Of spheres and squares: Can Sloterdijk help us rethink the architecture of climate science?

Spheres versus networks

How should we read the architecture of science? Do different visions of science translate into different material shapes of scientific architecture, and if so how? In Galison and Thompson’s (1999) magisterial volume, The Architecture of Science, most of the contributions are written by architectural historians or architects whose enthusiasm for the study of space and place is shared by science and technology studies (STS) scholars and anthropologists. However, architectural scholars seem more concerned with stylistic formalism and historical analysis of the built environment, which are dimensions STS and anthropology have largely bypassed. This makes for a productive intersection between STS, anthropology, and architecture, which I shall attempt to investigate here. One of the key debates between these intersecting disciplines is how to rethink relations among and between science, technology, politics, ethics, and aesthetics.

Reviewing the scholarship on what Shapin (1999: 479) calls ‘the venues of knowledge’, Henke and Gieryn (2008: 353) identified four distinct waves (to which they add a fifth) in the study of the sites of scientific knowledge production. For the most part, all five ‘waves’ leave the aesthetic dimensions of scientific architecture and what it might tell us about scientists’ commitments, values, outlooks, and horizons, out of the analytical canvas. This reflects Lynch’s (1991) argument that the production of scientific knowledge has to be understood as ‘locally organized topical contextures’ (p. 74). That is, ‘spatial grammars are topically tied to complexes of action and equipment’. Shapin’s (1988) work on Robert Boyle’s laboratory dwells on access, thresholds, and entries and distinguishes between different spheres that produce trust and credibility in the evaluation of experimental knowledge. Hannaway’s (1986) analysis of Tycho Brahe’s fortress laboratory on the island of Hven focuses on the aesthetic dimensions of exteriors. For obvious reasons, these important discussions cannot take into account the constitution of global publics through mediations by virtual media, which of course also holds true for other historical studies of the shifting sites for making legitimate knowledge about nature, such as the Agora in Athens (Sennett, 1994), the Renaissance studio (Ophir, 1991; Thornton, 1997), cloistered monasteries (Noble, 1992), or Enlightenment museums (Findlen, 1994), as well as Shapin and Schaffer’s (1985) study of the social and public life of the ‘house of experiment’ in 17th-century England, examining how locale and legitimacy intersect in the production of knowledge about nature.

However, of late, the aesthetic dimensions of scientific architecture have surfaced in a debate about whether the topologies of science should be conceived in terms of ANT-styled networks and/or spheres. In this regard, Bruno Latour (2009) articulates much admiration for Peter Sloterdijk’s grand ethico-aesthetic program on spheres and makes critical conceptual imports from Sloterdijk’s ‘spherology’ into his own thinking:

I was born a Sloterdijkian. When, thirty years ago, I was preparing the proofs of Laboratory Life, I had included in the pictures, to the disgust of my scientist informants, a black-and-white photograph of the air-conditioned machinery of the Salk Institute in which I had done my fieldwork. ‘What does this have to do with our science?’ they asked, to which I could only reply: ‘Everything’. Without knowing it, I had always been a ‘spherologist’, as I discovered about twenty years later when I became familiar with Peter Sloterdijk’s work in another local situated, air-conditioned place: his school in Karlsruhe. (p. 139)

With Sloterdijk, Latour (2011) argues that

While networks are good at describing long-distance and unexpected connections starting from local points, spheres are useful for describing local, fragile, and complex ‘atmospheric conditions’ – another of Sloterdijk’s terms. Networks are good at stressing edges and movements; spheres at highlighting envelopes and wombs.

Latour (2011) uses Tomas Saraceno’s art installation at the 2009 Venice Biennale, Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, to illustrate his argument about the complementarity of networks and spheres, and that ‘we can have our cake and eat it too’. In December 2009, I had the opportunity to visit RETHINK – Contemporary Art & Climate where Tomas Saraceno’s work Biospheres was featured (Witzke and Hede: 2009: 105). Viewing his installation at the National Gallery of Denmark, I was struck by how well Latour’s core ideas were visualized in this piece of art: Several suspended spheres floating in the air containing plant-based ecosystems/habitats were connected in strict geometrical ways by straight wires and in more contingent patterns by soft cords. The entire installation was very illustrative of the coexistence of spheres and networks, recalling Buckminster Fuller’s poetics of geometry, and also a serious but playful representation of alternative/utopian social spaces in the face of global environmental change, which is based on detailed scientific studies by Saraceno of the geometrical principles of spider webs, cloud formations, and, significantly, soap bubbles. Thus, there are obvious resonances between Latour’s appropriation of Saraceno’s work and Sloterdijk’s recalling of Buckminster Fuller’s work.

The purpose of this article is to explore the theoretical traction of Sloterdijk’s spherology vis-à-vis the field research station at NEEM (North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling). My question is, will Sloterdijk’s grand project, which was published in three volumes in German in 1998, 1999 and in 2004 (the first volume was published in English in 2011), advance our inquiry into the relationship between architecture and science? More generally, how can Sloterdijk assist us in re-theorizing the relationships among science, technology, politics, ethics, and aesthetics? This article explores how ideas about science are articulated in the architecture and layout of the NEEM camp. NEEM is situated on the northern Greenland Ice Sheet, about 300 km east of the closest coast (Peabody Bay), about 500 kilometers east-northeast from the closest human settlement (Siorapaluk) and about 600 kilometers east of the closest base with supplies and capacity for emergency operations (Thule). NEEM’s remote location provides a good case to explore the sphere/network complementary contradiction because the research base can be understood as a floating island suspended in a vast nothingness (or in Sloterdijkian terms an ‘anthroposphere’), but at the same time as a singular critical node in the globe-spanning climate science infrastructure.

Generally, I shall concur with Latour that Sloterdijkian spherology can contribute to core STS agendas and debates by mapping space differently from conventional ‘political’ understandings of territoriality. This concurrence rests on my principal argument that Sloterdijk’s (2004) ‘ethico-aesthetic’ project lends itself to an analysis of the NEEM spheric forms as a ‘museum-like quality’ (p. 818), embodying the aesthetic attitude of the scientists, which resonates with the principles of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome design. Ultimately, I shall argue that the NEEM research base could be conceived as an analogue to Buckminster Fuller’s notion of ‘spaceship earth’, which is a critical metaphor for Sloterdijk’s thinking about anthropogenic climate change and for his re-theorizing of spatial dimensions, which carries considerable theoretical traction vis-à-vis the NEEM base as a micro-cosmos.

Arriving at the ice cap

When I arrived at NEEM in June 2010 to conduct five weeks of ethnographic fieldwork, performing the functions of assistant cook and ice-core logger, I did so with fourteen other passengers and a lot of cargo tonnage carried by a United States Air Force (USAF) Hercules plane (Figure 1). We had been on standby in Kangerlusuaq, Greenland, for more than twenty-four hours due to bad weather conditions. Low visibility made landing on the ice a high-risk operation. When we arrived at the camp, a hectic scene ensued. The plane needed to discharge cargo, load more cargo, refuel, and takeoff again before weather conditions worsened. Newcomers and camp residents greeted each other in welcome and bade one another farewell to the sound of the engines of the Hercules, which never stopped running. The precision and efficiency of the off-loading and re-loading of cargo and people, in which one shift of scientists left camp and another shift arrived, was akin to that of a military drill. The entire scene of loading ice cores, off-loading cargo and exchanging camp crew was a perfect image of long-distance connections starting from local points captured by the ANT-styled networks.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The Hercules has just touched down at NEEM, and the ice cores are ready to be loaded and flown to a range of different laboratories for processing and analysis. Photograph by the author.

Walking from the ‘apron’ to the camp’s main dome, I was struck by the vastness and the emptiness of the landscape, the feeling of isolation (there was no way to escape this place by one’s own means … alive!) and the intense and cold light. After the Hercules left the camp in its third takeoff attempt, the silence of the place became uncanny. The tents seemed strange, artificial, and out of place in the featureless terrain, which seemed to carry no context and no heritage. In such a place, the architecture becomes the contours that give a sense of orientation and direction.

From mid-May to mid-August, in the course of five consecutive years (2007–2012), this particular place was inhabited by the ‘NEEM community’, which encompassed climate scientists (from PIs to graduate students) and field technicians (from drilling engineers to cooks) from more than twenty different nations, numbering anywhere from three to thirty-four persons at a time. Entry into the NEEM camp was by invitation only and the site was accessible only by air. Scientists and technicians were flown in by USAF ski-equipped Hercules planes to spend from one to twelve weeks in camp. Important personages, such as prime ministers, ministers, executives with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), members of Scandinavian royal families, and print and broadcast journalists from across the world, arrived in smaller planes such as Twin Otters and spent anywhere from an hour to several days in camp, depending on their schedules and the local weather conditions. As a site of both splendid isolation and thorough exposure to mass-mediated journalism, NEEM escaped most definitions of research stations. Moreover, as a temporary summer home producing hard evidence from the field and at the same time hosting interpretative work on the ‘mutants’ messages from the abyss’ (Helmreich, 2009), NEEM even eclipsed distinctions between the field and the laboratory (e.g. Kohler, 2002).

In terms of scientific rationale, the NEEM site offered the most promising prospects to obtain so-called Eemian ice, that is, ice from the previous interglacial climate period (115,000–130,000 BP), which current scientific consensus holds to be 5° warmer than the present. Thus, Eemian ice offers paleoclimatology a potential empirical terrain to gauge the future scenarios of global warming. In terms of physical stratigraphy, Eemian ice is to be found in the layer situated about 2400–2500 m below the surface of the ice sheet, just some fifty m above what sonar equipment found to be the bedrock (Skrydstrup, 2013). The challenge was to recover ‘undisturbed’ Eemian ice from where the layers of ice had not been mixed either by warming and melting from the bottom, seismic activity, or other forces. At this base, ice cores are drilled, containing air bubbles with oxygen isotopes, which can be correlated with temperature, thus serving as evidence/proxies for the reconstruction of past climatic conditions and possibly projections. This particular field site had been carefully chosen as the most plausible for the recovery of the ‘naked fingerprint of the Eemian’, as one of the scientists told me. Needless to say, the logistics of the operation were immensely complex, exemplifying what Latour (1987, 1999) has called ‘late modern techno-science’.

Sloterdijk on sphären

Sloterdijk’s project offers a radical reinterpretation of the history of Western thinking about space, focusing on spheres. Sloterdijk (2011) says that

The initial aim of spherology is simply to retrace the formations of shapes among simple immanences that appear in human (and extra-human) systems of order – whether as organizations of archaic intimacy, as the spatial design of primitive peoples, or as the theological-cosmological self-interpretation of traditional empires. (pp. 80–81)

He argues that two millennia ago, the Earth was the center of a cosmological system comprising seven, ten, or twelve ether bows that reached ever higher upward toward the highest, which was the Empyrean (crystal heaven) in the vicinity of some sacred entity. The Sloterdijkian notion of cosmological ether bows carries a striking resonance with the visual depiction and cosmological self-interpretation of the NEEM base. According to Sloterdijk, this traditional cosmological or spatial-theoretical concept was then transposed and humanized from the late 18th century into a notion of ‘micro-spheres’ (micro-uteri), which were associated with the biological or utopian comfort of the mother’s womb, a form of existential secluded space into which a person enters. During fieldwork at NEEM, I often heard younger male scientists in camp refer to the main dome as ‘the womb’. However, I find this ‘womb metaphorics’ less productive than Sloterdijk’s (2005) notion of ‘co-isolated spheres’ and the overall ambition of envisioning ‘a new politics of trans-human symbiosis’ (p. 944), which means, as I understand him, a form of new atmospheric politics of coexistence, which is not limited to humans alone.

According to Sloterdijk (2011), humans and other mammals try to recreate existential micro-spheres through science, ideology and religion, and macro-spheres (macro-uteri) through nations and states. In his own words, ‘living always means building spheres, both on a small and a large scale, humans are the beings that establish globes and look out into horizons. Living in spheres means creating the dimension in which humans can be contained’ (Sloterdijk, 2011: 28). Sloterdijk’s spherology program revolves around ‘spaces of coexistence’, isolated life worlds of human togetherness, implicating co-isolation and the protected shelter of existential space against a threatening exterior.

What should we make of Latour’s claims about the conceptual import of Sloterdijk’s spherology project? For Latour (2007), Sloterdijk’s spherology captures the fact that to define humans is to define their life-support systems: ‘in the same way as a space suit or a space station is entirely artificially and carefully designed, so are all of the envelopes that constitutes the fragile life supports of humans’ (p. 66). Here, we see the ‘spaceship earth’ metaphor and resonances between Sloterdijkian post-humanism and Latour’s grand project of re-theorizing the effects of the ‘modern constitution’ and marrying ‘networks’ with ‘spheres’. Latour (2007) phrases this Sloterdijkian contribution to STS in this way:

What I find so important in the notion of explication, of folding envelopes into envelopes, is that it is a powerful way of retrieving science and technology by completely modifying what is meant by a sustainable artificial life. It is really in that sense, that Sloterdijk is THE philosopher of design. (p. 68)

As we shall see through an exploration of the architectural features, contours and visions, as well as the aesthetic history of ice-core drilling and an ethnography of everyday life at the NEEM base, the conditions of possibility for life at NEEM is artificial-support systems, and the NEEM population does move from one envelope-sphere to another envelope-sphere during their sojourn in camp.

The republic of science versus cosmopolitics

When I first arrived at NEEM, I was struck by the ‘alley of flags’ leading from the apron, where the planes arrived and took off, to the main dome. This was reminiscent of any UN avenue and welcomed the visitor to what I initially conceived as a sort of ‘republic of science’. The first flag was the Danish one, second was Greenland, followed by Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, and so on. It did not take long to figure out that the order was alphabetical, except for the hosts Denmark and Greenland. I was surprised that the flags of China and Greece waved because these nations were not formally part of the NEEM science consortium; that is, they did not contribute financially to the project. When I asked, the field leader told me that one of the graduate students working in the science trench was a Greek citizen, although he lived in Denmark. Earlier in the season a Chinese scientist had visited camp for a week. He had photographed everything meticulously. He said,

The Chinese want to join the race in Antarctica; however, we can’t make out if their ambitions are scientific or territorial. But we want to be on good terms with them. We have almost every flag in the world in camp, but I think the only one we have never used is the Norwegian one. They drill for oil, not climate research.

He said that with a smile possibly alluding to the legacy of Danish–Norwegian rivalry over the sovereignty of East Greenland, which was settled in The Hague by a verdict granting Denmark sovereign right to the whole of Greenland in 1933.

The alley of flags served as the public face of NEEM. This was where the incoming journalists were led, the place where interviews with leading scientists were conducted, and one of the favorite places to photograph visiting VIPs. Since the NEEM project was run by the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, this flag parade could seem a legacy of Bohr’s spirit of a cosmopolitan science, which knew no borders of race, nation, or religion. The Greenland Ice Core Program (GRIP) and the subsequent NorthGRIP camp (1996–2003) also featured alleys of flags representing the nationalities of the scientists and guests embedded in the camp at any particular time. The rank of the flags was alphabetical and ‘egalitarian’ in the sense that representation could not be bought (in terms of fiscal contribution to the NEEM project). However, this assembly of flags was also a clear signal to the visitor about which nations were hosting and which nations had the status of guests. By implication, there was a tacit understanding in camp that ultimately Denmark determined protocols, took responsibility if anything went wrong, and ultimately was in control. A German Columbian field technician and drilling expert told me that compared with the Russian Vostok Station in Antarctica, NEEM was almost like being invited on holidays by close friends. There could be hardship, but nothing compared to Vostok, he told me. However, it was clear to him who hosted and who were guests.

Significantly, the alley of flags constituted the scenic backdrop of broadcasts about NEEM, which obviously raises the question of the constitution of publics. During my five weeks of ethnographic fieldwork at NEEM, the station was visited by several teams of journalists reporting on the scientific work. Thus, even though the NEEM base was a floating island suspended ex nihilo, it was at the same time embedded in the global media sphere. This transformed NEEM into a global experiment and ice cores into a form of public proof, which raises significant questions about what kind of experiment and laboratory NEEM is and how to theorize its spatial dimensions.

In the case of contemporary knowledge production about climate change on the empirical terrain of ice, NEEM constitutes somewhat of a paradox. On the one hand, it could be compared to Tycho Brahe’s fortress castle on the island of Hven, as a site completely inaccessible to the public and which no one can visit without an invitation. The site is eminently separated from the crowd; it is science in splendid isolation. On the other hand, NEEM is among the world’s most exposed research stations, circulating in a global mediascape as a scientific showcase for a public experiment on global warming.

How do Sloterdijk’s macro-spheres of nationhood and statehood building sit with the alley of flags? Although the alley of flags projects a certain hierarchical order of relations between guest and host and the acknowledgement of the national affiliations of the labor in camp, what strikes me is that the alley of flags projects the cosmopolitan aspirations of the science conducted at NEEM. More specifically, I would argue with Jasanoff (2011) that NEEM’s alley of flags is expressive of the ‘cosmopolitan knowledge’ production of this particular strand of climate science. In a broader sense – and this is where Sloterdijk enters the picture – the alley of flags serves as each visitors’ entry point, reminding her or him that climate science is intimately entangled with the political futures of these flags. In that sense, we might read this piece of architectural design of the NEEM base as a micro-assembly, conjuring up the very sense of a global community to which the scientific knowledge production is addressed and, at the same time, that characterizes the collective that conducts this research. ‘Here at NEEM’, a French glaciologist confided to me, ‘we are one global family!’ Sloterdijk (1989) has argued for the priority of the aesthetic over the juridical approach: ‘We are citizens of the Earth (Erdbürger), before we are citizens of the State’ (pp. 307, 318). This argument is at odds with the experience of walking up the alley of flags; while you do feel as though you are walking on top of the globe, you are also reminded of your national citizenship. Be that as it may, the globalized media presence and the backdrop of the alley of flags leads me to argue that rather than an entry to the ‘republic of science’, we have before us the entry to a micro-assembly/macro-interior ‘anthroposphere’ of scientific knowledge production, which is deeply entangled with the collective futures of all the flags wavering in the wind.

Spaceship earth

Having traversed the alley of flags, we have now arrived at the main dome, the most spectacular architectural feature of the NEEM camp. Can Sloterdijk assist us in reading this key architectural feature of the camp? I shall begin to answer this question by way of interviewing the person considered the principal architect of NEEM, who goes by the name of PJ. When I asked him who had designed NEEM, he laughed and said modestly that thank God there never was a single designer. But as Latour (2007) writes about the philosophy of design with reference to Sloterdijk, ‘in addition to modesty, there is a sense of skillfulness, craftsmanship and an obsessive attention to detail that make up a key connotation of design’ (p. 63). After a while PJ added that he had served as the external examiner at the School of Architecture in Aarhus (Denmark) on a dissertation project, which became the state-of-the-art research station known as Halley VI in Antarctica.

Throughout the interview, PJ made references to other architectural designs of ice-core stations and explained that the challenge of building climate research stations in Antarctica and the Arctic was the snow build-up, which could be between one and two m every year:

Every building on the snow surface is bound to become covered and eventually be crushed by the weight of the snow. However, Halley VI solved that by putting the housing atop ski-fitted hydraulic legs, which can be individually raised to overcome snow build-up, and the entire facility is GPS controlled, which moves the station to compensate for the drift of ice, so their coordinates remain the same. It’s a caterpillar that crawls … very clever!

PJ was impressed with the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley VI, but he said that it comes at a high cost and stressed that in comparison the ratio between scientific output and cost was better in the NEEM design. However, PJ also said that the two designs cannot be compared directly, since Halley VI is an overwintering permanent station, whereas NEEM is a seasonal semi-permanent station. The design and architecture of NEEM was often contrasted with other research stations; the British Halley VI and the American McMurdo stations in Antarctica were two frequent counterpoints.

NEEM was designed and engineered by scientists, not architects. ‘Remember, we teach engineers how to calculate critical load and the proportionality of structures, so of course we can do that work ourselves’, PJ said. There were four sets of considerations that, according to PJ, went into the design process. First and foremost, NEEM had to be strong enough to withstand the site-specific conditions of snow, wind, and temperature. However, in contrast to Halley VI, NEEM was not an overwintering station, which made these factors less extreme. Second, starting with the NorthGRIP camp, the Greenlandic Home Rule had required a complete cleanup of sites; everything had to be flown out when the research was done. Third, there were economic constraints of keeping costs as low as possible. Fourth, PJ wanted to make NEEM a livable sphere, where the architecture facilitated the free exchange of ideas between scientists and between scientists and technicians in communal forms of engagement. The goal was to create not just an interdisciplinary forum but rather a space where technicians and scientists, students and professors would level with each other and share responsibility. This was sought through the creation of open spaces to facilitate interactive behavior, where people could meet on ‘egalitarian terms’, as PJ explained. He continued,

You find no signs in camp with Only Access for Authorized Personnel, as you do everywhere on McMurdo. There are really no places in NEEM that are off limits. And these features of a flat social structure, where people meet and mingle in the common spaces is something unique to NEEM.

Illustrating the value of flatness, PJ said,

This summer McMurdo could not receive any scientists, because they had 1,200 field technicians running around at the same time. That is absurd! Logistics can easily attain its own life. This would never happen at NEEM, because here technicians and scientists work in tandem. We integrate drilling and science, whereas the Americans separate them.

When he compared NEEM with Arctic and Antarctic stations run by other ‘big’ nations (primarily Norway, United Kingdom, United States, France, Germany, Australia, Russia, Japan, and China), his conclusion was that ‘NEEM delivered more science for the buck, than any other station in the world’.

Finally, in my interview, I raised the issue of the spectacular appearance of the main dome. Why was it black and why had they chosen the dome form? As an entry to this question, I quoted Willi Dansgaard’s (2004) claim that

[t]he advantage of the hemisphere shape is that the wind runs around it making the drift snow settle 3–4m from the building. This is not a new invention. The Eskimos [Inuit] have used it through millennia in the igloos. (p. 99)

Dansgaard (1922–2011) is considered the founding father of glaciology and ice core research in Denmark and the first scientist to extract climate information from a Greenlandic ice core from Camp Century.

PJ responded that Dansgaard’s analogue with the Inuit’s igloo was something of ‘a wisdom of hindsight or a late revelation’. He continued,

we chose the shape of an egg or what you call a geodesic dome, because putting triangles into a round shape is the strongest possible structure you can build. I felt it when I fitted the last steel bar into the construction, it was as if everything just fell into place and the entire edifice just became ten times stronger. The black color is because we used vulcanized rubber to cover the structure. It is the strongest surface material that exists and has the advantage that it melts the snow, which stays on the dome. The windows on the first and second floor are turned inwards to the camp, to allow visual perspectives towards the Main Street, flagged by the two lines of tents, which gives you a nice sense of looking at the square of a town. The intention here was to give people a sense of orientation in a vast space of nothingness. The five-sided hat sitting on the top of the dome is the so-called cupola, which was made specifically for us. It is by far the highest point in camp and serves as the office of the field leader and doubles as a flight control tower for incoming planes.

Where does the geodesic dome design come from? According to architectural historian and critic Kenneth Frampton (1999: 353–374), the design of the geodesic dome in architecture is attributed to Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983). Fuller was an American architect, system theorist, inventor, and futurist designer who published widely and coined the term ‘Spaceship Earth’. His invention of the geodesic design was derived from his notion of a new nature in the form of a universal, tetrahedral cosmos that he justified partly on the grounds that this particular matrix corresponded to matter’s molecular structure, namely to the geometrical order that provided for spheres in closest packing. Frampton, and with him many architectural historians, have seen in Fuller’s new nature program a reaction and critical alternative to prewar functionalism. Frampton dubs Fuller’s geodesic methodology as a ‘pragmatic, and indeed, a more romantic techno-scientific approach’ (p. 358). He goes on to argue that

Fuller’s generic solution to any building task was always the same, and in that sense, it bordered on the simplistic, for it invariably comprised the throwing of a geodesic dome over the required accommodation, irrespective of whether it was a botanical garden, a railway shed, or a private garden. Fuller’s solution was conceived, it would seem, to meet three particular criteria: efficient, lightweight structural assembly; optimal openness of both structure and space; and last but not least, an Archimedean geometrical form capable of representing the universe’s underlying structure. (Frampton, 1999: 358)

Given the four sets of considerations that PJ articulated as integrative to the design process of NEEM in the interview (strength to withstand the extreme environment, environmentally sustainable and easy to cleanup, economical, and a livable open sphere facilitating free exchange of ideas), the appeal of the geodesic dome form comes as no surprise. The generic functionality of the geodesic dome, its light weight, structural strength, and optimal openness met all of PJ’s requirements.

Latour (2007) argues that the analysis of design is ‘unquestionably about meaning– be it symbolic, commercial, or otherwise. Design lends itself to interpretation; made to be interpreted in the language of signs. In design, there is always as the French say, un dessein, or in Italian, designo’ (p. 63). But the design of NEEM did not begin from scratch. The NEEM research base is a redesign of earlier designs. As Latour maintains, architectural design is ‘complex assemblies of contradictory issues’ (p. 63) and ‘there is always something remedial in design’ (p. 64). In fact, in the particular aesthetic history of Danish ice-core research in Greenland, the geodesic dome appears in the camps of GRIP (finished 1992), NorthGRIP (1996–2003), and NEEM (2007–2012). As we have seen, the principal designers of Danish ice-core research stations explained this design philosophy with recourse to practical reason, namely avoiding snow build-up (Dansgaard) and it being ‘the strongest possible structure you can build’ (PJ). However, a comprehensive anthropology of Arctic and Antarctic research stations reveals that the geodesic design philosophy is unique to Danish ice-coring camps, which makes the utilitarian and pragmatic explanations offered by the design scientists themselves appear cultural, since all Arctic and Antarctic ice-core drilling stations face the same environmental challenges in terms of snow build-up, strong winds, and extreme temperatures. This leads me to reiterate my earlier argument: the appeal of the geodesic design may be found in its representation of Buckminster Fuller’s ‘new nature’, encompassing a range of scales, from matter’s molecular structure to the universe’s underlying structure. This range resonates with the aspirations of a climate science, which translates bubbles into hemispheres. Although PJ never articulated this, the geodesic dome design projects geometrical precision and the correspondence of scales, where correspondence is understood as a form of precise knowledge about the visible and invisible forms of nature, which is also important to the ethos of ice-core research. The main dome embodies a geometrical form capable of representing an underlying structure in the Universe, according to Fuller (1992). From this aesthetic perspective, I argue that much of NEEM’s aura of sci-fi futurism stems from Fuller’s pragmatic and romantic techno-scientific approach to architecture, an approach that informed his vision of Spaceship Earth (see also Van Tuinen (2009), who makes this argument).

To strengthen my argument that the visual form of the main dome materializes the cosmological self-interpretation of the NEEM scientists, I consider the annual Christmas card (2011). Throughout my fieldwork at NEEM, I tried to capture the architectural presence in its different light intensities on black and white analogue film (Skrydstrup, 2014). One of these images was chosen as the annual NEEM Christmas card to be mailed as greetings to sister institutions, friends, and colleagues around the world (Figure 2). The image chosen by the NEEM hosts to represent their project was a shot of the main dome with a fogbow arc, thus rendering an aura or sphere over their house of science. Fogbows are the Arctic’s analogue of rainbows, where incoming light interacts with very small water droplets or mist. Below the image, a minimalistic text reads ‘NEEM 77.45°N 51.06°W’, with the NEEM project logo in one corner and the website address in the other. I thought it significant that the reference to place was not written in the normal parlance of geography (Greenland), but in longitude and latitude, that is, numerical correspondence with the utmost precision. As motivation for selecting this image, the Centre for Ice and Climate Coordinator told me that they had yet to see the dome shape so aesthetically pleasingly replicated by nature as it was in my photograph.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

The image of the main dome with an overarching fogbow, chosen for the NEEM annual Christmas card in 2010/2011. Photograph by the author.

I would argue that this institutional self-representation in the form of the annual Christmas card tells us volumes about the aesthetic aspirations, visions, and values of the science in question, which echoes Buckminster Fuller’s ‘new nature’ and his metaphor of Spaceship Earth. I would argue that the NEEM scientists and Sloterdijk share a common project of bridging and making scalar connections between air bubbles and hemispheric fluctuations at the level of empiricism (NEEM) and theoretically between micro-uteri and macro-uteri to re-theorize space (Sloterdijk). At the level of aesthetics, the NEEM scientists and Sloterdijk also share a fascination for fogbows (NEEM) and ether bows (Sloterdijk), which render cosmological significations to the globe they both try to theorize. For the NEEM scientists, the fogbows render their home sacrosanct, whereas for Sloterdijk the ether bows are key to his theoretical project. Finally, Sloterdijk (2009) picks up the metaphor of Spaceship Earth when he speaks about anthropogenic climate change. He argues that the scientific proof that Earth has a climate memory renders climate scientists far more significant than contemporary designers; according to Sloterdijk, thus, climatology has proven one of Fuller’s techno-futuristic prophesies wrong. Nonetheless, I would argue that the Spaceship Earth metaphor captures analytic scalar connections being made by NEEM at the terrain of ice and also the theoretical drift of Sloterdijk’s spherology project, when it retraces the formations of shapes across micro-uteri and macro-uteri orders of spatial design.

Squares versus spheres

How should we read the distinction between squares and spheres at NEEM? I shall argue that these camp contours project the difference between experimental scientific work (squares carved out of subterranean ice) and recreational life (spheres on top of the ice). There was one significant exception to this architectural base-scape, namely the generator, which runs on fossil fuel and is housed in a shoe-box form on the surface, close to the main dome. Nonetheless, I shall argue that the boundary between subterranean squares and surface spheres could be read as constitutive of the very (modern) distinction between science and society itself, with the uninhabited generator as the only exception. Thus, in the following I shall read the NEEM base as a modern micro-cosmos, anticipating and building within itself the very sense of a global ecumene to which its scientific work ultimately is addressed.

In the layout of the NEEM camp, a strict morphological grammar seems to apply. The residential sections of the camp were grouped on each side of the Main Street, with two red semi-geodesic domes next to the generator, one for women and one for men, housing up to twelve individuals in bunk beds. This tent type was the most robust in camp and could overwinter between field seasons. On the other side of the Main Street, a line of tunnel tents served as dwelling for up to six people in bunk beds. The only dwellings in camp to offer private accommodation were called ‘tomatoes’ and looked like red camping trailers on skis, which, in a sense, they were. The tomatoes had been used previously in the NorthGRIP camp and were pulled in a caravan some 600 km across the ice sheet to NEEM by a snow tractor. One tomato was reserved for the field leader and the other for the most senior field technician, who would spend approximately one hundred days in camp. Rumor had it that the only gun in camp was stored in one of these tomatoes, in case a polar bear should visit. Generally, none of the residences for human habitation were heated; they were all gendered; they (apart from the two tomatoes) did not offer any privacy and they were all spherical in form (Figure 3). As mentioned, the only exception to the spherical form on the surface of the camp was the generator, which was strictly rectangular and uninhabited; an exception to the overall pattern with which I will deal at the end of this section. All these spheres were facing toward the main dome, often referred to as the ‘mother ship’. Almost all the tracks in the snow led from each residential unit to the main dome; there was not much traffic or sense of neighborhood between the residential tents.

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Figure 3.

Human habitation at NEEM. Photograph by the author.

The door of the main dome constituted the threshold between extreme outside temperatures and domesticated inside temperatures. The main dome was the only heated space in camp (except for the sauna on Saturdays), maintained at a comfortable 18°C throughout the field season. The ground floor was organized around collective dining, with a large open kitchen, clusters of dining tables and the only indoor bathroom in camp. The first floor catered to recreational and leisure activities, featuring a large table-top football game, lazy sofas offering semi-panoramic views of camp and sofa tables with board games and fashionable magazines. It was a space where people relaxed after lunch and dinner or on Sundays. A small ladder led to the second floor, designed as a cupola, which housed the semi-private office of the field leader. The cupola also served as a flight control tower and communication center. The entire edifice was a spherical octagonal structure, round and bubble-like, featuring an interior with high ceilings and large expanses of natural wood that gave the interior a feeling of domesticity. The geodesic dome structure provided an optimal openness for human encounters and the triangular shaped windows modulated the rays of light from the low-hanging sun outside, which never sets during Arctic summers. The timeless geometry, the materiality of wood, the human scale in proportionality, and the vistas to the rest of the camp provided a sense of looking at a ‘square of a town’ in a vast nothingness, as PJ said in the interview. (It should be said that this ‘square’ is not actually square but is simply a patch of snow.) When I asked PJ about the large amount of wood used in the open spaces of the main dome and suggested that it was a way of creating a homey atmosphere, he said

Well, it might have that effect psychologically, but we used timber in the construction because it is light, strong, durable and cheap and it does not require any advanced power tools. Rirrevs [a field technician in camp] can mold wood to almost anything I might ask of him.

Working as an assistant cook, my vantage point throughout my fieldwork at NEEM was the open kitchen area on the ground floor. After serving breakfast at 8:00 a.m., I followed the scientists entering the dining hall at 10:30 a.m. after their first shift in the trenches, slowly warming up over Swiss hot chocolate. Conversation would soon begin to drift (Figure 4). The open assembly structure ‘forced’ people to mix and meet during meals, albeit as a newcomer one quickly learned that seating was not completely free. Camp ‘long-timers’ tended to cluster around their regular table by the window. But apart from this table, vegetarians sat next to carnivores, seniors next to students, technicians next to scientists. Sometimes, there was a tendency that a single institution or nation would occupy ‘their’ table, but there was no entrenched pattern.

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Figure 4.

Inside the main dome during a lunch break. The field leader is making an announcement about the proximity of bedrock. Photograph by the author.

The architecture shaped this feeling of collective or ‘global family’, as a French glaciologist dubbed the NEEM community. What PJ had sought to materialize here in the medium of the main dome architecture was the special nature of the assembly. Gathered in the circular-octagonal space, the NEEM collective almost appeared as a congregation and the physical space as a sanctuary. The geodesic dome seemed the kind of space that makes people into a group and moves them collectively to form a convention, a legislature, a constitution, or a new science. It was a space dedicated to a single elevating purpose. One feature in particular did much to build this collective: a monitor sitting centrally in the common dining area for everyone to see. This piece of technology announced the speed and depth of the drilling in real time, as well as the local weather forecast and the events of the day. The monitor instilled a sense of exposure to the same threats from the extreme environment (the local weather forecasts) and building a shared responsibility for the challenges encountered in the abyss of the drill hole. As the field leader would often say during her lunch talks to boost the morale of the camp, there was a split second between the success and failure of the entire operation.

For most of us at NEEM, our days were filled with busy routines, where the announcement of outside visits and new recreational activities such as movie nights, opening of a new skiing track and the celebration of birthdays offered a welcome respite. Apart from undertaking the domestic chores assigned to each camp member (cleaning the fridge, shoveling snow into the smelter, being ‘house mouse’, etc.) there was an expectation to contribute whatever talent or ability one had to the collective. During my ethnographic fieldwork, I saw scientists baking their favorite cupcakes on a Sunday afternoon, performing as rock stars, showing their best movie on the hard drive, and engineering a can bottle opener, to name a few. These contributions to the collective were always staged in the main dome. To sum up, the main dome was a mother ship, a micro-uterus and a life-support system in a distinctively spherical form to ‘cultivate human beings’ and shape the ideal citizen-scientist of the globe.

In stark contrast to the spherical forms of the surface, residential areas, stood the production of ice cores and consequent knowledge about the Eemian, which serves as an analogue to the Anthropocene. Below ground level, large drilling and science trenches were excavated in strictly rectangular forms in the ice. To enter these trenches, one had to climb down an industrial steel ladder, which would lead to the drilling trench. Ice-core drilling is labor-intensive and involves repetitive sets of action. I have elsewhere described the craftsmanship involved (Skrydstrup, 2013: 163–182). Here, it suffices to say that what takes place in the drilling trench significantly influences the collective mood of the camp. Data on the speed with which the drill moves toward bedrock and the length of the ice cores pulled up from the borehole are transmitted instantly to the monitor in the main dome, like breaking news on CNN. These figures keep the entire camp in suspense, particularly when bedrock is close, as they determine the success or failure of the entire project.

In the beginning of my fieldwork, when I worked as an assistant cook, I hardly ever entered the drilling and science trenches. But when I became a ‘logger’ I mediated the space between both trenches, measuring the core in the bore hall and transporting it through the permeable plastic curtain into the science trench where it was processed. Crossing this permeable border more or less constantly throughout my shifts, I learned that the spatial division between the engineers and technicians, who do the actual drilling, and the scientists, who conduct the analytical work, was arbitrary. I would find scientists helping out in the bore hall or the drill master inspecting the progress in the science trench. I learned that this traffic between techne and scientia was a distinctive feature of the NEEM camp, as opposed to American glaciological research stations, where scientists would commission ice cores from a particular site and it would then be the job of the technicians to produce them at the lowest possible cost. It was obvious that this subsurface architecture was conceived to make interactions between technicians and scientists seamless. In the science trench, the work was organized along an assembly line, where each scientist was assigned a specific task, but where everyone assisted each other to pull through their shift of repetitive work without daylight and at a temperature of minus 18°C. Being below the surface also enabled uninterrupted work six days a week from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., regardless of wind and weather conditions. It was designed for efficiency, collectivity, and interactions between production and interpretation of ice cores, which was accomplished exclusively with rectangular forms and straight lines.

Was there anywhere in camp – apart from the residential tomatoes, reserved for the seniors – where one could take a break from a built space that only seemed to cultivate the collective? Had any space been designed for individuation, contemplation, and existential solitude – apart from the two outside toilets, where a waving pole flag indicated ‘occupied’? It took me some time to learn about the so-called ‘bench’ in camp (Figure 5). However, one day the cook took me 2 km on a Skidoo snowmobile to the far end of the apron of the camp, where we found the bench. It was a retreat and a refuge from the cramped space in camp, and it offered a wide-angle perspective of NEEM. Camp consumed and engulfed – after all, it was all that there was. At the bench, there was literally nothing, offering relief and perhaps liberation. The silence was like no other silence I had ever experienced. The bench was a site of tranquillity, fit for the solitary meditation of religious retreats. It also constituted the last stop any camp member was allowed to visit without permission from the field leader. In contrast to all the other built features of NEEM, the bench’s existence was somewhat of a public camp secret and nobody I asked knew who had conceived the idea or implemented it. Or more likely, they knew but were hesitant to share and potentially disseminate this piece of information, since the existence of the bench was a sensitive topic. Most significantly, the bench was not part of PJ’s design process.

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Figure 5.

The so-called Bench in camp, here occupied by the Cook Rene, who showed it to me. Photograph by the author.

As we have seen, the NEEM architecture was conceived and designed to cultivate collectivity across surface spheres (residential and leisure space) and subsurface squares (work space). Spheres and squares constitute the grammar of aesthetics that defines and divides collective experimental work and collective recreational life on the ice. There were two anomalies to this overarching design philosophy of the NEEM camp: the rectangular power generator on the surface next to the main dome, and the bench, where isolation and existential void loom large. When I asked PJ about the carbon footprint of the camp, he admitted that they had looked into alternatives but that their calculations showed that alternative energy sources could not deliver enough kilowatts of power for the activities of the camp unless they took on a scale that would make them disproportional to the camp size and the pristine environment. He further stated that extreme care was taken with the handling of the fossil fuel, since a single drop would penetrate very deep into the ice sheet. On this topic of energy consumption and the sustainability of the camp, PJ would tack between a techno-scientific modernism (‘we did the math’), a certain romanticism (‘the pristine environment’), and mundane pragmatics (‘we have to clean up after ourselves’). All three strands reified nature as a sublime external entity out there but affected by human activities. PJ’s predicament carried a certain irony, in so far the NEEM project endeavors to produce new knowledge about the Anthropocene, yet at the same time this knowledge production is enabled by fossil fuel. Szerszynski (2007) has recognized this predicament more generally in what has been called the ‘post-ecologist condition’ and argues for an environmentalism informed by ‘an ironic world relation’ (p. 337), which would have found an ally in PJ. Thus, in line with the design philosophy of NEEM, I find it significant that the unsustainable power generator is the only square building on the surface, in contrast to the domes and spheres inhabited by humans and sheltering them from the extreme weather outside.

With regard to the bench, it also constitutes the antipodes to the overarching design philosophy, as the only place that was not part of the design process and the only place where existential solitude can be actively pursued. Generally, the imperative of togetherness overrides privacy; that is, individuation follows after the necessity of being and working together. The architectural intent of NEEM is to foster responsibility, collectivize individuals into larger assemblies, and shape the ideal NEEM citizen-scientist. If the sphere is the ‘interior, disclosed, shared realm inhabited by humans – in so far as they succeed in becoming humans’ (Sloterdijk, 2011: 28), then ‘succeeding in becoming human’ at NEEM means to be part of the collective and carry responsibility for its scientific success. Thus, the bench as a site for escape for camp citizens must be understood relationally vis-à-vis the sphere.

I have argued that we may read the entire NEEM camp as a micro-cosmos, where squares (subsurface experimental space) and spheres (top-surface leisure/recreational space) project the very modern distinction between science and society. As PJ said during the interview, he planned a small-scale town, which seems to reproduce the ‘modern constitution’ in its materializations of architectural design.

Rethinking scientific architecture

In their iconic ethnography of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, Laboratory Life, Latour and Woolgar (1986 [1979]) established a novel way of looking at ‘localized scientific practices’, specifically ‘the way in which the daily activities of working scientists lead to the construction of facts’ (p. 40). The visuals of Laboratory Life (an appendix entitled ‘Photographic File’ with fourteen black and white images) bear testimony to this ethnographic sensibility, where only a single picture depicts the exterior architecture (a gloomy, half obstructed view entitled ‘View from the laboratory roof’), whereas the rest of ‘Photograph File’ amounts to an almost forensic gaze of the bits and pieces that make up the interior of lab space. However, in Latour’s (2009) reflection on his fieldwork in California, he singles out the exterior image, which for him represents the fact that ‘without knowing it, I had always been a “spherologist”’ (p. 139). In other words, science is inconceivable without its life-support systems in the form of air conditioning and ventilation. By photographing the pipelines and ventilation systems on top of the laboratory, Latour had anticipated the Sloterdijkian posthuman vision of life-support systems, before he encountered spherology in Karlsruhe. However, in the course of Latour and Woolgar’s account, we do not learn much about the conspicuous architectural visions and features of the Salk Institute. Here, I want to briefly illuminate some of the key ideas and aesthetic visions of this piece of architecture, in order to argue that they do not differ much in substance from the ones PJ articulated for NEEM.

As anyone knows who has visited the Salk Institute, it faces the limitlessness and tranquillity of the Pacific Ocean. The edifice is considered an iconic piece of 20th-century architecture built in 1959–1965 by the American architect Louis Kahn. Its first director, Jonas Salk, held strong views about how to organize the built space of science:

My ambition was to optimize the functioning of the human mind, to deal with the issues and questions with which the human mind is concerned. … I was seeking a retreat atmosphere for reflection and work away from the business and noise of the world. … Some people pursue science for human use, in contrast to science for the sake of science. This architecture is for human use, to serve a purpose. (Collins, 1999: 410)

Salk’s overall script for the building was his scientific understanding of biology as ‘life intended in the building’; a vision mediated and translated by Kahn into architectural forms (Safdie, 1999: 485–486). In his design of the collective spaces of the Salk Institute, Kahn was profoundly inspired by the religious dimensions of assemblies: ‘The stimulation came from the place of assembly. It is a place of transcendence for political people … The assembly establishes or modifies the institutions of man’ (Kahn, 1992).

Kahn’s vision for the collective spaces of science seems to echo what PJ intended to foster with the main dome, namely a venue for the ‘free exchange of ideas between scientists and between scientists and technicians in communal forms of engagement’. These two architects of science essentially saw science as a collective enterprise and accordingly sought to carve out physical spaces, which cultivated collectivity and fostered a sense of shared responsibility. If Kahn sought to lend the Salk Institute the religious dimension of assemblies, PJ deployed Fuller’s geodesic design in a similar way to materialize the Archimedean geometrical form of a new nature representing the ethos of this particular branch of climate science.

Does Sloterdijk help us to push forward inquiries into the shapes of science? Can his spherology project assist us in answering the key question of how different visions of science translate into different shapes of science? I have argued that Sloterdijk’s spherology may serve as a point of departure for rethinking the aesthetic grammar of scientific architecture. Buckminster Fuller’s notion of Spaceship Earth lends itself well to capturing the NEEM project of scalar alignment between air bubbles, hemispheres, and atmospheric fluctuations. At the level of re-theorizing space, Sloterdijk (2009) deploys Buckminster Fuller’s metaphor to elucidate how meteorologists and climate scientists have demonstrated that the atmosphere of the Earth has a memory (ice cores) and consequently introduced the novel idea of ‘macro-interiors’. I hope to have shown that the micro-cosmos of the NEEM research base can be productively explored with a little help from spherology and that Sloterdijk’s project may serve as inspiration for new ways of conceptualizing space and rethinking architectural design in STS.