T H E G E O M E T R Y A N D T H E U N C A N N Y I N T H E I N T E R I O R O F T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L S PA C E S TAT I O N by Alice Gorman

tions are organized around membership in corporate dwellings rather than descent lineages. 7 This seems particularly apt for the International Space Station: an unrelated crew molded into a culture by the nature of their intended dwelling.

The existence of the house, then, bears further inquiry. But to understand its interior, we should start with the exterior.

Sphere, Cylinder, and Saucer

Something that’s rarely remarked upon in either architecture or anthropology is that terrestrial houses are structured by gravity and pressure. In contrast to space, atmospheric pressure is the same whether inside or outside. And as space environments researcher Ondrej Doule has noted, all empirical standards in terrestrial architecture relate to one type of gravity 8 . The floor is down, closest to the center of Earth; the ceiling is up, closer to the heavens. The dimensions of the house relate to the orientation and dimensions of the human body. Doors and windows align to the configuration of hands, feet, and head.

A notable feature of contemporary architecture in industrial societies is the Euclidean geometry of the vertical and rectilinear. In his Poetics of Space, philosopher Gaston Bachelard states that a house is, first and foremost, a geometric object: “It is dominated by straight lines, the plumb-line having marked it with discipline and balance.” 9 It’s easy to forget that this wasn’t always the dominant architectural geometry. Round and curved houses are among the earliest known from archaeological contexts. For example, domed mammoth bone houses in eastern Europe date from about 23,000 years ago at the height of the Last Glacial Maximum. From the Ice Age to the present, curvilinear architectures have survived across many continents, for both houses and tombs. Prior to the conception of the infinite universe in the 14 th century, 10 the round house acted as “a microcosm of the Universe.” 11

When the early space theorists imagined habitats in microgravity, practical constraints led them to hark back to these earlier nonindustrial architectures. In the 1920s, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky sketched out life inside a giant spherical habitat, where the floor would no longer be distinguishable from the ceiling. 12 Creating gravity by spinning was of little interest to him, as he saw gravity as the source of social inequality. Inside his habitats, microgravity “makes the poor equal to the rich,” as virtually no energy is needed for transport and construction.

No slouch in the imagination department, Tsiolkovsky already had envisaged some of the most pressing domestic problems inside the space habitat. One of his fictional astronauts foreshadowed the schoolchildren’s questions of a century later:

All sorts of odds and ends are drifting about the rocket, dust doesn’t settle—how are we to wipe it away? Water refuses to stay put in open vessels, you can’t take a bath or wash, and in the lavatory it’s just awful . . . 13

In this house, dust was not concealed in corners or under furniture: it was ambient, present in a way that drew attention.

Around the same time, a young officer in the Austrian army was less concerned with the social consequences of microgravity and more with the engineering challenges. In his 1929 book, Hermann Noordung considered the problems of low pressure and gravity in orbit. To be pressurized, space stations needed curved surfaces, as flat surfaces would require internal supports to withstand the overpressure. 14 His solution was a spinning torus or doughnut-shaped space station.

Noordung may have been less lyrical than Tsiolkovsky, but he was perceptive in other ways. As a consequence of the curved torus architecture, space stations would have a non-Euclidean geometry where parallel lines converged instead of remaining the same distance apart. 15 The interiors of the space station would be very unfamiliar indeed to the astronaut cohort. This curvilinearity was co-opted into the aesthetics of the Space Age, exemplified by Matti Suuronen’s flying saucer-shaped Futuro houses built in the 1960s and 1970s.

The World in a Tube

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Noordung’s torus space station was championed by Wernher von Braun as a staging post for the rest of the solar system. Von Braun rightly argued that microgravity would have a deleterious effect on the human body, allow-

ing muscles to atrophy. Hence the space house, like Baba Yaga’s round chicken-feet hut from Russian folklore, needed to spin. But when the architect Eliot Noyes (who was involved with the design of 2001: A Space Odyssey) conducted a habitability study, it turned out that spinning made for a very poor astronaut experience. Although a torus-shaped space station was designed, it was abandoned in favor of recycling Apollo technology. The space station that would become Skylab was the cylindrical body of the Saturn V rocket. And so US space stations turned into tubes, just like the Russian Salyuts and Mir.

Skylab tested design for habitability, meaning an environment which was fit to live in with a perceived quality of life for the astronaut. 16 However, in the 1980s, when planning for the International Space Station began, the parameters changed to productivity, to compensate for the high costs of living in space. The confluence of productivity and habitability was influenced by the ideas of Eliot Noyes. One of these was organic design. Noyes described it in 1940 as an harmonious organization of the parts within the whole, according to structure, material and purpose. Within this definition there can be no vain ornamentation or superfluity, but the part of beauty is none the less great—in ideal choice of material, in visual refinement, and in the rational elegance of things intended for use. 17

In the 1950s, he developed the notion of the closed counterenvironment: “An ordered informational space set apart from the external environment and turned in upon itself.” The counterenvironment was “generated from the demands of machines upon human bodies and vice-versa.” 18 The International Space Station became such a counterenvironment. The emphasis was on the performance of the individual capitalist body, rather than the comforts of home: a new tension between workplace and house, typically the experience of women performing unpaid domestic labor. The organic harmony and structuring of interior space would produce the desired astronaut body. The socialization of the astronaut in this counterenvironment was based around factors that generated the right habits. These included, according to the NASA 1985 Space Station Human Productivity Study, the color, texture, and patterns of the décor, the internal lighting, the layout, and how astronauts moved through it. In the torus, this movement could be an endless circle. The ISS, however, was a nest of cylinders interlocking at right angles. Keep moving forward, and eventually you come to the end of the tunnel.

Despite Noyes’ vision of the organic and balanced, the interior of the ISS is marked by excess: a superfluity of objects and tangled cables, rather than the clean lines of rational elegance. It’s a palimpsest deposit, with all periods of occupation mixed up together on the surface. Ancient cables from 20-year-old computers jostle with the latest tablets; a graffiti of Velcro patches adorns the walls. These are signs which can be read by the inmate, but are opaque to the gravity-bound observer, accustomed to thinking in two axes.

The Past Haunting the Present

Objects and dusts circulate differently inside the microgravity tubes, in comparison to terrestrial houses. Microgravity doesn’t let the ghosts leave, the bodies sink into the soil and be covered. In the counterenvironment, there is limited exchange with the outer world. What enters and leaves is strictly regulated. Outside, there is boundless, limitless space. Inside, everything seems out in the open, but in reality, there are endless places for objects to hide, often in plain sight. Let go of an object, and it can become lost in seconds. Memory does not help you when objects are animated in the same way as humans. Within the terrestrial house, gravity underpins the mnemonic. The tendency of an object to remain where we left it last is lost in microgravity. Interiors must be designed to fix things in sight, by Velcro, straps, or holds, so that they can be remembered.

In this sense, the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar evokes the unheimlich, the uncanny, something that is strangely familiar but disturbing. 19 Sigmund Freud contrasted unheimlich with heimlich, which means belonging to the house, familiar and comforting, or, paradoxically, hidden or concealed. But unheimlich is not frightening because it is unfamiliar. Rather, the uncanny “is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” 20 He also finds it in the act of

repetition, of not knowing where one is, walking in circles only to see the same landmarks. The modular design of the station contributes to the “doubling” effect and microgravity multiplies it through the 360 degrees of the circle.

For us, as outside observers of the interiors through the camera’s eye, the uncanny lies elsewhere again. There is something eerie in the images of empty rooms on the International Space Station. It feels as if the “astronaut” is always just out of sight, just around the corner in another module, having exited the room moments before the camera snapped. When we see crew in the image, we recognize a familiar room in the house. Their bodies define an arbitrary up and down (note in how many images the astronauts align their bodies with each other). In their absence, the empty room becomes uncanny; our sense of orientation is destabilized, like looking through a kaleidoscope instead of a telescope; we become lost.

Perhaps it is for the best that Noordung’s torus space station, spinning or not, was never realized. In the mathematical world of topology, spheres, cylinders, and cubes are homeomorphic: they are essentially the same shape, as they can be deformed into each other. Thus, both terrestrial and space houses, for all their differences, are topologically identical. The torus, however, is not, as it must retain its central cavity. Here, the uncanny is always just beyond the curve of the walls. Walking around the perimeter of the torus gives the sensation that if you turn your head rapidly enough to look behind, you will see your past or future self about to enter.

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18 19 20 Hitt, David, Owen Garriott, and Joe Kerwin, Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). Buchli, Victor and Gavin Lucas, The Absent Present: Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past in Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past, eds Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas (London: Routledge, 2001), 9. Ibid., p. 10. Carsten, Janet and Stephen Hugh-Jones, Introduction: About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond in About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond, eds. Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4. ibid Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘’The Berber House or the World Reversed,’’ Information 9, no. 2 (April 1, 1970): 151-170. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The Way of the Masks (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982). Doule, Ondrej. “Ground Control: Space Architecture as Defined by Variable Gravity,’’ Architectural Design 84, no. 6 (Nov. 12, 2014), 90-95. Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 48. Koyré, Alexandre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (New York: Harper, 1958). Parker Pearson, M., Food, Fertility and Front Doors in the First Millennium BC in The Iron Age in Britain and Ireland: Recent Trends, eds. T.C. Champion and JR Collis (Sheffield: J.R. Collis Publications, 1996), 119. Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, The Call of the Cosmos (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), 71. Ibid., p. 235. Noordung, H. The Problem of Space Travel: The Rocket Motor, eds. E Stuhlinger and JD Hunley (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4206, 1929), 88. Ibid., p. 104-105. Clearwater, Yvonne A. ‘’Space Station Habitability Research,’’ Acta Astronautica 17, no. 2 (Feb. 1988): 217-222. Harwood, John. ‘’The White Room: Eliot Noyes and the Logic of the Information Age Interior,’’ Grey Room 12 (Summer 2003): 8. Ibid., p. 17. Freud, Sigmund. ‘’The Uncanny,’’ Imago V (1919): 297-324. Ibid., p. 1.

Opposite page: The first space station, as imagined in 1883 by Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, Russian rocket scientist and space pioneer. It’s a sphere, a shape well suited to hold pressure in vacuum. All the systems illustrated by Tsiolkovsky are found today on modern space stations: propulsion, gyroscopes, airlocks. The space station occupants are represented in different orientations, just as astronauts are once in space.

Z1 Truss High Bay Space Station Processing Facility – SSPF NASA Kennedy Space Center, Florida