Overview
In the summer of 1975, NASA brought together a team of physicists, engineers, and space scientists-along with architects, urban planners, and artists-to design large-scale space habitats for millions of people. This Summer Study was led by Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill, whose work on this topic had previously been funded by countercultural icon Stewart Brand's Point Foundation. Two painters, the artist and architect Rick Guidice and the planetary science illustrator Don Davis, created renderings for the project that would be widely circulated over the next years and decades and even included in testimony before a Congressional subcommittee. A product of its time, this work is nevertheless relevant to contemporary modes of thinking about architecture. Space Settlements examines these plans for life in space as serious architectural and spatial proposals.
Full Product Details
Author: Fred Scharmen
Publisher: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
Imprint: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
Dimensions:
Width: 15.00cm
, Height: 2.80cm
, Length: 20.20cm
Weight: 0.618kg
ISBN: 9781941332498
ISBN 10: 1941332498
Pages: 208
Publication Date: 23 July 2019
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
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Reviews
We need utopian visions for the future of life on and beyond this planet. Scharmen's Space Settlements is an essential text in that project-opening up the possibility of developing radical, speculative visions for the future and pursuing them, not through the whims of benevolent billionaires, but through democratic means that enable us to learn from mistakes, not simply to reproduce them beyond the thermosphere. -- Billy Fleming * Public Books *
We need utopian visions for the future of life on and beyond this planet. Scharmen’s Space Settlements is an essential text in that project—opening up the possibility of developing radical, speculative visions for the future and pursuing them, not through the whims of benevolent billionaires, but through democratic means that enable us to learn from mistakes, not simply to reproduce them beyond the thermosphere. -- Billy Fleming * Public Books *
Author Information
Fred Scharmen teaches architecture and urban design at Morgan State University's School of Architecture and Planning. His work as a designer and researcher focuses on how architects imagine new spaces for speculative future worlds and who is invited into those worlds. Recent projects, with the Working Group on Adaptive Systems, include a mile-and-a-half long scale model of the solar system in downtown Baltimore (in collaboration with nine artists), and a pillow fort for the Baltimore Museum of Art based on Gottfried Semper's Four Elements of Architecture.
