything. 

I'm looking forward to the cold, the food, the atmosphere, the camaraderie, the team spirit, the isolation, the sense of urgency to complete on time, even the sea sickness – the whole experience.  It's not an opportunity that comes around every day and it's something to talk about for ever. 
 

In our imaginations and aspirations we have always seen Halley with bright, white, pristine snow-scapes, blue skies and biting cold winds.  Even if the reality is not as idealistic as this, I can't wait to get there and experience it.