*Very "diegetic prototype." Hmmm. via @justinpickard
http://c-lab.columbia.edu/0203.html
Consider the Spacesuit, Part 1
Nicholas de Monchaux in conversation with Jeffrey Inaba, Justin Fowler and Leah Whitman-Salkin
In his forthcoming book, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, Nicholas de Monchaux probes the Cold War mindset through the lens of bodily enclosure, delving into the conflicts between aspiration and necessity behind the production one of the most innovative garments of all time.
Vaulting in scale from the fabric layers required to produce a flexible and impermeable suit to the systems-driven military industrial mindset of the sixties, de Monchaux, a former visiting fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, fleshes out a case for an expanded field of architectural possibility within the hazy and often inconsistent boundaries between man and machine.
In part 1 of our conversation with de Monchaux, we discuss Stanley Kubrick, Jane Jacobs, parametric design and the fallacies of Panglossian thinking. Look for part 2 in February.
Leah Whitman-Salkin: In thinking about the privatization of space exploration and the rapidly emerging economy of space tourism, how does the privatization of space exploration interact or mirror the city as a public/private sphere?
NdM: An essential document here is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Not because it’s science fiction but because of its relationship to science fact. (((Oh really.))) What people often don’t quite understand is that one of the most important reasons why Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke were able to make the film in around 1968 was not cultural, but financial and institutional.
By 1968 NASA had already paid for all of the Apollo hardware – two years earlier, in 1966, almost a nickel out of every tax dollar went to the Apollo program – but that couldn’t be sustained. Apollo had a singular goal: to bring back the TV image of an American on the moon. But after that there was no more investment, and no real plan for continued efforts.
So all of these space engineers were all of a sudden out of a job. Many of them, it turns out, went into urban government, but a whole phalanx actually went to work for Stanley Kubrick, because he was hiring. For example, an engineer named Fred Ordway, who had been Wernher von Braun’s assistant at NASA, became Kubrick’s assistant on the film, and supervised the rest of the ex-NASA personnel. So we can actually take a lot of the projections from 2001 as real; they’re not purely science fictional. (((It would be interesting to read a work which was "purely science fictional." I doubt that such a thing purely exists.))) The hotel on the space station, for example, a Hilton, came from the way in which all these companies were already enmeshed in the space program. It really was a military industrial commercial academic complex, not just a military industrial complex.
The actual story of space architecture is actually about a different kind of adaptation and hybridization. But the story we tell ourselves about it is not. It tends to be singular and spectacular, whether a NASA scheme or Archigram’s or anyone else’s. (((NASA and Archigram, together at last.)))
And that singular, spectacular story has been, most often, the type of space architecture brought down to earth. ((("Googie.")))
Another great example is Howard Finger, who designed the interplanetary nuclear spacecraft proposal on which 2001’s Discovery was based. Like many others, in 1968 he left NASA and he went to work for the Department of Housing and Urban Development where he was the director of research and he initiated one of the major 20th century programs on prefabricated housing, Operation Breakthrough. It was an enormous scheme in which dozens of massive aerospace contractors were commissioned to design houses. They built twelve prototype communities and had all these plans for expansion, for an urban and architectural space program on earth. (((Where are those architecture-fiction plans today, and could one instantiate them with a Makerbot?)))
In this context, we should remember that Hubert Humphrey made a speech in 1968 in which he announced that “the same techniques that brought us to the moon are going to solve the problems of American cities.” The rhetoric was not, as it would be taken now, a matter of comparison. Rather, he was referring directly to this vast set of cybernetically inflected architectural exploits, which went on for about half a decade and in which they were literally trying to use the same techniques which they used to get into space to solve the problems of American cities, not only of management, but of construction, of problem conception, of the organizations to make stuff that would be much more recognizable to you or I as architects: taking the utopian ideal of the space program and mapping it over any real utopia in conception.
Justin Fowler: Just to talk further about fiction, (((oh yes let's))) Herman Kahn’s biographer described the work being done at the RAND Corporation in the ‘50s and ‘60s as an “intuitive science” of nuclear war, where speculative hunches became quasi-fictional propositions to be tested through simulation and the “hard” image was underwritten by “soft” fashioning production that involved techniques of trial and error. ((("Design Fiction" never firing on all cylinders without some futurists in the mix, and the more "unthinkable," the better.))) Do you think perhaps that aside from parametric design there is another foil to your argument in the “green,” where the “soft” green image is underwriting the “hard” performance of sustainability and ecological optimization?
NdM: I would say simulation is one of the key connections. Because we’d never landed on the moon before, we had to develop pretty much every modern technique of simulation in order to do so – in order to practice something that you could inherently not do before you did it, and something on which so many resources of national prestige were depending. By the time we were landing on the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin each separately had done about 3,500 hours of in massive, sophisticated simulators. These simulations developed the technology on which much of current virtual space depends.
Simulation as a tool in design, one that helps master the realities of ecologies, landscapes, and cities, is one of the major intellectual legacies of the space race....
