Antarctica Reconstruction | 2023-24

After packing the buildings, designed and prefabricated by CU Denver students in 2022 and 2023, into shipping containers in Denver, the materials traveled cross country by semi truck to Long Beach, California. They were loaded onto a container ship before sailing to Punta Arenas, Chile. In Chile, the containers were unpacked and loaded onto the helicopter deck of a research vessel that sailed across the Drake Passage to Livingston Island.

Livingston Island is only accessible by small boats. Without a dock or heavy equipment to aid construction, all the building materials had to be loaded onto zodiacs and hand-off-loaded on shore. From there, an ATV with a small trailer was utilized to bring the materials to the job site. Over 500 zodiac loads and another 500 ATV trips were required to transport all the materials to the job site. 

The lightweight, prefabricated, flat pack building’s design helped minimize the on-site construction timeline to two field seasons, taking the Bespoke Project Solution Field team of 12 people a little over two months to rebuild (one month in January of 2023 and another in January of 2024). In addition to building the four new structures, the original field camp was disassembled and shipped off the island.

The Bespoke Project Solutions re-fabrication team was made up of seasoned Antarctic contractors, CU Denver Professors, and eight ColoradoBuildingWorkshop alums.