At a reception in the London headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects last year a group of architects was declared winner of an ambitious project.

The task for the Faber Maunsell/Hugh Broughton Architects team was to design relocatable, flexible, elevated modules to be installed in Antarctica as a research station for scientists and associated staff. It would be known as Halley VI.

Although the concept of modules is nothing new, the unique set of engineering obstacles and restrictions thrown up by Antarctica called for a special solution.

Faber Maunsell, part of the global group AECOM, received early help and advice from a sister company, DMJMH+N of Orange, California. One of its most experienced Antarctic engineers visited the UK to brief the design team on what it would face.

For instance, the ice shelf moves about 1.5m every day, off the continent and onto the Weddell Sea. It is effectively a floating glacier. The snow level rises 1-2m a year, mainly due to wind-blown accumulation combined with some precipitation. This results in surface buildings being buried within a few years and crushed after 15 years.

The winning design comprised a series of semi-autonomous modules, connected in a line to reduce snow accumulation, around a 200-tonne ‘mother ship’ – all 4.5m above the snow level and supported on giant skis. The skis will allow the units to be towed 15km every 10 years to a new site when ‘carving’ causes chunks of the ice shelf to break off and float north.

The modules will contain sleeping accommodation, offices, science facilities, workshops and power plant. The central mother ship will house the social spaces – restaurant, bar, Internet cafe, music room and library. Remote science ‘cabooses’ will collect data in the vicinity of the main building.

Over time, the modules can be rearranged to respond to changes in the environment and the science. They must remain reliable, sustainable and maintainable in the harsh Antarctic environment.

The station will be built during two 10-week austral summers in 2008 and 2009, with final commissioning in 2010.

Apart from supporting the science, the station is primarily a survival module similar to the lunar landing modules used by NASA in the 1970s. However, they are bigger, are assembled on site and will be isolated every year for 10 months during the austral winter.

The research station will be configured as two platforms, each with an energy module and linked by a service bridge. The energy modules will house the main combined heat and power (CHP) generation plant, water storage, fire suppression and sewage plant, and oil storage tanks. They will be distant from the sleeping modules to obviate noise, vibration, odors and fire risk.

“Keeping things simple is not a ‘nice to have’ on the Brunt Ice Shelf, it’s a necessity,” says Faber Maunsell regional director Michael Maslin, who has been involved with the project since its inception.

“It’s all too easy to end up with 30 types of light fittings in a building, but here the cost and storage of spares is high, and rationalizing components has many benefits.”

The current Halley station (V) already has a large number of external storage containers that need to be raised annually to prevent them from being buried. Smarter product selection means fewer containers to keep from ‘going under’.

During a recent meeting with a Huston-based consultant working for NASA on its Manned Mission to Mars project, Maslin was told that sections of the current International Space Station were no longer operational because the large number of spare parts required could not be delivered or stored.

“As the Space Station had been enlarged, the discipline of keeping things simple had been lost,” Maslin says.