The Antarctic Oracles and hosts. Architecture, land and diverging imaginaries of the “Argentine”, “British” and “Chilean” Antarctica. 1961 on

Abstract

Three emblematic buildings from the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Chile project their competing interests on Antarctica and their overlapping territorial claims. One corresponds to the Halley Stations, on the eastern edge of the British claim. Another is the utopian "first city in Antarctica", imagined close to the Argentine Marambio aerodrome, in the extreme north of the Antarctic peninsula. The third is the International Antarctic Center, a multifunctional building to enhance the role of Punta Arenas as a gateway to the white continent. The three were conceived as nodes of superimposed and apparently analogous networks, articulating research stations, logistic nodes and gateway cities from nearby national territories. However, the selection of which should become iconic works shows different affirmative discourses and leads to wondering how architecture and territorial policies interacted with the general context of the overlapping of competing interests the norms that regulate and the imaginaries that inspire them; dynamics that differ in relation to different conceptions of territorial unity and different ways of interpreting the idea of the continent as a space of cooperation agreed in 1961 by the Antarctic Treaty and materialized by the actions of each of its member countries.