Architecture, Media, + Climate

Past-Future and Future-Fiction Perspectives:

Architectural Phenomena in the Face of a Destabilizing Earth

Designers and visual communicators must take a stance on architectural relevance in the face of the planetary issue of climate crisis. Our contexts and sociopolitical climates may limit what we can envision as a possibility for our future, but technology has given us the feasibility ‘green light’ to calculate design implications for humanity’s future on—or off—the Earth. It is up for debate which material rhetoric is the most convincing indication of global urgency: political media, images, data, graphs, etc. Regardless, we as humans are separated from the natural world by media and media can be mechanized to help humanity reconsider that boundary’s existence and ponder the implications of a future world.

Climate Crisis vs Environmental Crisis: The State of Us, Such As We Are

Digital media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun speculates on inaction as a bad ‘habit of living’ in response to the distorted models of causal and correlative climate data released to prolong debates of its verifiability. Rather than proceed in a state of inaction, which would cause what is now speculative data to eventually become true, Chun suggests we change our habits to address uncertainty rather than wait for finely tuned images: “creative anticipations based on repetition are key to building responses to combat global climate change and to registering and negotiating unimaginable, invisible, and seemingly inexperienceable causalities and correlations.” This analysis gives architects and planners free reign to explore solutions to a wide scope of spatial and technological questions of resilience in the face of climate uncertainty.

The invisible and unimaginable scale of climate change is challenging to remain conscious of on a quotidian basis for those who are privileged to consider the mediatic condition of habit change. In this case, who is to blame for a lack of communication of urgency? It is the role of the architect to produce new knowledge through media, with media as the interface of said knowledge. As stated by Chun, knowledge may be uncertain, but knowledge can be used to fuel one’s agency. Is it possible architects and creators aren’t being cautionary or extreme enough? Are architects making resilience design look too comfortable despite the visual evidence of environmental transformation and degradation? The first photograph of Earth, “The Blue Marble” (Image I), taken by the Apollo 17 spacecraft crew in 1972, forces its onlookers to draw a line between themselves and those who view their place on the planet in diverging ways. The Earth, framed in a mediatic image; a viewer either sees the planet fully revealed—it is all we have and all we will ever have—or sees infinite resources, masking the finitude of the Earth as it is seemingly able to be further exploited. The scale of the planetary in the scope of climate crisis thus remains invisible to us. In this case, until a new image changes how we relate to the world, we wait in a state of inaction until the publishing of “The Gray”, “The Orange”, or “The Black Marble”.

An image of the Earth is alienating for humanity to visually consume and comprehend but it is contributing an ever-expanding perspective of climate change evidence detection for those who seek it. Neil Evernden, author in environmental thought, expands this perspective of an alienated humanity on Earth by suggesting that climate crisis posits humanity as a niche-less species separated from our environment by our tendency to constantly develop novel technologies. As a niche-less species, we have afforded ourselves a flexibility of contexts as new technologies remove us from our evolutionary context and allow us to flourish wherever, unchecked, until resources become a limiting factor: “The consequences of technology are subtle but extensive, and one such consequence is that man cannot evolve with an ecosystem anywhere. With every technological change he instantly mutates into a new—and for the ecosystem an exotic—kind of creature.” Herein lies humanity’s cultural search for meaning. Our social ecology is a constant search for alleviation from this sense of placelessness to which we are, according to Evernden, biologically predisposed by our need to improve and innovate no matter where we are environmentally. Evernden recognizes an environmental crisis upon humanity, which has ultimately led to our global state of climate crisis:

“For Heidegger…technology is not simply the utilization of tools but the understanding of the world as a field for the use of tools… The world we see is therefore revealed against a background (context) of belief, without which it could not appear as it does. And against that background there is only one kind of reaction available to us—the search for problems and solutions…tall smokestacks and catalytic converters are clever inventions, but they do not address the core of the environmental crisis. It is not a question of our encountering the crisis and resolving it through technology. The crisis is not simply something we can examine and resolve. We are the environmental crisis. The crisis is a visible manifestation of our very being…[it is] inherent in everything we believe and do; it is inherent in the context of our lives.”

In this case, humanity’s Umwelt, the world as it is experienced by humans, has always been in a state of evolving uncertainty as humanity strives to improve upon itself while it copes with the confusion of constantly adapting and reshaping itself to new environments on Earth, unlike other species which ‘naturally’ (unquestionably) evolve at a slower rate.

Evernden’s analysis concludes that we as members of humanity exist as naïve ontologists acutely experiencing the meaning-perception of our changing environment, whether externally or internally imposed. Similarly, Donna Haraway in her “Cyborg Manifesto” calls upon the cyborg as our ontology in a postmodern context, suggesting that our body politic is a construct of “cyborg consciousness.” In the cyborg consciousness boundaries, as we know them, are completely split into hybrids or chimeras such as machine and organism, human and animal, and ultimately the physical and the nonphysical. This splitting is symbolic of the shattering of structures where hostile boundaries are necessary within existing constructs such as within identity formation. There is also an emphasized importance on survival in order to dispel myths of pre-cyborg culture. As Evernden explains that the environment is us as we understand and perceive it, Haraway similarly states that “the machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.” This autonomy over embodiment, agency over that which before now had simply been given and accepted by us, is an interesting attitude toward how we as architects might choose to design differently.

A Call for Architects to Do Things Differently

If architects universally approached problems through the lens of cyborg imagery, in Haraway’s terms, by embracing the “skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life…building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories” then global society would understand, take a stance, and act, unanimously, upon the climate crisis. In our state of urgency it is no longer up for debate whether we need to change our ‘habits of living’ and it is the job of the architect—among others—to calculate, strategize, and materialize the survival kit for a changing world on or off the Earth. Whether or not we are talking about Earth, it is up to humanity, looking forward, to become inheritors of what Isabelle Stengers calls “a second history”, in which we no longer rely on past knowledge through which to see future histories and construct futures that resist influence of existing power structures which result in barbarism. What sort of architecture would this bioclimatic body politic inspire?

Architectural Visions from the Past and the Earth’s Environment:

Living Within a Concept

It is important to look toward futuristic architectural visions from the past in order to recognize the limitations of those visions, their contexts, and their mediatic accessibility. A taxonomy of retrofuturistic visions has been organized chronologically including Archigram’s Walking City, selected projects and manifesto of the Metabolist movement, and Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti and development of ‘Arcology’, in order to assess how architects have envisioned earthly cities during a period of rapid change and adapted to growth. These are future cities in which it is envisioned that humans will live within a designed concept and architects change the habits and conscious awareness of its envisioned inhabitants.

In Archigram’s “Walking City” (1964), the cyborg imagery comes to mind as moving robotic city-machine-buildings act as a living organism, freely communicating with other machines as needed without any design elegance in its communication structure like that of typical, planned urban streetscapes. (Image II) During the formation of Archigram (Architecture Telegram) in the early 1960’s, cartoon drawings by its founder, Peter Cook, helped communicate the visions ultimately expressed in their first major exhibition called “Living City” at the ICA London in 1963, which speculated on innovations in architecture in relation to art, inventive cybernetics and robots, growth and modernity, all within the scope of the city. In Walking City, developed by Ron Herron, the city-machine operates as an individual within a city or as an entire metropolis within itself. Their mobility is dictated by need: resource scarcity, manufacturing, or environmental conditions such as air quality, water, or even moving to where there is direct light, especially in an off-Earth scenario such as Walking City on Mars’ moving out of the shadow of surrounding planetary forms.

In the context of the 1960’s, these machines appear more like defensive space crafts with offensive protruding tubes in case of a post-apocalyptic scenario during the Cold War era in which citizens need to be transported to safe zones. Although Herron’s drawings are detailed elevations of the walking city and its vaguely dense urban context that could be anywhere in the world at any time in the future, this representation is difficult to understand at the level of the individual human or family unit and how they would live on these machine ships and circulate within them. The clearest path of circulation is the protruding tubes which are described to serve a number of uses, from connective passageways to plumbing. How does one avoid accessing a plumbing tube by mistake? It is helpful to see the dimensionality and scale of these cities represented with modern rendering software (image III). The vision of the city within a city and the city as isolated individual machine becomes understandable, yet the scale of the individual is still unintelligible. Whether or not this is intentional on behalf of Archigram, it portrays the mindset of prioritizing the collective survival of the urban communities over the dwelling of the individual family unit-within-the-community-within-the-machine, and the large scale of the city-machine stands as a vessel that is anti-war, anti-destruction, and anti-waste.

While Archigram remained purely as idea-based “paper architecture”, a post-war movement began in Japan that was started with the intention of fully realizing their visionary cities. Walking City is considered a megastructure but the urban visions of the Metabolists are much more emblematic of a megastructural organization with clear, separate components for structure and infill. This facilitates the visualization of how individual units are organized within a greater system. Metabolism, started by a group of young Japanese architects, is a movement first publicly proposed at the 1960 Tokyo World Design Conference. The movement acknowledges a new relationship between humanity and technology as humans have developed a reliance upon technology that will likely increase into the future, ultimately acknowledging this technological influence on the body-politic of Japanese society. Within Metabolism there is a clear role of the architect in devising “spatial equipment” that citizens can operate themselves while facilitating humanity’s control over their own environments. As a result, the architecture acts as an expression of its inhabitants—man and machine as they live, circulate, metabolize, and recycle—even as they become obsolete, die, and are replaced.

Accessibility of the projects is expressed in hand drawn renders (image IV), physical models, as well as floor plans articulating overall internal organization and organization within the capsule “infill” of the individual unit. Within the unit (Image V) it is clear where one sleeps, eats, exits, and circulates from their capsule to the rest of the megastructure and to others residing within. The capsule is Kisho Kurokawa’s brainchild but shares western contemporaries with Archigram’s capsule designs to meet the needs for postwar mass housing while sharing concepts with pre-war designs by Buckminster Fuller and Jean Prouve’s Le Maison des Jours Meilleurs (Image VI). Even Haraway’s description of the home for the dispersion of the unitary self in her cyborg imaginary is described as ‘module architecture’ for a simulated nuclear family. The various Metabolism project proposals have names and expressions that refer to water or sky elements, denoting importance of the element in relation to the life-form of the megastructure’s expression. The most famously constructed Metabolist project erected outside of the context of the 1970 Expo is Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, built and opened in 1972, chronologically after the “death” of Metabolism as a group. It is fascinating to see the project realized in built form, however its downfall is the fact that the building no longer works within the city, thus rendered metabolically “dead”. However, due to architectural and cultural preservation—and the fact that a couple of remaining people occupy the still-functioning units—it is ill-advised to tear down the emblematic edifice.

Metabolist proposals and theory remain accessible and relevant to visionaries as designers and architects are able to expand the projects in re-imaginings of the urban landscape present day through visual communication in competition boards with articulated drawings and renders (Image VII). One vision that began around the time of the Metabolist’s end in 1970 and is continuing present day is that of Paolo Soleri’s desert city at Arcosanti in Arizona (Image VIII), an emblem, under slow-paced construction, of his concept of Arcology. Soleri designed Arcosanti while seeking an alternative compact city design within the framework of his concept of Arcology (Architecture + Ecology) in which resources are preserved within the framework of quality of life. In alignment with Arcology, Arcosanti resembles an “urban implosion” in which the buildings evolve similarly to an organism, which evolves to become more complex and compact. Placed on top of a desert mesa so as not to disturb areas of biodiversity, Soleri aimed to develop small portions of hyper dense cities while leaving as much land untouched as possible. In Soleri’s ‘Map of Despair’ he identifies the remaining islands of untouched, natural land in the United States, an archipelago floating within swaths of land overrun with pollution (Image IX). Soleri is critical of senseless development and land use practices, such as America’s ever-extensive urban and suburban sprawl, which takes command of nature and swallows it up accompanied by urban furniture such as roads, highways, pipelines, rail lines, etc. The site at Arcosanti is protected and run through programs that are sensitive to the local ecological desert makeup through agriculture, food production, rainwater management, trail management, and so on. Architecturally the site is composed of passive, self-heating amphitheatres in proximity to artist’s studios and living units that stack as box modules with large, round windows for cross ventilation and natural light. The materials used to build are local to the site and the inhabitants know how to live, make, build, and share information on site about what is developing as the project remains unfinished, visually somewhere between a construction site and an archaeological ruin (Image X). It is as if the slow pace of construction on site is anticipating the right moment when the rest of the US is ready to take on this future city’s vision and ultimately live it as it grows in its implosive, self-organizing density and complexity.

In an issue of Stewart Brand’s CoEvolution Quarterly, descended from Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, an article by Soleri is written about his concerns and considerations regarding humans in space colonies. A spiritual man, Soleri chooses theology over Earthly ecology as the “Urban Effect” in space is the next step toward divining man and G-d in his statement, “the bridge between matter and spirit is matter becoming spirit.” He mentions that, operating with the human concerns of the social, environmental, cultural, ethical, and esthetic, is an eschatological concern to give rise to new theological models in space exploration. (Eschatology: a study or science dealing with the ultimate destiny or purpose of mankind and the world). As the creator of Arcosanti and Arcology one might suspect Soleri wouldn’t be enticed by human colonies in space, and not merely because he is looking forward to the restoration and preservation of natural lands on Earth with the removal of human impacts. Perhaps Soleri is also a science fiction nerd who is interested in defending the Earth with the fictional imaginaries of unpopular culture—marginalized communities uniting to save the planet.

Science fiction ‘nerd ecology’ begs the question: what is the relationship between real and fictional worlds in the context of ecological crisis? How is this addressed when our political environment is allowing crisis to flourish in favor of consumerist capitalism and barbarism?

Can Sci-Fi Film Save Our Planet, Presently?

Climate change is real and is being hastened by man-made factors. In spite of the overwhelming evidence supporting the existence of climate change, the United States has refused, remarkably, to participate in the Paris Climate Agreement In the present US political arena, where “fake news” and “alt-facts” confound virtually every important issue of social consequence, the threats to the Earth from climate change are being positioned frequently as unimportant, untrue, or “a Chinese conspiracy.” Sparring among mainstream media outlets and the alt-right further obfuscates the veracity of scientific evidence on climate change. Fortunately, the film industry maintains a persistent and independent voice on the perils of climate change. During the past few decades, the science fiction genre has embraced climate change among the potent, dangerous, and imminent threats to life as we know it. As a result, directors have presented movie-goers with rich speculative views into life that is altered to the extreme by climate catastrophe. As cautionary tales, these filmmakers design plausible worlds that address all aspects of the built environment, including shelter from the elements, procuring of clean air and water, farming, family units and community. As such, these films serve many roles in the climate change debate, including educating the public on known perils, showing the effects of current habits and practices, and illuminating the need for new solutions and further research.

Movies that consider architecture as essential to the film’s story typically fall under futurist fantasy genres, backed up with scientific and architectural derivations from the past. In an order from least-to-most ‘futuristic’, Ridley Scott’s 2015 film, The Martian, starring Matt Damon, represents no crisis on Earth but rather a crisis on Mars as astronaut Mark Watney is mistakenly presumed dead while on a mission and left to survive on Mars. The climate on Mars is shown at its most “comfortable” as a livable desert environment, and is otherwise experiencing extremes in temperature and wind storms. One would think the abandoned astronaut is completely left with nothing until the compact, technologically luxurious astronaut living quarters (“The Hab”) is revealed to have everything one could ever need while food and resources last. By using harvested (packaged) human waste and excrement with water and strong artificial light, Mark is able to grow his own food on Mars while preparing for his mission back to Earth in 4 years time with some downward turns of misfortune for dramatic effect. The designs for the spaceship and the Mars outpost living quarters look identical to existing designs for Mars Research Stations (Image XI). The production designer for the film, Arthur Max, based the designs on the efficiency of existing NASA spacecraft and atmosphere safety research. There is a sterility to the clean, white mechanism that keeps humans contained and comfortable while on a dusty, temperamentally stormy planet (Image XII). While the outpost is heavily mechanized, it also has aspects of lightweight construction, presumably for transport as these outposts are not intended for long-term stay. Disregarding the fact that Mark is on Mars, the outpost does seem like a comfortable, livable dwelling space. The main take-away from this film is the poise of character necessary to be an astronaut who can calmly think logically through life-and-death scenarios. New designs from Bjarke Ingels and Foster and Partners for Mars Science City and Lunar Habitation are similar in their material and atmospheric practicalities in addressing a shelter architecture for humans on other planets (Image XIII).

Interstellar, Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film, takes viewers through many internal environments, ranging from the ordinary degradation on Earth, to realistic space craft travel through a worm hole, a tesseract 5th dimension capturing one moment in time, and a cylindrical futuristic home for humans in outer space. There’s also a robot that could have been designed by Mies van der Rohe (Image XIV). Evidently the art director of the film, Nathan Crowley, is a fan of modern architecture. Simplicity was the tactic behind providing an audience with a complex plot juxtaposed with simplistic architectural elements to create a visual relatability and legibility. The planet Earth that the film starts with is familiar farmland in monoculture disaster dustbowl—our not-so-distant future—creating a stark contrast between Earth and futuristic spacecraft design based on existing schemes. (Image XV). The most confusing scene plot-wise is the 5th dimensional Escher-esque tesseract, which is difficult to understand in theory with the plotline but is represented as a rigid series of orthogonal extrusions—an alien architect’s attempt to convey an environment a human can understand and respond to. The film concludes with the success of the excursion: to find a planet or place in space that is habitable for human space colonization—bright, full of orange glowing sunlight, grass and crops appearing from nothing in proximity to housing and healthcare spaces, an environment that appears to be flowing along the inside of a cylinder rotating in space. (Image XVI).

The rounded rotating space colony is elegantly articulated in a future beyond that of Interstellar in which the colony is well-established by the wealthy while the dystopic Earth is left to ruin with loose political and geographic borders, air polluted, with trickled-down access to advanced technology as robots slowly replace jobs for humans and humans can be surgically turned into cyborgs. This is the world of Elysium, Neill Blomkamp’s 2013 film about how life is ‘better up there’. The wealth of quality of life on Elysium, the name of the rotating torus space colony, is illustrated by actual mansions and starchitect civic spaces built on Earth (in real life) rendered on the torus while machines and devices clearly depict how necessity of health and healing is prioritized to the wealthy few thousand or so who get to live on Elysium while lower class Earthlings are literally left to survive or die (Image XVII). It is unusual how on Earth there are advertisements and billboards everywhere for Elysium with phrases such as “It’s Better Up There” when it is nearly impossible for those who remain on Earth to secure a lawful place on Elysium (Image XVIII). Based on how the torus is organized by land use, it is clear that the colony is not meant to grow in population or density. Sprawling mansions with their pools and tennis courts take up as much land as they please as if each property were a beachfront in the Hamptons. The entire torus is consistently shown to be made up of these haphazardly oriented oversized homes that mimic architectural styles of cookie cutter McMansions (Image XIX).

Scientifically-Supported Visions from the Past for our Future: Space Colonies

The land use on Elysium is not as community-minded as the land use proposed on NASA/Ames Summer Fellowship Design Study on space settlements from the 1970’s, which is undoubtedly what Elysium’s aesthetic is based upon by means of form, scale, and composition of framed camera shots that emulate NASA artists render-paintings. Although these types of space colonies have appeared in science fiction novels since the early 20th century, high-energy physician Gerard O’Neill, professor at Princeton University, began his own research on the feasibility of space colonies before handing the question over to a classroom of students: “Is the surface of the planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?”

Based on this question, this research is speculating off-Earth civilization, but ultimately it is for Earth, its species, and the future of humanity. Foster + Partner’s recent designs for Mars Habitation aren’t just for amusement. Foster’s designs are for the NASA Centennial Challenge, which is ultimately designing spaces for astronauts on Mars. The premise: autonomous machines help construct extra-terrestrial shelters for human habitation, while in the process helping the advancement of fabrication capabilities on Earth. The architectural challenge is a competition of structural performance within the constraints of a limit of parts.

Gerard O’Neill’s vision is enthusiastically laid out in his work, “The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space.” O’Neill’s motivation for this speculative research is based upon limitations on Earth such as confinement of human activity and resource scarcity of material and energy as a zero-sum game. O’Neill calls for a frontier that is exploitable for all of humanity, an unrealistic notion considering human population’s rising number:

“Our goal is to find ways in which all of humanity can share in the benefits that have come from the rapid expansion of human knowledge, and yet prevent the material aspects of that expansion from fouling the worldwide nest in which we live. Necessarily, many of the concerns of this book are materialistic, but more than material survival is at stake. The most soaring achievements of humankind in the arts, music, and literature could never have occurred without a certain amount of leisure and wealth; we should not be ashamed to search for ways in which all of humankind can enjoy that wealth.”

Two years after the completion of the NASA/Ames study O’Neill has no reservations on stating the technological capacity we now have to set up large human communities in space for manufacturing, farming, and all other human activities. According to O’Neill, this is by no means beyond us. At the time of the most recent space-news event, the first landing of man on the moon, it seems natural that the next ‘leap for mankind’ is space colonization down the line, “to make available for life every place where life is possible. To make inhabitable all worlds as yet uninhabitable, and all life purposeful.” The idea that the pursuit of this research is ultimately beneficial to humanity continues to be restated by the supporters of space colony research. Stewart Brand in his Letter-from-the-Editor in his CoEvolution Quarterly addresses how this alters humanity: “our perspective is suddenly cosmic, our Earth tiny and precious, and our motives properly suspect… Either way it goes [Space Colonies] should be made, because not knowing whether we can leave the planet begs all of our important questions. Either knowledge could make for more responsible habits. Either knowledge is a kind of growing up.” If researchers and scientists manage something so large and complex successfully, the knowledge can be put toward reversing our destructive practices on Earth. If it fails, then it is something that manages humanity, which humanity is not to take management of, “that we are in the care of wisdom beyond our knowing.”

A critique on these visions in rendered paintings, drawn, and diagrammed within the feasibility study reveal a sublime within sublime, a piece of visual culture to stimulate political and economic capital as well as a sense of wonder, a visual and organizational logic of urban interiors that maintain unity and economy of industrial production. However, according to Fred Scharmen, the sense of wonder varies as NASA artists portray the interiors of the colony differently, ranging from incorporating standardized home designs and floor plans like Reyner Banham’s ‘Terrassenhauser’ sloped terraced housing where each unit opens to the roof of the unit below. Other artists preferred to illustrate population density through garden apartments and integrated landscapes with architectural outdoor elements. Finally, one artist, Don Davis, preferred an empty interior, revealing the lush manifest destiny of open land ready for the taking as the first colonizers move in, their small spaceships hovering around the torus for a sense of scale (Image XX).

The sense of wonder diminishes greatly as the organized yet adaptable megastructure is shown in components of the building and floorplans as exhibiting a familiar ‘shopping mall gone mad’ same-ness, but that is also a weakness in architectural representation in general as a floorplan or a section does not transcend the awe inspired by a model or a rendered image of the same idea (Image XXI).

An aspect of the NASA Space Settlements design study that is interesting is the consideration that human population is something to be designed—and that this is nothing new, considering the paper architecture of the ‘60’s and 70’s and so on—which thus determines the suitability of the overall design itself. It cannot be exaggerated how calculated and designed every aspect of the space settlement is within the design study: from human needs in space within the physical properties of outer space zero gravity, alternative techniques for systems criteria to create a flourishing land, and ultimately a tour of the colony, a step-by-step of building the colony to prosper, and the possibilities of the future once it is in established, all with diagrams, charts full of calculations, and, always in a blue frame, spatial drawings that would especially appeal to the architect (Image XXII). Admittedly, going along with Scharmen’s critique, the floorplans exist in modular isolation with little inclination of how the units fit together to form the vision of the megastructure within the torus. Drawn renderings of housing at the human scale look like shopping malls within a glass arcade, or a denatured postmodern subdivision for the family unit to call home in space. It no longer feels like a space colony, but a design for a type of humanity that already exists outside of the proposed techno-social Umwelt of a new population that has yet to seize the opportunity to be part of the creation of a novel outer space Umwelt. The space is domesticated, normalizing the unfamiliar with suburban mall tropes. It is a fine line between nostalgia and accepting the existence of a constructed environment within a hostile void.

In response to the hostile void and the threat of human extinction on Earth, British physicist Freeman Dyson answers O’Neill’s initial question proposed to his class about planet surfaces for technological civilizations in support of isolated city states floating in the void. As these floating cities develop in accessibility, they can become Outlaw Areas, allowing a radical new type of human being to experiment and flourish as floating space junk—an interesting answer also to the question of the extinction of the human race on Earth. Which is to be the fate of humanity?

O’Neill has been thoroughly criticized for his visions which visibly pander to the wishes of corporation executives, political operators, militarists, bureaucrats, the guardians of Stenger’s “first history” and promoters of barbarism. However, O’Neill also calls for a coming together of administrative and creative minds to complete the full vision of humanity’s future by humanity’s visionaries:

Now is the time for NASA to encourage people besides engineers to get into the act. The program needs administrators who are not afraid of excellent artists, novelists, poets, film-makers, historians, anthropologists, and such who can speak to the full vision of what’s going on. And their voice needs to be a design voice, not just advisory. America (and Russia) were in Space for ten years before they bothered to get a photograph of the Earth. That’s pretty arid thinking.

It is evident to O’Neill that images and ‘design voices’ are paramount to the communication between (the state of the) Earth, Space and humanity, design innovations and humanity, the messages in national and international multimillion dollar blockbuster films and humanity; it is a relationship that fosters the accountability of the masses with thoughtful visionary exploration and knowledge exchange in a process of careful checks and balances in order to implement the smartest solution for the masses of the present future.

As for what to do on Earth, Alan Weisman’s “The World Without Us” speculates that, if we, humans, were to suddenly be removed from the face of the Earth, everything we have built and maintained would be destroyed very quickly due to less-than-sustainable, quick-fix methods of keeping the elements, specifically water, at bay. Impending fault lines and earthquakes would also turn high rise city visions to rubble in parts of the world where high rises oughtn’t be cheaply built on shaky foundations that were meant to sustain the weight of a mere storefront. It is incredible to see how patched together our developed urban environments are, regularly maintained and held in place by construction workers like a model held together by glue that never dries. Ultimately, Weisman states that we were never built to last, and in geological time all evidence of humanity will be wiped out to no more than a metallic red strip in a layer of rock. In response to this type of thinking in the face of current global catastrophes in the form of seemingly isolated events, Orit Halpern states that “we cannot dream of creative destruction, since we have indeed already destroyed the world, but nor can we continue to embrace a world without futures.” Like Chun’s ‘habits of living’, Halpern calls for an embracing of the uncertainty to test human life as an experiment for technological futures, rather than testing simulations of life for utopian answers, allowing the emergence of a testing ground utilizing self-referential ‘smartness’ that transforms the impacts of negative futures (destruction, death, etc) into a ‘positive embrace of end times’ by introducing social movements, art, architecture, design, humanities, science and politics to ‘reintroduce other forms of time and life into space’. In alignment with this hopeful resilience is the architectural and cultural illumination of paper architecture realized in the physical realm regardless of success or failure such as the works of the Metabolists and Soleri, and the art, design, and scientific rigor of blockbuster films bringing speculative, heavily research-based findings to life on screens for millions of people to consume and learn from. There is a call for visionaries and speculators to bring hypotheses to the realm of the hypo-real, to embrace the uncertainty in order to embrace a future on—or off—the Earth, to refuse to succumb to inaction and fear in the face of catastrophe.

Bibliography / further reading

Brand, Stewart (ed), Space Colonies, Penguin Books, New York, Waller Press, San Francisco, 1977.

Chun, Wendy H. K. “On Hypo-Real Models or Climate Change: A Challenge for the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 41:3, Spring 2015.

Evernden, Neil, The Natural Alien, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1985.

Graham, James (ed), Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, Lars Muller Publishers, 2016.

Halpern, Orit, “Hopeful Resilience” in Accumulation, Daniel A. Barber and e-flux eds., http://www.e-flux.com/architecture/accumulation/96421/hopeful-resilience.

Harraway, Donna, “Cyborg Manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century”, 1987.

Johnson, Richard D., and Charles Holbrow (ed), Space Settlements: A Design Study, NASA, Washington D.C., 1977.

Lioi, Anthony, Nerd Ecology, Bloomsbury Publishing, London/New York, 2016.

O’Neill, Gerard, The High Fronter: Human Colonies in Space, William Morrow and Co, New York, 1977.

Siegert, Bernhard, “Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic,” Grey Room 47, Spring 2012.

Scharmen, Fred, “Highest and Best Use: Subjectivity and Climates Off and After Earth”, Journal of Architectural Education, 71:2, Routledge, 2017.

Scharmen, Fred, “The High Frontier, The Megastructure, and the Big Dumb Object”, Journal of Architectural Education, 69:2, Routledge, 2015.

Stengers, Isabelle, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, Open Humanities Press, Ann Arbor, 2015.

Weisman, Alan, The World Without Us, St Martin’s Press, New York, 2007.