A real snow job.

A Honolulu architecture firm is drafting cool antarctic designs as a bedrock of its business.

It's 89 degrees outside and Joe Ferraro and Lee Davis are sitting in their air-conditioned office pointing out similarities between Hawaii and Antarctica. The two architects in the Honolulu firm Ferraro

Choi & Associates have logged considerable time shaping this discourse since 1984, when the National Science Foundation gave them their first design contract on the frozen continent. "People say what are Hawaii architects doing in Antarctica?" Ferraro says. "You think about it, Ross Island, which hosts the main U.S. research station, is a volcanic island with volcanic ash, and the buildings are raised on stilts just like ours. We need to raise the buildings or else they would heat the ground and settle into the frozen soil."

Alright, so it's a short list of similarities. More germane to Ferraro Choi's purposes are the cutting-edge nature of designing buildings for antarctic research and the weight of the latest contracts from NSF: potentially more than $1 million a year for work including design of a new American station at the South Pole. For a five-year-old company that will bill about $2 million this year, mostly from institutional and corporate projects in Honolulu, that's pretty cool. But the kicker is that Ferraro Choi won the contracts in nationwide competition, preserving the firm's status as the only American private-sector design team working down at the pole. Which brings us back to the obvious question: What are Hawaii architects doing in Antarctica?

ANTARCTIC EXPERTISE. The foundations of the answer lie at CJS Group Architects, a Honolulu firm whose corporate resume includes designs for Bishop Museum science labs and a needs study for the U.S. research outpost at McMurdo station. That 1984 study made CJS the first non-Navy architects on the continent; within several years, the departures of Ferraro, Davis, Gerald Choi and Jim Guequierre transferred the principals on the antarctic projects to the newly created Ferraro Choi.

It takes an architect to stretch parallels between Antarctica and the rest of the world. Ferraro Choi's literature describes the site as "the least visited of all the continents . . . (with) no nations, no governments, no cities and no citizens." Temperatures fall to minus 110 degrees in the nine-month winter, dry winds alternately scour surface snow from the black rock or pile it around outcrops and structures, exposed skin burns in minutes in the intense cold under the gaping patch of depleted ozone.

It was during the brief summer thaws of the mid-1950s that the United States, working amid a convoy of other nations, began moving scientists and supplies to research camps at Palmer Station, Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and to McMurdo, the key point for field science projects and resupply of inland posts. Initially, McMurdo was designed for brute survival against polar conditions; later projects would add power, water, sewer and communication systems. By the time the Hawaii architects appeared, the station was moving toward a more sophisticated quality-of-life emphasis. Even then, the roughly 130 structures housing labs, dorms, offices, utility plants, stores, clubs and warehouses struck Davis as about as refined as a turn-of-the-century mining town.

Then again, as far as job sites went, this one was more out of the way than most. Many routes to Antarctica converge at Christ-church, New Zealand, where an almost daily schedule of C-130 Hercules transport planes outfitted with landing skis ferries scientists, support staff and supplies on an eight-hour run to McMurdo. Access to the South Pole takes another three hours. Both routes remain open only during the summer months, when McMurdo's population swells to 1,500; in the long winter, the bare-bones staff of up to 200 gets one plane drop of mail and fresh food.

Ferraro Choi would find the logistics nearly as formidable as the climate. "At the pole it's very similar to building something on the moon or on Mars. Everything that goes down there has to go in the cargo hold of a C-130, like the space shuttle," Ferraro says. (Not coincidentally, NASA is developing lunar and Mars-based space stations on the continent.) "Since we started going there the chief engineer from the NSF is gone, the general contractor is gone. Keeping a team together is the hardest thing."

CJS's original mandate was to compile a programming study to assess what clients and structures needed by way of design elements. From Honolulu, Ferraro, Choi, Davis and Guequierre began putting together a broad-based team that would eventually comprise specialists in San Francisco, Massachusetts, Ontario, and Hawaii -- TRB Architects, Shigemura Lau Sakanishi Higuchi & Associates, architect Russel Moy, Cost Engineering of Hawaii, and George Matsumoto & Associates. With expertise in fields ranging from structural design and snow study to energy analysis, the team members produced innovations like a 45-degree angle between floors and walls that lets snow blow under buildings instead of burying them. And, with the federal government expending two gallons of fuel for every gallon flown in to operate diesel generators, they began studying ways to harness the pole's round-the-clock summer sunlight as a source of energy.

In 1989 the fledgling Ferraro Choi responded to an ad for an architectural/engineering design team to carry out a three-year contract on the continent. It was billed as "open-ended," meaning whoever was hired would do whatever work came along, with potential fees advertised as up to $1 million a year. The broad mandate from NSF was to incorporate "quality-of-life design" in antarctic structures under American jurisdiction. Ferraro Choi signed that contract in 1990, and then another one for the South Pole station in spring 1992, and finally, a third one in the fall for site inspections at the pole and at McMurdo.

DESIGNS ON EXPANSION. While Antarctica promises to be a deepening bedrock of the firm's business, its real strength until now has been interior architecture. It does conventional architecture as well, but work within existing buildings for Hawaiian Airlines, Hawaiian Electric Co., Liberty House at Ala Moana and other large clients has made Ferraro Choi a big player in a small market of fewer than half a dozen architectural firms. At its founding in 1988 Ferraro Choi had two architects, a staff of six and billings of $600,000; this year, its payroll has expanded to four architects on a staff of 16.

That they snagged the government-funded antarctic contract amid a lingering recession hasn't been lost on the firm's principals. The consideration more than outweighs the vagaries of designing to accommodate future science. "NSF is a difficult challenge because it's hard for them to predict what they're going to be doing in 10 years," says Ferraro. "They respond to grants. That is a whole separate economy. It's government-funded--it relates to the U.S. presence at the South Pole and to prestige."

The new polar station, ordered to replace the futuristic 20-year-old dome that is partially buried in snowdrifts, and future projects will use new design concepts and materials and extend them to plans for a self-supporting food supply, closed-loop waste disposal systems and new sources of power generation. It's little wonder Ferraro has an easier time drawing parallels with Mars. "There are obviously vast differences designing for Antarctica and Hawaii, but at the same time, there are great similarities," he says. "We're trying to utilize the knowledge and technology we're employing in our antarctic designs to preserve our island environment."