Overview
Working and living in the Snowflake station will require researchers and support staff to spend long periods of time in isolation, through the dark winter months, in an internal environment.
Our design prioritises people, their mental and social well-being and safety, by organising the building into small scale elements and communities that together make up the total station building and population.
This is a strategy successfully used in university campus design where students are better housed in cluster-based layouts; groups of self-contained rooms centred around a small communal area, rather like a house or apartment arrangement in scale. This makes it easier for strong friendships, social and support groups to form, for information to and learning to be naturally shared & disseminated. It also encourages ownership and better care of the common areas and precious building facilities.
Our proposal has been specifically designed to facilitate this social group approach, rather than make large single volumes with long anonymous corridors.
