Architecture can reduce the climate footprint and protect buildings and urban areas against climate change. In conclusion, this paper suggests that architects are uniquely qualified to address the challenges of building in extreme environments, since hostile conditions demand creative solutions to difficult spatial issues.The climate around us is changing at an unprecedented pace, and we are experiencing increasing temperatures and more frequent extreme weather events.

Designs must be especially sensitive to users’ psychological comfort as they attempt to adapt to their unusual surroundings. In each, architecture has the opportunity to mitigate extreme conditions such as disorientation, atypical daylight, containment, and lack of familiar sensory stimuli.

Analysis of these three environments highlights the similar design challenges they face. Habitats studied include Summit Station in Greenland, Jules’ Undersea Lodge and NOAA’s Aquarius habitat off the coast of Florida, and Angel Marie Seguin’s unbuilt design for a long-duration, self-sustaining space station. Information about their built environments is conveyed through case studies as well as inhabitants’ own observations. This paper examines three frontiers of human exploration: the Arctic, undersea environments, and outer space. Contrary to popular belief, such intrusion into the natural landscape is not only inevitable but may be beneficial, as exposure to unfamiliar environments produces a population that will advocate on their behalf. As climate change and population growth continue to strain available space and resources, human development will increasingly encroach on these environments. As a profession, we must ask ourselves: what is the architect’s role in extreme environments? The label of “extreme” suggests a wide spectrum of conditions, from outer space to Earth’s polar regions. Yet as explorers and researchers venture into such “extreme” environments, drawn by the allure of the unknown, architects will undoubtedly follow. There is no gravity, no north arrow, no atmospheric weather-not even a designated up and down. In the vacuum of outer space, the usual parameters for architectural design simply don’t apply.

Architecture extreme conditions