launch
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Launch AGRIculture Andrew Liebchen A degree project presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Architecture in the Department of Architecture of the Rhode Island School of Design. The Rhode Island School Design Providence, Rhode Island 2009 Approved by Committee:
Enrique Martinez, Degree Project Advisor Assistant Professor of Architecture
Olga Mesa, Degree Project Panelist Adjunct Professor of Architecture
Jonathan Knowles, Degree Project Coordinator Assistant Professor of Architecture
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Abstract The degree project seeks to project a facility for the slow harvest of Hydrogen rocket fuel grown from algae. The facility’s slow harvest of Hydrogen coincides with the periodic return of Halley’s Comet; culminating in the launch of a scientific probe to study the comet and the solar system. Implicit in the facility’s programming is a cycle of growth, launch, and obsolescence. Historical, environmental, and cultural inputs impacting the structure are mediated and processed by physical and graphic devices modeled on Space Race-era ephemera, including stamps, commemorative coins, wheel charts, and tourist photographs, to name a few. Potential Keywords: Agriculture, Architecture, Algae, Apollo Ephemera, Halley’s Comet, Launch, NASA, Rocket, Probe, Possibility, Space Race, Sustainabilty, Soyuz, Tourists
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Table of Contents Title page......................................................page i Abstract......................................................page iii 1. Fall 2008..................................................page 5 An essay completed at the conclusion of Degree Project Seminar. 2. The OBFUSKATOR...............................page 12 An early probe designed to discover questions. BEB Gallery, October 2008. 3. A Chapter of Concerns...........................page 18 Selected blog entries, completed during primarily during Wintersession 2009. 4. Performative Ephemera........................page 38 Project introduction for the final review, May 2009. 5. List of plates..........................................page 40
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1. Fall 2008 Engineered Form and Alternate Universes We read the engineered forms of space capsules, aircraft carriers, bridges as we read dutch architecture: rational diagrams made physical. Engineered objects are no immune to the cultural history of the engineers who designed them. These differences can be reconciled by examined pairs of engineered objects, entangled by similar diagrams but divergent in their form. Additionally, how do these precise objects hold necessary program beyond their diagrams, or program that is un-diagrammable? The restaurant of the sporting center in Belgrade, Serbia was featured on Dezeen, a trendy design blog the other day. Evidentially, the cantilevered structure was intended both as a landmark and a exclusive dining facility to the communist elite, and is known as the Danube Flower. Tito himself dined there on November 22, 1973, its opening night. Rechristened “Wellness Sky,� the triangular building is now a health club and spa, presumably catering to the wealthy elite of Belgrade. There is scant information on the Danube Flower available to cursory searches of Google and Wikipedia. It seems that Dezeen is now the repository of all knowledge on the internet related to this curious relic from a communist past. 2
Rooms floating in the air are convenient building forms for the elite: access to them is limited to a single, well-protected point, not unlike a medieval castle. Unlike a castle, the elite should be confident that their cantilevered structure will not be siege by anyone with a catapult. In the democratic west, our shopping malls seem to be the opposite of the floating restaurant of the communist elite. But, I can draw a diagram to describe each that would look remarkably similar: in the communist example the divisive field is air and in the democratic example the divisive field is parked cars. The P&O building in London was demolished from the ground up. Backwards demolition is counter intuitive, but this particular office building was built the floor plates were suspended from truss girders at roof which were in turn supported by the central core. In death, the true nature of the building’s structure was revealed. It was a communist floating restaurant in a capitalist’s generic office clothing. (Kundera: “They wanted to efface hundreds of thousands of lives from memory and leave nothing but an unstained age of unstained idyll. But Mirek is going to land his whole body on that idyll, like a stain. He’ll stay there just as Clementis’s hat stayed on Gottwald’s head.”) 3
There is a critical moment in the launch of the rocket when success and failure, crash and burn, life and death hang in the balance. The countdown clock has reaches zero, the rocket engines are producing fire and thrust, and the clamps that had delicately secured the missile to the tower are released. We are still holding our breath; this is the moment that doomed so many test rockets when Eisenhower was still President. Time slows here as thrust and gravity reach détente. Let’s stay in this moment, where rocket isn’t quite a spacecraft and the launch tower just stands there, useless. The fate of Schrodinger’s cat in the box is limited to two possibilities, life of death, just like rocket on the launch pad. Of course the rocket lifts off and makes it to the moon, perhaps because we are aware only of the universe in which this happens. Is there another universe in which the Apollo 11 was reduced to a flaming heap, and three astronaut’s wives became widows? I think I saw this episode of Star Trek. Alternate universes are the fodder of science fiction and comic books. Van Braun’s V-2 rocket is the first to achieve suborbital flight, while Kennedy was on his PT boat in the Pacific. Designed to destroy London from a launch site in Germany, the form of the 4
rocket is similar to the science fiction comic book rockets of the time. Is this a coincidental parallel development of form based on a rudimentary understanding of ballistic aerodynamics shared by artists and scientists, or did one inform the other? Van Braun is brought to America, Kennedy becomes President and launches our race to the moon. Our rockets and spaceships take on rational AMERICAN forms: the Saturn V’s setbacks are reminiscent of a skyscraper shaped by Manhattan zoning laws (it is even brought to the launch pad upright!), while the Apollo capsule is comprised of platonic forms designed for movement in Cartesian space. Meanwhile, the Soviets develop the strange insect-like Soyuz module and deliver their rockets to the launch pad horizontally. Engineers are not immune to forces that influence artists and architects; they bring social, cultural, and political preoccupations to the engineered forms of rockets and spaceships. In 1975, the engineered forms of the US Apollo module and the USSR Soyuz joined in a symbolic end of the space race and intergalactic dÊtente. Imagine the cultural, political, scientific, and historical forces wrapped up in the moment when the hatch opens, and three American astronauts join their two cosmonaut colleagues. It is a moment of historical significance, taking place in a physical space that has been engineered for a spe5
cific purpose—safe and economical spaceflight— and not diplomatic relations. In the tight tube of an air lock, representatives of two enemy people unite in a handshake, as their spacecraft have united in orbit. This occurrence is more frequent than not, the reuse of space beyond the intent of its design. Paraphrasing Raimund Abraham’s Negation and Reconciliation, Modern Architecture presented a spur in the line of history, an alternate reality of towers in the park, etc. by offering only criticism of art but no new treatise or style to replace it. Science fiction presents projected future with the present (or sometime in the past) as a point of departure. We can see, though that science fiction has the ability to bend history in its direction in a way that Modern architecture cannot. science fiction
projected future history
Modern architecture
history
unfolding future
Wolf D. Prix, “…the Dutch people can recognize their uniqueness and they can translate their Calvinist thinking into diagrams and have made it their trademark.” 6
Calvinism: Adam’s fall had doomed man to state of total depravity, or immersion in sin such that he cannot choose to follow God. God, therefore, must PREDETERMINE that an individual will accept salvation. Thus, the two states of man are intertwined: free will (Godless) and salvation. It is up to god to open the lid of the box. Is this a struggle between democracy (capitalism) and totalitarianism? Or just the entanglement of ideas that a Koolhaasian diagram must rectify? The Dutch hold back the ocean and drain the plodder to build upon the fresh muck. One wonders if Almere will ever see the day when a structure must be re-purposed from its original use. Is it possible for master plan for chance and accident, strange juxtapositions in time and space, erasures and memory fragments that find themselves travelling through time? Like the whole of the Netherlands which exists as water and land, the dike has opened the lid of the box. Rem: “If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernism has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout. Modernization had a 7
rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown‌Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment‌� Is Almere the opposite of Junkspace, or just better diagramed? If the Apollo and Soyuz modules are the best flying diagrams of the complex systems needed to support human life in space and bring it back to earth, how does the space enclosed by the module react when confronted by a mission beyond its design (diplomacy). Early thought in quantum mechanics tried to reconcile classical physics with the counter intuitive or contradictory results of experiments in the field. Consensus of the time, known as the Copenhagen interpretation, held in part that human observation of microscopic or quantum phenomenon in some way changes the reality of the event. Erwin Schrodinger proposed a thought experiment in 1935 to challenge the Copenhagen interpretation. He imagined a steel box, which contained a small amount of a radioactive material, a Geiger counter, a hammer, a container with an amount of cyanide, and a cat. If the Geiger counter detects a particle from the radioactive material, the 8
hammer is dropped on the container of cyanide, killing the cat. In Copenhagen interpretation, the cat exists in superimposition of two states, alive and dead, until the lid is opened and the cat is observed, at which point the two possible states collapse into one. Poor cat. The Apollo and Soyuz craft are the entangled pair of dead cat and alive cat in reverse. Each represents a culture’s physicalization of similar diagrams for spaceflight. Different cultural and engineering histories, mission profiles, and even aesthetics influence these objects in ways their makers might not like to admit. Each developed in kind of alternate reality, entangling in orbit in 1975. US Navy public relations officers love to tell us that the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier is a “floating city,” or a “city at sea.” Hollein says, “Everything is architecture,” so the warship runs aground in the pastoral landscape. One is reminded of a recent project by NL Architects called “Cruise City, City Cruise” in which the deck of the aircraft carrier becomes an amusement park. Would Le Corbusier include the aircraft carrier in volume two of Towards a New Architecture? On the trans-Atlantic steamship, the pleasure forms of railings, portholes, etc derive from certain shipbuilding logic. On the other hand, the aircraft carrier is 9
an orphaned section of LaGuardia’s runway lost in the middle of the ocean. The launching and retrieval of fighter jets drives it’s from above all else. Is this why the re-juxtaposition of the carrier back on the landscape (or the landscape back onto the carrier) so appealing? Back to the cat in the box: some would suppose that at the moment the lid is opened, instead of collapse, the superimposed states SPLIT into two universes, one in which the cat is alive and one in which the cat is dead. This idea is refined by the later “quantum suicide” though experiment. Suppose an experimenter sits in front of a gun which is triggered or not triggered in by the radioactive decay of some atoms. There is a 50-50 chance that the experimenter will live or die. At the moment when the gun does or doesn’t fire, two universes are produced, one in which the experimenter lives and one in which he dies. You could imagine that eventually, and universe would emerge where the experimenter had NEVER died, and therefore imagined himself invincible.
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2. The OBFUSKATOR It all began with a misunderstanding, a miscommunication created by an imprecise translation from analog to digital. The degree project board presented a device on which a signaler would apparently draw a circuit diagram, causing corresponding LEDs to light for a view. By the cunning or laziness of the device’s creator, the signaler was unaware if there was a direct relationship to the diagram he was creating and which LEDs lit up for the viewer. Both signaler and viewer are hopelessly confused.
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The installation and user’s guide:
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3. A Chapter of Concerns December 28, 2008: Diverging opinion Modularity vs. Parametrization or ballistic vs. blunt-body re-entry or Soviet vs. American:
I keep coming back to the American/Soviet space race-era capsule design. This work produced two separate morphological threads of space craft development, even though each family of vehicles represents a response to the same environmental and mission constraints (see plate 1). Beginning in earnest at least in the 1950’s (if not earlier) American and Soviet scientists and engineers began to tackle the same basic problem: put a man into orbit and bring him safely back to earth. These groups were not only separated by language, culture, and geography, but also an intense veil of secrecy. To me, it is a perfect test case for how diagrams are developed into formal responses to a design problem. As presented here, the most obvious difference in morphology between the American Apollo Command Module and the Soviet Soyuz is that former is a cone and the latter is a series of spheres. It can be argued that this difference of opinion can be traced back to a single decision early in the history of each program concerning which re-entry (see plate 2).
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The problem of re-entry troubled designers because it was unknown if a capsule could withstand the intense heat generated by the friction of atmospheric drag as it fell from orbit. Perhaps pragmatically, the Soviets chose to shape their capsule as a simple ballistic sphere, fully enclosed in a heat shield. The capsule’s center of mass was placed behind the cosmonaut so that the sphere would orient itself properly over the course of the re-entry. The ratio of solid to void within the spherical Vostok is acceptable for one or two cosmonauts, but a trip to the moon would require three or four. Increasing the radius of a sphere dramatically increases the volume; so dramatically that the volume risks becoming TOO great. So, the Soviets leave the radius basically unchanged from the one-man Vostok to the three-man Soyuz, and choose instead to stack the spheres, and thus more precisely increasing the interior volume of the vehicle. The Americans, on the other hand, settled upon the blunt-body as the best shape for a re-entering spacecraft. By flattening the leading face of the capsule, a shock wave would form, slowing the craft and decreasing the size of the heavy, expensive, and fragile heat shield.
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The Mercury spacecraft then, is a truncated cone. While the Soviets have only one dimension to determine their craft’s size (radius), the Americans have two (radius and height). If the width of the rocket sets the radius of the cone, the height can be used to increase or decrease the internal volume of the capsule until its JUST right. The cone has a secondary benefit: one side responds to the need for a tapered, more aerodynamic shape at lift-off, while the other is flattened for re-entry, eliminating an aerodynamic launch shroud employed by Soyuz. In spite of its apparent weaknesses, Soyuz today is the world’s most prolific launch system. In this case, parametrization is expensive and ill-suited to flexible or changing mission profiles, while a collection of smaller specialized modules are cheap and versatile. This division between American and Soviet, parametrization and modularity is easy to trace to a rational decision made by scientists, but what other INTANGIBLE factors contribute to the primordial decision? Where Americans hopeless romantics, feeling it necessary to bring as much of the mighty ship home as possible, while the Soviets are a crass and godless people who have no qualms about leaving two-thirds of their space hardware to burn in the atmosphere? And what of the supremacy 21
of the United States Navy and the vastness of the Russian tundra, what role did these factors play into capsule development? Maybe Soviet scientists never saw a Buck Rogers comic book during the development of Vostok. These questions are more elusive. As we look to the diagram as driver in architecture, we must acknowledge how personalities, cultures, idiosyncrasies, and the accumulated weight of primal decisions subvert the rationality of the diagram into a form that fits life. Modern architecture is the concretization of a diagram, forcing life to bend to its will. The fundamental truth of the diagram should not be denied, but to make an architecture the diagram must bend to intangibles‌ Look at the engineered forms of space capsules, aircraft carriers, bridges as you look at dutch architecture: rational physicalizations of a diagram. As the products of humanity, engineered form carries with it the cultural history of the engineers who created it. These differences can be reconciled by examined pairs of engineered objects, entangled by similar diagrams but divergent in their form. Additionally, how do these precise objects hold necessary program beyond their diagrams, or program that is un-diagrammable?
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December 20, 2008: Cantilevers in our midst As we look to the diagram as driver in architecture, we must acknowledge how personalities, cultures, idiosyncrasies, and the accumulated weight of primal decisions subvert the rationality of the diagram into a form that fits life. Modern architecture is the concretization of a diagram, forcing life to bend to its will. The fundamental truth of the diagram should not be denied, but to make an architecture the diagram must bend to intangibles‌ Look at the engineered forms of space capsules, aircraft carriers, bridges as you look at dutch architecture: rational physicalizations of a diagram. As the products of humanity, engineered form carries with it the cultural history of the engineers who created it. These differences can be reconciled by examined pairs of engineered objects, entangled by similar diagrams but divergent in their form. Additionally, how do these precise objects hold necessary program beyond their diagrams, or program that is un-diagrammable? The restaurant of the May 25th sporting center in Belgrade, Serbia was featured on Dezeen, a trendy design blog the other day. Evidently, the cantilevered structure was intended both as a landmark and a exclusive dining facility to the 23
communist elite, and is known as the Danube Flower. Tito himself dined there on November 22, 1973, its opening night. Rechristened “Wellness Sky,� the triangular building is now a health club and spa, presumably catering to the wealthy elite of Belgrade. There is scant information on
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the Danube Flower available to cursory searches of Google and Wikipedia. It seems that Dezeen is now the repository of all knowledge on the internet related to this curious relic from a communist past. Rooms floating in the air are convenient building forms for the elite: access to them is limited to a single, well-protected point, not unlike a medieval castle. Unlike a castle, the elite should be confident that their cantilevered structure will not be siege by anyone with a catapult. In the democratic west, our shopping malls seem to be the opposite of the floating restaurant of the communist elite. I can draw a diagram to describe each that would look remarkably similar: in the communist example the divisive field is air and in the democratic example the divisive field is parked cars. The P&O building in London was demolished from the ground up. Backwards demolition is counter intuitive, but in this particular office building the floor plates were suspended from roof truss girders which were in turn supported by the central core. In life, P&O is a bland office block in a dour city. In death, the true nature of the building’s structure was revealed. It was a communist floating restaurant in a capitalist’s generic office clothing. 25
January 1, 2009: Performative nostalgia Actual space capsules might not be as exciting as those in science fiction, but they are rigorous nexuses of Newtonian physics, human factors, and history. Some would argue that manned space exploration is an expensive distraction from the more efficient work that robots and probes could be doing; that manned spaceflight is the result of a showboating exercise between two former superpowers. Without the glitz and glam of sweeping visions of space exploration (Kennedy’s push to the moon, Reagan’s Star Wars) the public grows bored. With reusable space shuttle that makes spaceflight seem routine and an expensive and sophisticated work of engineering parked in high earth orbit (the International Space Station), spaceflight has lost its thrill. So, we remember our past achievements (and expenditures) with commemoratives: postage stamps, coins, plates (see plate 3). Spacecraft are sophisticated marvels of engineering, representing millions of man-hours, billions of dollars, not to mention the lives of the astronauts who took them to space. Once they land, and retrieved from the ocean, encased in Lexan, and hung from a museum’s rafters they are visited, photographed, and dreamed about by an amazed public, most of whom unknowingly com26
mitted a few pennies from their weekly paycheck to it. Technical object to collected object. Flying through space to flying through a ten-year-old’s dream. In addition to mediating the myriad factors of spaceflight, the spacecraft has to mediate our hopes, dreams, and ambitions. Somehow the excitement of architecture is not the same of the excitement of tanks, space exploration, and warships. Is it that architecture is too tied to capital and power, or that it is perceived to be mundane, ordinary? That it does not move? That it does not kill people? Architecture is a slow force. Bullets from an attack helicopter are instantaneous.
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February 3, 2009: On space and sustainability WHAT? Examining the emerging sustainability movement in architecture* through the lens of the so-called “space race.” ** HOW do spacecraft achieve their form? Mostly, they are little more than aggregations of related engineering choices and hierarchies. Sometimes, the decision of one becomes policy (political) and guides all subsequent choices. Just as important, what is the life of the spacecraft once its mission is complete? In its obsolescence, its purpose expanded into symbology, dreams, and ephemerality. Can we anticipate this transformation so that our new infrastructure can live out its golden years with grace? The discourse about NASA and spacecraft is not esoteric. As an analogy for architecture, it is worthwhile. Thirty years on, we can see how the space race panned out, we can visit its artifacts in museums. Will architecture reach détente with its environment? Its now state-of-the-art assemblages visited by our grandchildren, obsolete relics of a brave past.
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*SPACE RACE: a geo-political struggle disguised as a program of scientific exploration which began in 1959 with the Soviet launch of Sputnik and climaxed with an American astronaut walking on the moon. Arguably, the race ended in 1975 as the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft rendezvous in orbit, forming a physical détente of the two nations. **As characterized by the competing tactics of collectivized piecemeal technological innovations or “green design,” or dangerous meta-narratives, of the sort that culminated in the Pruitt-Igoes of the past.
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February 7, 2009: I dream of drawing machines The drawing below was produced by a drawing machine (a historic RISD architecture genre) in construction for the past few days. The drawing machine consists of four parts: 1.) The launch pad is a level surface five inches above the floor. A 4 - 1/8 inch square is cut in the center, into which is seated the… 2.) The transport assembly consisting of a rubber stopper with a styrene tube piercing vertically through the center. The tube is attached to a length of vinyl tubing which leads to… 3.) A bicycle pump provides the pneumatic pressure required to launch the… 4.) Rocket which is loaded with an amount of charcoal powder. The charcoal particulate spew from the launch of the pneumatic rocket is registered on the paper (see plates 5 & 6). Throughout the historical the historical progression of spacecraft and the related ground-support infrastructure, it is striking that the devel30
opmental decisions are made cumulatively with economy as a primary concern. The space capsules in are museums are rarely results of heroic individual design efforts, but a kind of agglomeration—a metamorphosis like the formation of marble—of countless engineered decisions, revisions, improvements, and leave-well-enoughalone, though it takes an act of policy to begin the processes. I’ve made drawing machine (or some kind of overly complicated machine) at least once a year since I’ve been at RISD. This time, I’ve documented the development of the device in a single 31
isometric drawing from conception to current configuration. Once this drawing is finished, it will describe a developmental history full of hypotheses that become facts, false starts, idealism that metamorphoses into pragmatic conclusion, and so on. In short, the drawing is an archeological chart of the layered progression of the construct (see plate 4). The drawings the machine produced at face value border on mere form-finding (which is dangerous), and have less value right now than the process of making the drawing machine (which is not to say that the drawings will not prove useful in the future). The construction of the machine is so valuable, it is like a miniature history of the development of the space program, as manifested in the active and ghost buildings on Merritt Island and the spacecraft launched there. The legacy of decisions, mistakes, and discoveries are pulled forward through time, institutionalized, corrected, and regularized by the small triumph of economy. There is little doubt that my project should focus on a launch complex in the spring. This exploration therefore is the beginning of a diagram or thumbnail sketch. All the components for a launch system are here in micro: static platform, the rocket transporter, fuel production, recovery. 32
February 13, 2009: Cat in the box Erwin Schrodinger proposed a thought experiment in 1935. He imagined a steel box, which contained a small amount of a radioactive material, a Geiger counter, a hammer, a container with an amount of cyanide, and a cat. If the Geiger counter detects a particle from the radioactive material, the hammer is dropped on the container of cyanide, killing the cat. Early consensus in the field of quantum mechanics held that the cat exists in two superimposed states, dead and alive. Not until the lid is opened do the two states collapse into only one. An orbital dĂŠtente was staged on July 17, 1975 as two space capsules, Apollo and Soyuz, docked for the first time. The American craft is a fat assembly of platonic solids: cone stacked on cylinder, gleaming silver in the pure sunlight. The Soviet craft is complicated, joined modules lacking reductive geometries. Given that each was built for a similar mission: taking a man to the moon and back, how is it that they came to look so different? Schrodinger had a problem with the common interpretation of his thought experiment: what happened to the opposing state when the lid was open. His assertion is simple. At the moment the 33
lid is opened, reality splits into two. In one reality, the cat is alive and in the other, it is dead. The Apollo and Soyuz craft are an entangled pair of dead cat and alive cat in reverse. Given different cultural and engineering histories, policies, and even aesthetics each craft developed simultaneously, re-entangling in orbit in 1975. As a culture, how do we remember these great achievements of spaceflight? Primarily by the obsolete capsules we keep in museums and by cheap ephemera and commemoratives sold in nearby gift shops. Manned spaceflight’s cultural legacy is not Velcro or tempurpedic mattresses, but junk kept under glass or left in orbit, eventually becoming meteorites in the upper atmosphere. The legacy of manned spaceflight has not be thoroughly appreciated by architects: we though Archigram got us off the hook. It is worth another look now that our profession again looks to take up the cause of saving humanity from itself. How to we remember technocratic wonders of a past age? In their obsolescence, what are their capacity as symbols, as ephemeral collectors of dreams?
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March 12, 2009: Portable contextual frames Wheel charts are useful ephemera. Unlike essentially value-less commemorative coins, collectable stamps, and the like, wheel charts are interactive and informative. There are two basic components: a disc with a polar table of data, and a second disc on top of the first that is a frame with which the data can be interpreted. The circle at once suggests a dynamism, but the wheel chart is in a way static, the information enclosed in the circle cannot be expanded. The circle is the most symmetrical shape, yet the wheel chart requires a certain amount of asymmetry in order to function. Of course, the original circles in nature are the celestial bodies, long revered for the predictability and perfection. The wheel above (see plate 13) relies on juxtaposition and obfuscation to subvert romanticism and linear narrative. At once, humanity’s oldest organized pursuit (farming) is place atop its newest (the crushing industry needed to fuel America’s consumer culture). The two are not mutually exclusive, but seem to be worlds apart. I would characterize both images as fairly romantic, in that they picturesque-ly gloss over the harsh realities of each. Cutting holes and filling them with miniature, changeable compositions in a way brings back the small moments of humanity 35
and connection lost in overwhelming multiplicity of the bottom image. Cartesian rationality still exists in global sense, fully intact below the rotating frame but is locally modified by the rotating frame. Jessica Hefland: “Indeed if the astronomical volvelles [wheel charts] of the incunabula once sought to compress three dimensions of data into two, it might be said that modern wheels‌do precisely the opposite, employing kinetic conceits to infer added depth and increased dimensionality, challenging the surface, and with it, our notions of where the surface actually is, if indeed it exists at all.â€?
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4. Performative Ephemera May 18, 2009 An orbital détente was staged on July 17, 1975 when space craft from two nations rendezvous and docked for the first time. The American Apollo is a fat conjunction: cone stacked on cylinder, gleaming silver in the pure sunlight. The Soviet Soyuz is a stack of discrete units, an orbiting Bolshevik bug. The craft kiss and trade saliva, teeming with astronauts. Wheel charts are performative ephemera. Their stacked discs suggest dynamism, even when the chart’s information is fixed and predictable. In spite of infinite symmetry, the wheel chart requires a certain amount of asymmetry in order to function. The wheel chart’s information may be rigorous and expansive; the junction of kitsch and tactility make the information digestible and portable. Spacecraft and wheel charts are mementos from collapse of uncertainty of the Cartesian world, be it the mastery of orbital flight or a heifer’s menstrual cycle. While the objects themselves may be immutable, the ephemeral life they lead is not. -Introductory statement to the Degree Project jury.
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5. List of Plates 1. The form of Eastern and Western spacecraft A sheet of commemorative stamps. 2. A divergence in opinion and policy yields... or Soviet modularity vs. American parametricization This early diagram sought to make an account of why the form of the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft diverged. Hypothesis: spacecraft are not purely rational constructs. Because of their intense complexity, they are a collection of decisions layered on top of the experience gained from previous decisions. 3. Apollo and Soyuz 1:96 scale model Sytrene model parts, cardboard packaging, decals, and instruction manual. Acquired on eBay for $17.99. 4. Launch pad drawing machine, Construction documentation Design and actual development is recorded in a series of axonometic drawings, completed daily. 5. Launch Pad Drawing #1 Charcoal and fixative on paper
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6. Launch Dad Drawing #2 Charcoal and fixative on paper. 7. Forgotten moments in space history, a commemorative coin set Coin 1 of 4: Ed White (first American to walk in space) returns to the womb. 8. Forgotten moments in space history, a commemorative coin set Coin 2 of 4: The first hand gun in space, and why. 9. Forgotten moments in space history, a commemorative coin set Coin 3 of 4: The relationship of locals to spaceflight, the United States and Kazakhstan. Each coin (especially coin 3) functions as thumbnail diagram that is bound by the peculiarities of the commemorative coin in that the reverse provides context or commentary for the obverse. 10. Wheel chart #1: The Astronaut’s Guide 11. Wheel chart #2: The Farmer’s Guide Plates 11 and 12 are two sides of the same wheel chart object. Vintage wheel charts are taken as a departure point. On the front, “The Astronaut’s Guide” collects of rocket systems illustrations and 41
specification data on a circle. A rotatable frame mediates the mass of information into discrete chunks. “The Farmer’s Guide”, on the reverse, allows the user to calculate the amount of surface area required of an algae farm to produce a given quantity of hydrogen. 12. Wheel chart #3: Domestic bliss 13. Wheel chart #4: Pastoral 14. Wheel charts #3 and #4 revealed Wheel charts #3 and 4 attempt to collapse two seemingly oppositional pictorial scenes by way of strategic openings in the top contextual frame that reveal the content below. Two related achievements: a) each idealize scene (top and bottom) is related and subverted by the other; b) invent new, juxtapositional narrative possibilities. 15. Continuous Hydrogenase processing When the algae C. Reinhardtii, a single cell green algae, is deprived of oxygen and sulfur, it spontaneously begins producing hydrogen gas for a period of four days. Then the algae must be recycled into a normal aerobic atmosphere. The process can be maintained continuously, as long as fresh algae is supplied to replenish exhausted stock.
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16. Algae cultivation area, a comparative study for a ďŹ ve-week launch campaign 1. Large; Rocket: Delta IV; Algae cultivation area: 85,524 square miles; 56 Rhode Islands 2. Medium; Rocket: Falcon I; Algae cultivation area: 13,920 square miles; 9 Rhode Islands 3. Small; Rocket: Spaceloft XL; Algae cultivation area: 139 square miles; .09 Rhode Islands 17. Payload and Launch Vehicle processing of a typical Soyuz launch 1. Payload arrivals at Yubileiney Airport. Unload payload from transport airplane onto transfer railroad. 2. Payload transferred to MIK 112 facility. 3. Spacecraft autonomous preparations. 4. Spacecraft filling and testing. 5. Payload integration with upper composite stage. 6. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd stage Launch Vehicle (LV) arrival and transfer to MIK 40. 7. Launch vehicle preparation. 8. Upper composite transfer to MIK 40. 9. Upper composite integration with LV 3rd stage and LV final integration. 10. LV transfer to launch pad and LV stand-up on launch pad. 11. Preparations, fueling, and launch.
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18. A typical Soyuz launch campaign described as a function of time and distance Time is measured in radians, with the arrival of the launch payload at Yubileiney Airport at the outer edge of the chart, and the moment of launch in the dead center. Each 4.8 degree equals one kilometer of distance; a straight line along a radius indicates that the payload or rocket is stationary for an amount of time, while a curve describes movement. Note the construction/destruction line (an idea drawn from Paul Virilio). Inside this circle, the launch vehicle is fueled and destruction of the rocket is assumed by the robustness of the infrastructure within it. 19. Measuring a farmer’s time As a proportion of the Earth’s annual orbit around the sun. 20. Insolation Given a set area, insolation can be described as a slope used to determine the amount of time need to cultivate an amount of hydrogen. 21. Insolation analysis of platonic solids The cone presents the most surface to the sun, measured as a cumulative daily average at the solstices and equinoxes.
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22. The equation Using the cone from plate 21 to increase the surface area of a hydrogen production array, this equation describes the relationship between variables where: A = cultivation area (in square feet); h = height of cones (in feet); n = number of cones; t = time (in days)
Two solutions are presented using the equation. Both set t equal to five weeks. The first requires a cone far dwarfing any man-made structure (indeed, Mt. Everest would be able to fit inside it), while the other presents a vast array of cones at a more modest height. 23. Expanding surfaces of a geodesic to cultivate hydrogen from algae: summer sun 24. Expanding surfaces of a geodesic to cultivate hydrogen from algae: winter sun 25. Expanding surfaces of a geodesic to cultivate hydrogen from algae: trim Faces of a geodesic positioned on a site are enlarged on the basis of maximum insolation for a specific time, others are enlarged for a different 45
specific time. In this way, an emblematic form is created that is performative and iconic. Of course, the variantion between the surfaces is small, and the solar criterion is expansive. At a certain point, the decision of what surface to expand and trim becomes a question of aesthetics. This choice is delightfully irrational, owing to the seemingly rigid but tranformative and variable nature of the invented program. 26. Kennedy Space Center, courtesy of Google Earth a. Space Shuttle landing strip b. Vehicle Assembly Building c. Launch Control Building d. Turning Basin e. Crawlerway f. Launch Complex 34 A g. Launch Complex 34 B h. Commercial / Military satellite launch pad i. Banana River j. KSC Visitor’s Center k. Security Post l. NASA Headquarters Building 27. Zones of exclusion The industrial-scientific launch zones of Kennedy Space Center have never been freely accessible to tourist. Instead, an expansive Visitor Center hovers far outside the action, filled with artifacts of 46
the United State’s space past and present. Tourists are loaded onto a bus (1) into the exclusion zone (2) and shuttled to-and-fro amid NASA’s working building (3). 28. Aerial view, including Hydrogen production array, gasometer, and Vertical Assembly Facility Sited within the zone of exclusion, the Hydrogen production array, gasometer, Vertical Assembly Array cultivate and store Hydrogen rocket fuel, grown sustainably from massive hydrogen arrays, forming a mega-pavillion. Hydrogen production is slow, and a rocket is launched once every 76 years, coinciding with the return of Halley’s Comet. A causeway brings tour buses from the Visitor’s center the facility, isolating visitors from the surrounding nature preserve. 29. Building life and launch cycle During most of the building’s life, the gasometer within the geodesic at the heart of the facility, slowly collects and stores Hydrogen harvested from the array. However, as the perigee of Halley’s orbit brings it nearer to Earth, the gasometer is emptied and the rocket is fuelled. Visitors to the array are at an apogee and the now-irrelevant gasometer is converted to a planetarium.
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30. Exploded axonometric 1. Mechanical room 2. Opening in array and geodesic 3. Hydrogen cultivation array 4. Diagrid 5. Geodesic, gasometer’s outer shell 6. Elevator and fire stair 7. Spherical gasometer 8. Tour bus 9. Causeway to Vertical Assembly Facility 31. Plans At +14’ and +160’ 32. Sections As indicated on plate 31. 33. Hydrogen production array, skin assembly Typical construction of the Hydrogen cultivating skin. Two large corrugated clear PVC panels are fastened back to back, forming a series of tubes divided by a course of sealant. 1. Corrugated PVC assembly, outer panel 2. Water and suspended algae 3. Sealant 4. Tertiary steel structure. 5. Access ladder 6. Primary steel diagrid structure 7. Hydrogen conduit 48
34. Model #1 Vehicle Assembly Building Scale 1/64” = 1’ -0” 35. 36. Model #2 Hydrogen Production Array and Gasometer Scale 1/64” = 1’ -0” 37. 38. Model #3 Vertical Assembly and launch facility Scale 1/64” = 1’ -0” 39. VAB and gasometer viewed from a causeway crossing the Banana River 40. Approaching the gasometer, from inside a tour bus 41. Between the outer and inner shells of the gasometer, facing northwest 42. Between the outer and inner shells of the gasometer, facing northeast 43. Underneath the Hydrogen array, viewing the launch of the rocket to Halley’s Comet
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