A research facility in the Antarctic has been built using a staggering 134 shipping containers. The Bharathi polar station was built by German architects bof Architekten on behalf of India’s National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research.
The containers were used to allow for mobility so that the station could be shipped in. Architect Bert Bucking explains;
“We built all these containers with a maximum load of four and a half tonnes, because then we are able to transport them even with a helicopter.” It turned out that most of the containers could be transferred directly from ship to ice, but the crane needed a base, weighing around 40 tonnes, which had to be built.
“There was a real risk that the ice would break, and if the ice breaks and the crane goes down, we can’t get it back.”
The project was finished in March 2013, with the shipping containers connected with steel joints and two meters off the ground to avoid it being buried in a snowdrift. Up to 47 researchers can be based there completely self-sufficiently.
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