Conference Agenda

This paper investigates habitability in extreme environment habitats by examining how occupants contribute to the evolution of functional infrastructures into human-centered environments that support wellbeing. Through fieldwork at the Bulgarian Antarctic Base (BAB), the study combines architectural on-site observations with interviews, questionnaires, and participatory workshops. Three trends emerged from the combined material, highlighting the importance of regulating social interaction through semi-private spaces, the value of flexible spatial organization across work and leisure, and the role of personalization in supporting emotional stability, helping occupants claim the base as a lived habitat over time. By using occupants’ evaluations and spatial adaptations as evidence, the study informs design in a context rarely experienced firsthand by designers and proposes a participatory framework for assessing habitability in constrained environments already shaped by standardized planning and logistics. It offers an informed approach for translating lived spatial experience into qualitative interior characteristics.