Antarctic interiors : practices of inhabitation through embodied interactions with the ice

• Main Author: Nieboer, M
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Antarctic humanities; Interior Design; Architecture; materiality; ice; inhabitation; traversing; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://eprints.utas.edu.au/36030/; https://eprints.utas.edu.au/36030/1/Nieboer_whole_thesis.pdf

Antarctica and the notion of the interior are intrinsically intertwined. While the continent is strongly associated with its inaccessible icy interior, there are also built interior spaces in Antarctica that protect and sustain human life for the purposes of exploration and scientific research. Antarctic Interiors is an interdisciplinary research project that combines perspectives from Interior Design and spatial analysis with the insights of the emerging field of the ‘Antarctic humanities’. The thesis investigates ways in which Antarctica as a geographical and material place can inform a (re)thinking of the concept of ‘the interior’. Recent research on interiority within extreme environments has focussed on seemingly unbounded oceanic space and outer space. While designers have had an increased involvement in the built environment in Antarctica in the last two decades due to the rise in the number of new research bases, the continent has been remarkably absent in spatial/interior research. Existing research into the continent and its built environment has focussed on psychology and human behaviour (for optimizing human operationality), historic archival research (for heritage and conservation purposes) and building engineering (for optimizing building performance), all of which convey very little about the complex conditions of interiority presented by the highly specific Antarctic environment. Antarctic Interiors introduces the southernmost continent into contemporary scholarly discourse around the concept of the interior. Through its focus on embodied interactions with the ice, the thesis extends understandings of human inhabitation of the Antarctic. At the same time, because Antarctica’s highly specific atmosphere, geography and materiality challenge the boundaries of human perception and engagement, the thesis explores the limits of knowledge in interior research. Conventionally the interior is understood as a static, bounded space enveloped by a sedentary architectural structure. This traditional ...