A Space Resort
Living in the space is a dream.
2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing . On June 7th, NASA announced opening the International Space Station for commercial business so U.S . industry innovation can accelerate a thriving commercial economy in low-Earth orbit . Meanwhile, private companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, are playing an increasingly active role in the viability of space travel. These companies illustrate that we are taking concrete steps exploring the possibility of humans living, even temporarily, outside the earth.
1970s or 80s are the era when living in the space is more a realistic pursuit for people, encouraged by the tremendous achievement of space exploration in the past 10 year. However, the impotence of realizing it in the past 50 years frustrates us . Today, the idea of space traveling has a binary image for the public . It is both an fantasy for imagination stimulation, with the hope that human being can never one day live outside the earth. On the other hand, it is also a project in progress that may be carried out any moment from now on, with the hope given by the words of star entrepreneurs .
In NASA’s study for Space Settlements in the 70s’, the cover shows an astronaut whose face is hidden by the mask of the space suit . This illustration captures the need for concealment which comes from many practical limitations of space as a site for inhabitation. For example, the temperature can drop to 400 Fahrenheit during the night and rise to 250 during the day. There is no oxygen and the atmosphere is full of dangerous radiation etc . The human must be concealed inside a sealed up artificial environment in order to survive. Within this sealed manufactured interior, one’s real life plays out .
Concealing is the normal mode of modern culture, no matter how much it has been criticized. For Niechtche, it turns modern men into “walking encyclopedias” whose cover revealed nothing of the inside. For Karl Kraus, it sterilizes journalism, so it stops revealing what is going on. For Freud, this culture of concealing is presented as a “Civilized” morality which is the cause of mental illness .
In the book, Privacy and Publicity : Modern Architecture as Mass Media, this cultural of discretion is described as “masks” by Beatriz Colomina which is traced for its evidence in architecture. One primary example is the work of Loos, who claims a separation between interior and exterior, experience and representation. But, whose architectural designs complicate these clean binaries .
The culture of concealing also influences the speculations of living in the space, manifested in different ways . In NASA’s design study of space habitat in 1975, The designers had a strong tendency to replicate earth as a 1:1 copy- paste to the site of space. From these charts, we can see earth-bounded situations are used as references to set up design standards in the space. In this illustration by Don Davis depicts a French suburb built inside the container of habitat . The unusual context of space is concealed by the normality of earth and its standard situations . By opposition, in the Movie 2001: A space Odyssey, this premise is reversed. Kubrick successfully creates an up-front image of “otherness” wherein space obliterates nearly every familiar reference to earth in the extreme futurist design. Outlandish space design and eccentric details like the furniture becomes the “representation”, the “mask” of space.
However, our cultural context has changed, the modern culture of concealing has been shaken by many factors . We are now shifting to a culture of revealing . Or Are we? One of the factors is digital media . Details of everyone’s life are constantly livestreamed online. What was previously concealed is now revealed. At the same time, this uniform practice of revealing draws suspicion about the authenticity it reveals . While we can now peep behind the mask, is what we see another mask?
This parallel/recursive relationship between revealing and concealing is fundamental for the book discussing the authenticity of architecture in continuation of the existentialism debate implied by Laugier in his primitive hut and more explicitly claimed in Heidegger’s “Men and Space” conference with architects in 1951.
The Thesis speculates around the topic of authenticity base on the design of a space resort. The project is a space resort. It is the destination of a temporary trip to space. The design intends to look for a series of architectural consequences of space as a motivator of interruption. An intensified collective interior is created whose design heightens tensions between concealing and revealing as a means to question the necessity/essence of living back on earth. The thesis picks 8 autonomous moments in the resort to situate the discussion in a rather contextless environment of the space as an excuse. What need to be stressed is that this book does not intend to draft a manifesto for “authenticity”.
Worm Eye Aerial Plan
MEGAN PANZANO
REVEALS
CONCEALED
Plan Filed of Living
SIYUAN XI
ADVISOR: MEGAN PANZANO
A SPACE HABITAT REVEALS THE CONCEALED
Section Sleeping Capsule
XI
ADVISOR: MEGAN PANZANO
SPACE HABITAT REVEALS
CONCEALED
Axon Sleeping Capsule
MEGAN
Axon Centrifugal Configuration
ADVISOR: MEGAN PANZANO
REVEALS
XI
ADVISOR: MEGAN PANZANO
SPACE HABITAT REVEALS
SIYUAN XI
ADVISOR: MEGAN PANZANO
A SPACE HABITAT REVEALS THE CONCEALED
XI
ADVISOR: MEGAN PANZANO
SPACE HABITAT REVEALS
CONCEALED
Infinite Corridor
XI
ADVISOR: MEGAN PANZANO
A SPACE HABITAT REVEALS THE CONCEALED
Infinite Corridor
XI
ADVISOR: MEGAN PANZANO
A SPACE HABITAT REVEALS THE CONCEALED
Bathroom
SIYUAN XI
ADVISOR: MEGAN PANZANO
A SPACE HABITAT REVEALS THE CONCEALED
MEGAN
XI
ADVISOR: MEGAN PANZANO
SPACE HABITAT REVEALS
CONCEALED
MEGAN PANZANO
A SPACE HABITAT REVEALS THE CONCEALED
SIYUAN XI
ADVISOR: MEGAN PANZANO
A SPACE HABITAT REVEALS THE CONCEALED
SIYUAN XI
ADVISOR: MEGAN PANZANO
A SPACE HABITAT REVEALS THE CONCEALED
XI
ADVISOR: MEGAN PANZANO
SPACE HABITAT REVEALS THE CONCEALED
XI
ADVISOR: MEGAN PANZANO
SIYUAN XI
ADVISOR: MEGAN PANZANO
A SPACE HABITAT REVEALS THE CONCEALED
MEGAN PANZANO
SIYUAN XI
ADVISOR: MEGAN PANZANO
SPACE HABITAT REVEALS
CONCEALED
MEGAN PANZANO
HABITAT REVEALS
CONCEALED
MEGAN PANZANO
HABITAT REVEALS
CONCEALED