Architecture at the End of the World: The Pasts and Futures of Heritage Preservation in Antarctica

Abstract

The Antarctic Treaty, signed in December 1959, set the terms by which the vast southern continent of Antarctica might exist outside and apart from the political and economic contingencies of the Cold War binary. The southern continent would exist in a legal geography that placed it outside the framework of nation-states—a no-place, to use a utopian term. Though its inhabitation has remained minimal, the continent nevertheless raises questions about architectural heritage in the presence of a number of expedition huts built on the shores of Antarctica in the early decades of the twentieth century. These huts, which once sustained the effort to gain knowledge of an unknown place, are now entangled within efforts to maintain the existence of an untrammeled zone. Legal frameworks now stipulate the preservation of the human history of Antarctica and the preservation of an Antarctica that has never been touched or seen. Two utopias are to be preserved, one architectural and the other natural, sharing a single continent that is itself the common heritage of humanity. The case of Antarctica and its mechanisms of preservation thus suggests a paradoxical state in which processes of interference and noninterference are nested within one another inside an architecture at the end of the world.