 So listen, what a treat it is to be here to celebrate the launch of Fred Charman's fantastic book, Space Settlements, which we've recently published and are absolutely thrilled about. I'm not going to be saying anything about the book itself since Fred will be doing exactly that. But I would just like to say that working with Fred on the book has certainly been one of the most gratifying collaborations that we've had in the Publications Office. It's a book that shows, among many other things, how our imagination of space is always a reflection of terrestrial concerns, environment, urbanization, political economy, culture, and architectural discourse itself, among many other things. Fred is a deeply compelling thinker and connects an incredible array of ideas, buildings, and actors of various species in his writings here and elsewhere. And the archive of imagery that he's assembled in this book is a stellar project in and of itself. So I'd like to, yes, thank you, you gave me that, yeah, that's you, stellar was for you. So I'd like to briefly acknowledge some of the folks involved on our end. Jesse Connick was instrumental in the editing process in our team. Jose Luis Villanueva and Amon King did such a fantastic job of tracking down images. And of course, Scott Van Der Zee, who is, where'd you get him? There he is. I did such a fantastic job of channeling these materials into a brilliant book design and also produced the amazing posters that you see outside. But back to Fred, Fred teaches at Morgan State University in Baltimore as a writer and is the best Twitter user that I know. He was a go-to source for clear eyed critique of speculative futures of any kind. As a designer working with his, sorry, as a designer with his working group for adaptive systems, among other organizations. Fred's work exhibits a keen sense of playfulness, but also I think of genuine care, always keeping an eye on how we might engage the many questions posed by emerging technologies, urban planning and development, and ecological crisis. And on that score, I know everybody's aware of the climate strike tomorrow, but I hope there will be some participation from this room. Fred's work is reliably inventive, unfilmly, thought-provoking, and this book here is no exception. So after a presentation from Fred, I'll be joined in conversation by Lydia Colapoliti, who recently returned to teach at the Cooper Union School of Architecture, and recently published The Architecture of Closed Worlds with Lars Mühlen. Lisa Massari, who is a professor of anthropology at Yale University, and the author of Placing Outer Space and Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds, and actually came to Yale from the University of Virginia, which has a Virginian, I have to point out. I think that her writing is such an important model for what a field like ours has to learn from anthropology and science technology studies. So we're delighted to be having this evening, Lisa. And then finally, Felicity Scott needs an introduction. She has a professor of architecture, director of the PhD, co-director of the CCCP program, and the most recent of her books, which you're of course familiar with, is Outlaw Territory's Environments of Insecurity, Architectures of Counterinsurgency, and she's written about these space limits phenomenon in E-Flex, Averreview, and elsewhere. So I think we have plenty of expertise here to help shepherd this conversation with Fred. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Fred Sharman. Thank you. That was a really wonderful introduction. I'm going to bring you around for the rest of the book tour. So, expect to cancel your parachute. So to reiterate some of what James just said, I also wanted to give a special thanks to James and to Jesse Connick as the books two co-editors. They were so so wonderful to work with. They just got it, I think, from the start, and they did such an excellent job just bringing everything to ground too, which I know wouldn't have happened without them. And thank you also, I should again reiterate to the two image editors, to Emmalyn and Jose, they did such a huge task and there's so much heavy lifting in the work they did to put everything together. So thank you. And of course, again, Scott van der Zee, who made this object just so functional and beautiful. I should also thank the Graham Foundation, whose support really was instrumental in making this whole thing possible. And we'll say more in conversation, but I also want to acknowledge my three co-panelists. You all have books that came up before and during the process of making this one. And I'm very lucky to have been in dialogue with those books and with you all personally, and I hope that that dialogue can continue. So this book's topic is a series of exercises done in the 1970s, partly under the auspices of NASA, to design very large orbital habitats for up to a million people. And these came in three flavors. The Stanford Taurus, the Bernal Sphere, and the O'Neill Cylinder. In particular, the book focuses on a 1975 design workshop, a so-called summer study, at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, that brought architects and urban planners to work alongside the space scientists and engineers, along with two painters, Don Davis and Rick Goodis. They made a series of renderings for the project that have had a lasting influence on a number of fields since then. And my book is, in many ways, a close reading of these paintings, drawing out their connections to the more mainstream history of architecture and urban design, and visual culture as well. In this book talk, what I'll try to do is kind of summarize the threads that run through the chapters and the way in which they build the book's stories and arguments. The summer study was led by Princeton physicist Dr. Gerardo O'Neill. For O'Neill, his own story about this project. This work began in 1969 when he asked his freshman physics students, quote, is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization? So as an aside, I was just at a space summit conference last week that was convened to commemorate the 50th anniversary of this question. The arguments in this book are partly based on opening up the terms presented by O'Neill here. What is important exactly about the nature of surfaces, planets, places, expansion, technology, and of course that very fraught term civilization. And there's a spatial complexity built into this project right from the beginning. When O'Neill had been assigned to teach this introductory course in physics, the first thing he did was to make a course within the course, a space within the space, where he reckoned that what he thought of as the more gifted students could work on special topics directly with him. And he hoped that by answering questions like the one he posed, this subset of students could address problems that were facing, as he put it, quote, all of humanity. At a time in the late 1960s, when engineering and technology were getting a bad rap. And so their answer to this question was probably predictably, no. The services of planets were not the best places for expanding technological civilizations. Instead of bringing the notions of expansion or technology into play though, their next step was to design new surfaces in space, away from planets in orbit, totally defined by technology, wrapped up and closed around themselves. And these surfaces would form the basis for new landscapes, cities, and buildings inside. And this idea of a sequestered group of technicians producing a closed world, or a walled garden, has particular resonance in design culture. As again, the nature of spaces, virtual and actual that are designed, aligns with the nature of the spaces that those spaces are designed in. So here's Apple's new headquarters. This is recently completed by Foster. And it's also, of course, in Silicon Valley. But besides the formal resonance here, it's important to remember that both of these habitats are places that are designed to include all of the necessities and amenities that an inhabitant might need. And here's the new Google headquarters under construction now, coincidentally right across the street from the NASA Ames Research Center where the 1975 summer study took place. And this rendering re-enacts almost point-for-point with the running paths, cafes, and terraces Rick Goodison's painting, Stand for Forest Interior. So what is the nature of this wraparound surface? And what are the qualities of the spaces those surfaces create? When the human inhabitation of outer space was made to seem, for the first time, technically possible, thanks to Konstantin Silkovsky's rocket equation in the late 19th century, scientists suppose that freefall and orbital space would allow new ways of living to be experimented with. In this drawing of Silkovsky's, you can see tiny figures floating, each one with a different body orientation, a different up and down. By the time the International Space Station was designed, space scientists have begun to realize that different orientations in freefall produce confusion, especially among the crew that had so many different cultural and geographic origins. In order to produce more spatial unity, life within the station falls in a greed-on, shared set of coordinates that the crew nominally stays oriented to. And the station itself continually adjusts its own orientation to the Earth's surface with gyroscopes. Their down is always the same as our down, here on Earth, even though the station orbits 200 miles above us, almost as if it were just a very tall building. But humans can't live in zero gravity for long periods of time. Besides the radiation that space exposes our body to, human bone strength, eyesight, and muscle mass starts to degrade after just a few weeks in freefall. So the habitats designed for the 1975 summer study would all rotate to provide artificial gravity inside through centrifugal force. This has some interesting spatial consequences. The overall form of the structures would have to have rotational symmetry, so hence the spheres, toruses, and cylinders. But inside, there would be no horizon falling away from the observer. Instead, the distant territory tips up and presents itself to you in plan or aerial view by the time it's directly overhead. On Earth, we perceive the land to be flat on average, with each of us sharing the same surface, even though that's not the whole story. In summer study habitats much smaller than planets, though this drawing is not to scale, it might start to seem that each person was inhabiting their own individual patch of orientation and geometry, with their heads pointed at a common center, and their feet pointed out at the blank pochette vacuum void of space. Some researchers in the NASA team thought that these conditions might contribute to something they called solipsism syndrome, a retreat into the self as a person could not avoid dealing with the fact that their entire world was a constructed artifact. In other contemporary media though, entertainment, film, video games, and experiments in cartography like this one from the British studio of Barrett, designers have speculated that this kind of perception, instead of causing stress, might feel like a kind of superpower, the ability to see the near and the far at the same time. And there's precedence for the spatial superpower in the history of architecture, especially in didactic structures like cycloramas and panoramas that make complex environments comprehensible. And in some of the large spaces in visionary neoclassicism that surround the inhabitant of a space with collected knowledge, light, or in the case of the blaze tomb for Newton, a model cosmos itself. The new surfaces in the 1975 summer study project are also related to another long lineage in architecture and urban design. The desire to get away from the old default ground plane and build new ground in the sky. Whether it's the private ground enabled by the skyscrapers that Rem Kuhlhaus wrote about in Delirious, New York, or is the public ground of roof gardens, podiums, skywalks, and flyovers of Probusian urbanism in the radiant city, these projects share the same critique of original urban ground, that it was crowded, dirty, and there was too little left of it to go around. So in literature and art made for the summer study project, we can see that all the same things that critics were saying about 20th century cities in the 1960s and 1970s are now expanded in scope and used to critique the planet earth. In North American popular culture from this era, there was in science fiction and in other media a growing sense that earth was too small, that there was not enough room for people to live, not enough resources, and not enough space to throw away pollution and garbage. In 1972 the Private Think Tank, the club of Rome, published Limits to Growth, a popular science book that said as much, which was widely read and discussed. And in 1973, the popular science fiction film based on a novel titled Make Room, Make Room, speculated that earth would soon get so overcrowded that everyone would need to eat soiling cream, which is made of people. If Le Corbusier's solution to congestion is to create a new urban condition in which the whole city is a park, then Gerardo Nio's team would design a case where the whole new world could be a park, and thereby alleviate earth's overcrowded. But as the designers of parks well know, artificial ground needs maintenance. Famously, the old new ground of the High Line, originally intended by the park's designers to be treated as a found condition, had to be almost completely scraped away and replaced before the new park could be built, as deferred maintenance and neglect had left the 100-year-old railbed to rot and rust. A new ground also depends on extraction. Central Park used guano from South America and night soil from New Jersey in order to make the land fertile enough to support new meadows and trees. In O'Neill's project, first the moon and eventually the entire asteroid belt would be strip-lined to build more and more new ground in the sky. As artists and theorists at least the park says, and I'm paraphrasing here, the existence of a new hill or structure in one place implies the existence of a new hole or void someplace else. There's a scene in the philosophy documentary, Examined Life, with philosopher Judith Butler taking a walk in San Francisco with disability theorist and artist Sonora Taylor. Butler is on foot and Taylor is using a motorized wheelchair. They are having a conversation about how the design of certain kinds of spaces and surfaces invites some people to use them and the design of other spaces and surfaces can exclude them. This inclusion and exclusion could be a result of the way a space is formed and it could be the result of the way the space is operated and controlled. Architects know this lesson, or at least they should, but in the history of human spaceflight there's a particular story that illustrates this principle. The third crew of the American Space Station, Skylab, designated Skylab 4, found that the minute-by-minute checklist of tasks from ground control was too much for them to handle. The close coordination between the station and the ground left little flexibility, especially since the large size and complexity of the space was not taken into account by mission planners. The crew pushed back and took some unscheduled time off to regain their merits and to look out the window near the galley kitchen the designer Raymond Lowey had specified for them. Order was restored and the schedule adjusted, but for whatever reason no one in the crew ever got the chance to fly into space again. Their whole existence as astronauts, able to access space, had been redesigned and redefined. And in NASA's official report from the 1975 summer study, a similar story lies buried. The section on urban planning in the habitats specifies the amount of square footage that should be given over to different functions inside. The urban planners collected data on things like public space from world cities. They looked at the average of the low end, and then they decided to cut this number almost in half. The habitats would have agricultural areas they reasoned, so that space would also be available to residents. Meanwhile, in another room presumably at the summer study, the agriculturalists are expecting that the farms they're designing could produce twice the world's record yield for crops like tomatoes all year round. And if the spaces could get 24 hours sunlight, constant high humidity and heat, and a specialized atmosphere supercharged with carbon dioxide, which sounds increasingly like our atmosphere. And indeed the design of spaces and operations within these habitats would have had to accommodate many kinds of non-humans as well, including chickens, rabbits, and fish. The non-human animals in the Stanford Taurus, according to the 1975 design, would outnumber humans 35 to 1. And this has always been the case. Animals were the first earthlings to go into space. This crew launched just a few months before Yuri Gagarin's historic flight. Design here is just as much about systems as it is about objects. And as the Stanford Taurus details were specified, the engineers used network and directed graph diagrams to keep track of the flows of matter and energy within the habitat. And this impulse was kind of a symptom of an overall obsession with systems during this period. The basis for the Club of Rome's work in limits to growth had been to diagram human relationship with the planet earth using these same methods. And Gerardo Neal offered a direct review to the Club of Rome when he testified before Congress in 1975 that any, as he put it, limits to growth would be un-American and that his project of space settlements would, in contrast, offer plenty of, as he said, room to growth. Up to 3,000 times the surface of the earth if you disassemble the entire asteroid belt, according to his projections. He also offered to Congress an indirect review to the work of biologist Rachel Carson and her millions of readers when he suggested that the space settlements could be refuges for birds endangered by the pesticide poisoning that she wrote about in Silent Spring. Neal noted in his own book that no pesticides would be necessary in these habitats because they would be careful to avoid importing pests in the first place. And his fears and hopes about the future are related to the same impulses that drive science fiction as a cultural mode. Neal himself was always very quick to dismiss any direct connection between his work and science fiction. He always insisted on the plausibility of his proposals that were, as he said, quote, possible within the bounds of current technology, which would be the technology of the mid-1970s. But the two painters on the project were both avid readers and watchers of science fiction. They sometimes even illustrated the covers of science fiction books. So this influence is evident in the architecture and space making shown in their renderings for Neal. And the complicated relationships between science fiction, classic utopianism, architecture, space science, apocalypse and popular culture are the subject of chapter five in this book. These connections, especially in the 1970s, as evident in that era's visual culture are deep and rich. The summer study work represents an important nodal point where these things come together. And chapter six in the current book pushes these connections further. It looks at two interrelated critical concepts that both deal with issues of very large scale. One from science fiction studies, the big dumb object, is way to describe the overwhelming sublime effects of structures whose origin and purpose seem unclear, but that also seem to be the key to whole new worlds. And at the same time, the architectural category of the megastructure openly invites participation, engagement and interaction, all this time in the user's terms. Both are transformative but in complementary ways. And in large scale structures like the space settlements, both design approaches are necessary for mitigating what theorist Frederick Jameson calls the dialectic of identity and difference. It's ultimately these paintings themselves that act in culture. If not to resolve all these contradictions, then at least to somewhat uneasily settle some of the arguments and conflicts between different disciplines and communities that have been involved in the project. The paintings are often deliberate provocations made by the artists to intentionally raise more questions than they answer about the possibilities for life inside these spaces. Public constituencies are built around these paintings encompassing everyone who reacts to that provocation, whether pro or con. These paintings have been in the public domain since they were made, but this book is the first time that they're all collected together in print. So we're also so glad to be able to publish in the book's appendix, and again thanks to the Grand Foundation for this. Many of the sketches that the artist made for the project and other related work. I think that these again foreground the fact that these artifacts were made for very specific purposes by specific people with unique backgrounds, themselves in very specific, sometimes closed, sometimes open and interconnected spaces, disciplinary and otherwise. Thank you. I'm going to start by making an assumption about whether this book documents the history of the present, the history of the past, the history of the future that never happened or the history of our current developments. And I think that in the way that I write it and in the way that I see the role around us, it is not, I can't think of space-setting in such a future that never happens. Even though it does demarcate a vivid momentary culture of imagination to conquer an inevitable lens and this kind of vast desire of in the fiction of the vast blank space that we have to conquer and the idea that this space might be free and we might reinvent humanity from scratch within that space. I think you're telling us a different story. I think that the book is narrating a story not of a history of obsolescence of beautiful objects and machines that are no longer working but really pointing us to a much stranger present in reality. So if we look beyond, let's say, the section and the medium and the filmmaking of Christopher Nolan, I think that reality is much stranger and multiverse from fiction. And you rightfully point to us Google's headquarters by Derek Agnews and Thomas Heatherwick, the project of hegemony and control of whether leisure, work, and life. What is Apple's headquarters by Foster and Parker? So perfectly around this space, both literally and conceptually. And also I will add Amazon's spherical jungle jungles by NPVJ if not all space calls in these spaces. So I think the space it lives and wants to us and it is part of our life. It's not about the space, it's yours. But if you need to change this kind of desire to create a power structure for control and these giant corporate bubbles of massive venture capital investment are no longer representations of weather control and pollution as was what he stole over the capital in 1960. There are many of those power structures controlling bodies and sites within a perfectly controlled atmosphere and medium to keep constancy and augment productivity. And I have checked in particular certain comments of Amazon and the money that they spend to curate biodiversity within the headquarters of offices which was a turner to me that they buy this guy for five years and the whole enterprise to carry the whole biodiversity and specimens of plants took them four years to curate these plants in order to increase productivity of workers because of the biofilane policies. So this environment was really to kind of foster capital and to curate a certain kind of circadian rhythm of work basically in labor. And I think that this story begins from this desire of humanity to recreate the suffering structure. I'm also thinking that these kind of space settlements have a different life today. I don't know if you have seen Saturday Night Live in the global 2017. If you haven't, I was going to show it but it's just like it's two minutes out of my five so I can't show it. But watching it on YouTube, it's extraordinary and it really shows a dull note over Manhattan. It's almost like Rocky's Dome was transposed over Brooklyn but instead of it becoming an artifact to protect us from other evolution and create a kind of energy bound topology it was to house liberals when Trump elected from hearing the other people outside. And it was extraordinary to see that this kind of architectural artifact that became iconic over our history of architecture since the 1960s had become literally a space where we use social media in a way to create echo chambers and not listen to the voice of others. So what this video really shows us is that if there was a kind of idealization of the idea of networking in the 1990s and the kind of distribution of information and knowledge being dependent on that kind of distribution it really, the situation got reversed almost like your services get reversed and wrapped from inside out and are creating these bubbles of coexistence. And I found that in your description of the Solicitism Syndrome which I did not know and the idea that because of this enclosure and the echo chamber and the voice that we keep reiterating we always hear the voice of ourselves through our choices, through the reiteration of our choices we are becoming a self-referential reality and it was a ternary to see that that was a syndrome related to space occupancy. So thank you for that. So the space settlement is a topological bubble as a planet can site out in the words of Gerard O'Neill and has been consistently planned as a gigantic living machine of ingestion and excretion carefully calibrated so as human material and now data capital never crosses the boundaries of its circle. O'Neill's question which you raised which is extraordinarily simple but so important whether the planetary surface is the right surface for us to occupy is both in many ways a mathematical but also a hygienic question. Mathematical in the sense that there is a space that's being turned inside out and reversing the pathology so instead of architects thinking of Cartesian coordinate they could think of stereographic navigational system and spare the system of representation replacing the three-dimensional axis to the panoramic viewpoint dependent on you, me, the user referencing the self which is a very different way of thinking of space but it's also a hygienic argument in the fact that the bubble in the space ship cannot be attached as you very well show us in the book from the framework of social and political unrest throughout the 60s and 70s at Redburn city those dark places of small blacking oxygen. They not only these kinds of bubbles not only control the weather the purposes of comfort and leisure but also operated as types of prophylactic from the dirty humanity and in the words of somebody that drew an experimental city and talked about the fuller who drew an experimental city it was to protect from the filled agonist congestion and noise of urban life so another level of bubble enforces bystanders of comfort and well-being for the entirety of the human race like a power structure that maintains and manages constancy over bodies and cycles the space that alone provides a homogenized atmosphere in order to control and predict the behavior of growth of bodies as tools within the constant atmospheric medium controlled by whom as you're rightfully asked in the book. How long have you been speaking? I will pass and I have a lot of things to say but I think I'll say them so that I don't become exhausted. Well again congratulations Fred it's such a fun text to read with to think with and to read so space elements can be read and enjoyed as a tribute to interdisciplinarity the primary protagonists O'Neill but also Buckminster Fuller and Stuart Graham were polymaths each with their own disciplinary affinity whose work seeped beyond their control to bring forth these sprawling transdisciplinary enterprises but Fred's book is itself a testament to the power of interdisciplinary thought leaving together not only architectural theory but also literary criticism, gender theory, environmental sciences cybernetics, media studies and a host of others including science and technology studies which is the interdiscipline that I am ostensibly here to represent so it's a lovely move then that Fred ends the book by drawing out the word settlement as a fitting descriptor of such interdisciplinary work not only in its profitable connotations to colony though settlement is by my means Christine but also in the dynamism inherent in the term so quoting Fred on the last page through I made it to the end in colonizing implies a power that was come to stay, control and exploit then maybe the uncertain temporary transactional nature of settlement is more appropriate this is how transdisciplinary exchange takes place so one discipline does not colonize another but rather interweaving disciplines are settled again quoting Fred, provisionally occupied for a time with an awareness that there's always a possibility of popping into a spaceship and going off somewhere else so and indeed Fred's meditation on O'Neill space settlements involves boarding many a spaceship to explore the tentacular sprawl of a seemingly niche contained project. This project began with that straightforward question in 1969 O'Neill asked students is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization answering in the negative a decade of work produced alternative floating surfaces and accompanying imaginations if Juliana Bruno has described surfaces as architectures of relations then the surfaces of outer space that Fred writes about are relations of architectures but even more than this they are meditations on the substance and meaning of worlds so as a provocation and starting off point for discussion drawn from my own discipline I'd like to riff on Donna Haraway who is herself riffing on Marilyn Struthern and wonder with the relations Fred has provided what worlds world worlds so let me say that again what worlds world worlds are key as Fred attends to the ways in which the space settlements and the scientific and architectural projects that Fred draws connections between are multiply understood. I've actually always been quite taken by the work of the two artists who served as the primary world builders for O'Neill, Davis and Goodis and so was fascinated to read Fred's interpretation of the different kinds of worlds their paintings produced if Goodis worlded worlds that centered on an ideal human melting pot of human being Fred suggests that Davis showed us worlds not necessarily for humans but worlds that humans could nonetheless be with Fred offers so many beautiful meditations on the world being produced but I'd love to hear more about the worlds that enacted these worldings not just the broader cultural context which Fred carefully draws out but in fact the more contained worlds that these world builders imagine themselves to inhabit so this returns us to the tension of colony versus settlement in the end the world that worlded these worlds was in fact that of mid-century white American heteronormative men and to be clear this is not a critique of Fred he knows this about his story and in his scholarship provides an exquisite model of blunting the white maleness of this historical moment with voices of women and other marginalized people both historically and contemporary and oh how I want to live in the world that Fred worlds but he is well aware that O'Neill's space settlements rebranded today as these colonies have been given a 21st century facelift by Jeff Bezos who on my thread sees the world as made primarily for him and those like him while Fred explores the irony of pastoral sublime and utopian imaginations of space settlements Bezos unironically sees a world that he has been promised to him that has been promised to him and that he now has the capital to bring forth so I'm so glad that this book is hopeful and searching for futures that we can all see ourselves in but in this conversation without looking to the page I'd love to hear a bit more about the world from which these worlds come and how that might help us better understand and interdisciplinarily engage with the most powerful actors who are today imagining space future. I'm following on very much more than I'm trying to get to the end of this year but also to begin by congratulating you and also producing books and people involved in the book. Really an amazing project of fiction and the accounts of the visual and artistic dimensions affiliated with O'Neill's truly sort of fantastic vision and I also appreciated as you went through in your presentation the multiple ways that you connected it to familiar architectural landmarks like O'Neill's Resort, a new number of them Fuller, Smithson's Boulet, et cetera and I think that some really important work there and I also wanted to just underscore how much I appreciate the publishing of the archival documents from the NASA Ames Research Center I think this is also a major contribution of the book so I think this is all very great and I just actually want to begin also by making some connections to the present that I've been thinking of around space civilization and go from there to answer a couple of questions and so I'm going to flash back briefly so in 1976 after closing, do you know the role of the heroic Apollo program in 1970 two of the manned expeditions to skylight in 1970 for NASA redirected the agency's attention from outer space exploration to focus on earth science research and environmental monitoring one of the many responses to see threats to US security, one of resource scarcity pollution and population growth in the so-called developing world and so seeking to reverse that reversal and proposing to boost the role of private companies like Space X and Reserve Blue Origin in NASA's future space missions in April 2016 representing the United States we have a Republican from Oklahoma as well as in the American Space Fund since the ASRA announcing I quote that the purpose of this bill is to permanently secure the United States of America as the preeminent space for the nation and this bill rates down in the danger of doing waves, national security issues civil and commercial goals and heat core for architecture infrastructure and sort of geography as well as research and so Britain would not be the preeminent seafaring in the height of the global earth something much celebrated and fuller the US now seats to update this paradigm what we might think of as the new global order and then in September 2017 with absolutely no scientific or technical training by the same was nominated by Trump to head NASA his appointment confirms him out of the United States in 2018 and alluding then to the shock of the Soviet Union in 1957 which was tough there he declared that this was our start-up moment and so in a flashback to Rod K. Neal Britain has also announced that Earth's moon should be mined for fuel and that it should serve as a proving ground for travel to Mars, a ladder of course a key aspect of Trump's make America great things based on gender oh thanks for all the news about the Mars but if the Neal claimed that strip mining the moon would be in the interest of saving Earth's environment Bradstein makes no such claim his interest being aligned quite directly with one of Trump's earliest post-election victory announcements the plan to cut NASA's budget for Earth science research with climate change studies now being projected as for the science of science and to redirect the agency's attention back to outer space and so in retrospect I must suggest then that the military, psychological and economic agendas at work in this new renaissance seem to appear not just at NASA's work period of course in Sputnik but I think the imagery that the space race not only plays out in the rendering that we've seen but here as well but I also think it moves to this complex of nexus of nationalism and privatization that would be all quite explicitly fostered and it's a doctorate but me so in fiction of providing technoscientific aid for a global humanity that's how we're garnered both yet national and international and so it's also surprising that in the institution of space colonization was repeatedly likened to the European discovery of the new world and to the ideology of an endless destiny associated with the 19th century American frontier in the moment in the 70s in a moment we go as expansion and economic growth seems threatened by new social scarcity, environmental degradation including fallout and political pressures of the home and new developing countries that will be including the oil rich Chopin nation space colonization and parliament continually in the US economic supremacy and pioneering you know how and so it's this constellation I think that's what's surrounding some force and it's reported to be something scientific American a couple of years ago and I quote here echoing Trump's American first name like Penn said Trump intended to carry nationalism into space whether you'd emphasis on human space exploration and discovery for the benefit of American people and all of the world who are going to be tying this nationalist claim to a humanitarian role so again reversing the message Ness has dedicated his own participation in international partnership with the Trump administration and a famous call for American boots on the face of the models and so maybe I'll go past this but you know I wanted to we also know recently Trump declared intention to direct the Pentagon to establish a sixth branch of the US military called Space Force announcing also that it would be great for the second country so playing directly back into this cultural imaginary but also using language like dominance in space so it was pointed out of course that space would quite explicitly be a war in equity or a war fighting domain let the land see an area like literally a reconstruction of space that was itself likely to serve arms race in space and make war fighting more likely and I'm starting to have time to show this there and so when you end your book let's see very last word too I didn't read your story by Omsky who complained them being the renderers, the artists who complained them about the nature of the pictures I think this is an excellent question to Omsky but I would like to push a little bit further on this then so if you said we need to read Davis and I thought it was good to tell he says good is the moment, yeah understanding the confidence field of optimism, of libertarianism of nationalism that was at play in the 1970s and we need to take into account that they were basically doing work for higher jobs as far as it's associated with NASA when such optimistic images were played so strategically and so successfully into a series of desires operating the service of this expansionist agenda I do wonder why we couldn't suggest that artists and with their architects might not be asked to take a little bit more responsibility for the conviction that they participate in and that they launch through these types of images for they can also be rare again or strategic or quite dangerous fictions not to say that they are somehow constitutively responsible for the neoliberal trajectory that this story would take in the 1980s as it connects some of the old life society and it goes all the way through to Ronald Reagan and the SGI initiative and I can go on and on about that but really also thinking about where all the images played in approaching a particular type of political disposition and I'm wondering if we don't need to read that a little bit differently as well and so given my slightly different interests I was also really struck by the politic tone which set for design opportunities throughout the book at a number of moments you really beautifully point to important contradictions that play to all these ethical political qualifiers to the presence of colonialism of racism of the simple white personalities and subjects that play here and you even open by signing those coherence the whiteness of the movement which is what I'm going to open into the book so I think to mark out a really concise awareness of these issues when your book remains or this is what I'm going to ask you that are drawing out positive lessons for architecture and design and tracing these other possible features that might be harbored in this legacy again and so I too always would read these types of ambivalences or instabilities as harboring other features and I'm not in any way in a disagreement with that but I'd like to draw you out a little bit around how you intended to navigate the play of progressive and potentially progressive end or let's say inherent to this type of work so again to how you speak a little bit more what motivated you to dig this material out of the sand as we would say at this particular historical moment and on a related note I'm not going to say any of this much similar question you know right before but literally also at the end when you return to this political and space nationalization you mentioned claim that the U.S. State Department had an expression of forbidding that they insisted that it was nevertheless an effective term when you continue to use that I mean the exception of those remarks you don't really draw out the equally problematic figure of settlements not only settlements the consequences of Palestine and elsewhere and so settlements is not necessarily that less in charge of the term is an expansionist agenda and so I also wanted to hear a little bit more and then I have one time in a month the very first image after your conclusion one of my favorite images includes two women of the group from the 1975 study and women involved in the study don't really play a role in the account never come across any reference to them I wonder if they really were what they did or if they were able to find any evidence beyond this photograph of their participation Fred, start preparing your questions but I think Fred has some but I don't get you wrong yeah quite a few things to show I think to start with the most recent question I think that's a there are a lot of threats to follow our work from this work and that's certainly not the least provocative another threat that I found late in the game was a kind of hidden figure in the space of a project who was a black space scientist who had an accessibility who became a kind of analyst for the project on a real behalf during the 1980s we weren't able to find out the identity of those two women but as a speculation I've become part of the course of this research a member of a lot of some good some bad space enthusiast Facebook groups and so we put them to work we had a crowd source and I think at one point they narrowed in on one of the two women but in other ways which is a really really telling I think in the archive because there's certainly one woman who shows up in the credits of the official NASA report which is also titled space science but the other one may spend I think to talk to some of Lydia's questions and Lisa's questions and your narrative about the history of NASA publicity during the 1980s since the space of a project up to the present day is really it's really worth sitting with because it's kind of like it almost critiques itself is the amazing thing when Bezos creates a habitat like the spheres and presents it in PR terms as this idealized ecology and then right away turns around and does this incredibly past-each and here read up proposal in this July he made his own rendering his own private space like that would be gorgeous but are just so awful it's almost not even worth writing about or calling out and the present state of the conversation in the current political administration about why people should go to space it's just so obvious and stupid but it needs to be it needs to be addressed and it should be addressed and I would almost turn the question around to our disciplines architecture and architecture history theory and criticism and to end it STS because I think that one thing they share one of many things that approaches the shared comment is to sort of follow the practitioner saying that normal producers of knowledge follow around and point out hey you're not really thinking about this context there's some cultural history there but they don't care there's almost like I don't want to take a cynical view because I am at heart very optimistic as you'll point out as I think a lot of the book presents about ways to be in space on earth but when critique seems so an opportunity you know what do we do in that case when we're dealing with these areas that seem so there's just so many scenes of fault lines where do you start I went to the belly of the beast earlier in the summer I went out to the Bay Area to break from dialogues which is one of Stuart Brown's children in the world and I was asked to speak about on the handle of the national business and stuff about space from an anthropological perspective and I said I just wanted to be like maybe we should use the word colonization that was like all I wasn't saying we should go to space I wasn't like entering because I'm still having a limited store of argument over there I wasn't even entering there I was by people saying that I was denying their right of individual freedom like a very real liberal argument and that confronted me this question of I didn't get Stuart Brown on my side he happened to be in the room for that conversation and he was beginning to show some of his experience not excited to pursue the conversation because there was no desire on this kind of silo convalescent no optimism ears to be open to critique and I was just like so easily misinterpreted and of course I would take some lamper maybe still not being as clear as I needed to be but I think that's probably the problem is they don't want to critique and we can't force it on to these powerful, powerful people which is why I kind of just want to go live in your happy world and like I'll take a toroid and just kind of go on so similarly I was at the Space Helmets Conference I was at last just last week in Seattle I was asked to present on the history of Gerardo Neal's ideas and I'm not an engineer like many of the people in the audience were and many of the people in the panelists were so I presented his work in cultural art in artistic history context and everybody was like okay that's alright that's great let's talk about Miami Asteroids and even in the Asteroid Mighty presentation there was a brief slide that was like Miami Asteroids end scarcity and and nobody really followed up on that they just talked about how they probably had the Obama administration to change the law to allow for Asteroids to take place and how great that was one of the questioners applauded the Asteroid winners because they said the last thing we want is the people at the egg telling our Asteroid winners what to do which is a really filling moment so anyway I asked about okay let's go back to end scarcity and the only answer was well we'll be able to make more iPhones because we can get rare earth off the planet and we'll be able to deliver electricity for pennies per megawatt so it's just trickle down economics and it's these bizarre performance indicators for human prosperity but I don't even know what to start with there is a problem of representation when these kinds of meetings occur kind of like the Macy's conference where you have biologists and mathematicians and different kind of disciplines speaking of interdisciplinary and each let's say discipline or trajectory feels comfortable looking at certain representational modalities and the engineers see this process flow charts entirely and you mentioned them diagrams or systems but you do speak of O'Neill's hesitation to use images because he found he didn't think it was a plausible medium it was maybe going beyond the expectation of what was possible in terms of scientific and he felt more comfortable with equations so I think there's a real problem of these kinds of presentations when we're speaking about such a complex problem recreating basically who mentioned it a biological and artificial system it's not just architecture we have a certain agenda language of representation there are artificial synthetic life and they're engineering circles and they're mathematical equations and there's such overlap between the systems that I think that's what caused the terrible presentations of Bezos which were 1970s I mean it was almost intentional when I saw them started laughing it was terrible it was terrible to an extent that it should have been intentional it can't be that bad for somebody that has so much money I want to know who those artists were because they're playing a show but it can't be it can't be but maybe there was some kind of intentional going back to these kinds of presentations that you bring up from Bezos and he said goodness okay whatever the pronunciation is I think there was some intentionality in how the presentation is going to work and how the market or who it is going to appeal in terms of number of consumers or viewers are going to visit that in artists' ways we still haven't found a way to represent environmental systems in a non-detective way that has the intelligence of the drawing and I think that's a very big problem because in these kinds of books and I think in my book as well you only have the engineering flow chart which is a presentation of a diagram of an algorithm basically which is a process that's not in very simple steps and you have a pictorial representation and there's this one this gap between how we can negotiate intelligence of different flows of environment to be represented and to create a kind of convincing medium and I think that's a very big problem not because of Bezos and I totally agree with Bezos being a terrible word and so for them derail the conversation and I'm not sure what they're doing I mean I don't think it's a good answer but that's my point it is very active but if we want to reflect that on what we're doing as artists and how we represent this kind of phenomenon I think there's a tremendous lack of deduction in the way that we use language as a presentation I think that's really well put and I think that starts to help me articulate another answer to your question about the relationship of the artists to the project is it the sort of Trojan Wars that sort of speaks in the idea through the cultural and popular imagination I think I want to believe that there's been a group to speak about how recently I was a student at first as well I've been fascinated by a bunch of our work but especially this idea that critique can perceive by way of hyper-compliance delivering exactly through spec and then some which I think Rick Goodes is doing and it came out a little bit during our interviews he says Rick Goodes was trained as an architect and he worked as a graphic artist graphic designer or marketing artist in the 70s as well so he knows how to sell things he says this in one of the interviews I do think he's trying to sort of hyper-comply with the brief and the brief is to create a French countryside in space so he goes okay that's what you're going to get they said I know as an architect I know Cosper Square Foot this is not going to be so plausible so he's using that kind of strategy I hope I want to believe he is and they're seeing this through a contemporary lens themselves so their memories are filtered into being decomposed as they're remembering those his background is originally to illustrate planetary science or among other things Carl Sagan's general interest in the late 1960s and early 1970s he was the first artist that got to work for the USGS in the planetary science illustration division so he's really thinking about okay this is a world and as you're saying no one's really figured out how to draw a world and he's trying to draw a world in a way that critiques the idea that someone could make a world so I think this product is a little bit aligned with Rachel Carson's work they're talking about what falls through that directed network graph now but a world almost in a unblockable sense is always more than you can represent and so how dare you not only try to represent but also remake every aspect of the world I think that's Rachel Carson's critique or one of her many critiques and I think to use your terms Lisa he's an advocate of kind of the lightest ever imagination when he's making his paintings and I think that's really important so I do think there's some pushback or friction however however they can manage to do so as higher guns and paintings have a task we have a question so I I read a book and I have a friend what's your use so I'm a space architect so I graduated from GSOP and I work at Space Architect here in New York and I don't know another Space Architect in New York so it's pretty cool but there's I think this confrontation between the sort of deaf phases imaginary and the actual work is something that I come from with every single day because I have a very strong sort of ethical objection to this sort of, you know, slashing out benefits for Amazon workers who can pay for Blue Origin. That kind of thing. But guess what email I got today? I got an email from a space architecture sort of group, this sort, that from a guy who left NASA to work for Blue Origin and it's from a space architect who thinks you're reading Yale and a aerospace degree from Maryland and he posted a position for senior space architect at Blue Origin just like three days ago. And so what did I do? I went to the listing page and I went through all what I didn't do to apply and that's really just like me sort of being vulnerable and saying that there's this tension of like, I want to make, I want to have that dream job, I want to make that, I want to depart the aesthetic sort of formation of this new world. And I love your cover. So to me that, you're asking the question, we don't know, you know, how do we draw a world? I think that your cover is how do we draw the blackness of space and there's this point in the book where someone makes a comment on like the rendering of being like, what if the space is black? Like this is not purple and pink and, you know, orange. And that to me is like the perfect cover of your book because it's really about just pulling out something from nothing. As a technically minded person, whenever I see and I have this in my mind, my sort of heart saying when I saw the legit phases of Redux, is that in terms of life support systems and these just impossibly unimaginably complex artificial ecosystems, there is no science or mathematics for that to be possible. It doesn't exist. It's 100% efficient today and I think the only way we possibly crack that and I know this is something Redux tweeted once, just remember this tweet, was that the only way to crack that is possible is to put machines to work in the impossible context of these systems and just stay cybernetic, still home and low. If we, if we're able to crack that and I think, you know, the sort of mathematics and science kind of, that almost all over we can do it, but something you keep, despite how crazy that is, there's something very quaint about the images, there's something very quaint about these physical simulations where today we live in like basically a simulation. I think it's funny that Elon Musk is one of these people who talks about the lesson popularized in this question of reliving this simulation and I think we kind of already do, except we don't live in a physical world outside of the planet. We live in multiple worlds. We get guided around our algorithms and we are basically, we can't tell if something is real or real quick. So I'm like, I love this book, I love the book and I love this discussion so it's really awesome and I would love that she's able to bring back formal studies based on architecture which existed when I was a student and then got canceled, so I was going to allow the last group to do that. It's just too rich to not have it in school and you can take some of your names. I definitely consider adding that. I think it would be great to be able to have some good conversation with you for a few minutes but there are a couple of last sort of quick-hitting questions that anybody wants to put on. I just wanted to have a better response. Come back to the drawing person. I mean, I think in addition to laughing about the multi-cent renderings, I mean one of the very tiny moments is when you saw some of the fish coming out to eat the insect and reminded us that a meal imagined that insects would be necessary and of course we would laugh because we all know insects are necessary for our lives, you know, from the pond, tarnation and all the rest of it. I don't feel like bats. Yeah, exactly. But what gets me, when we come back to the drawing, is that moment when we laugh and yet these times are so powerful and so in retrospect they're entirely ridiculous and they function to convince many members of the U.S. Congress to, you know, garner millions and millions of dollars and so it's not about the technical capacity, it's something different that's going on. So this is where I think it becomes really complicated and also want to make this... I would answer something like, yes, it's great that we could draw worlds differently but I think there's going to be things that might be better done in text, let's say, or in critique, in terms of actually understanding the worlds from which these worlds come from. I don't... I mean I think there's so much still to be done in putting those images and restrictions and the meals in criminal salesmanship just back into the context of the 1960s and 1270s to understand why it did become so closely aligned with the other economic power lines and, you know, not just the libertarianism of the plan but so I would say something like that to me is the question, even if we can laugh and we can continue to laugh, these things function since... and so that's what it is and that's what I think critiquants do as a supplement just not to say they're going to change the mind of these characters I was also speaking in the bottom of a nuclear bunker in Sweden a few weeks ago and also at that time was a Swedish space engineer and, you know, I finished talking and she said well that was a lot of words but really science is neutral and I'm like, oh god so as though she operated the learning, you know, technologies for you know, and so I mean I appreciate internationalism as a period of space work I think that's particularly fascinating but the idea that she believed so wholeheartedly that what she did was apolitical just cool me, you know I didn't even know where to begin to have a conversation with her and so Brian knows that what he does is probably politicize, you know he's not sort of naive like that so I think the representation is key but making it better is not necessarily making it more able to capture the world won't solve all these other issues but that seems to be so important Yeah, I think what Brian has to get at I think one thing that Brian has to get at one thing that Kelly Easterling has to get at one thing that you're very good at, Jeff as a practitioner is to critique through the production of other scenarios your main scenarios and that is another critique proceeds not just a sort of sarcastic, you know oh go ahead and try and build this but to try to draw the world to continue to try and draw the world is necessary and yeah, to try and draw other worlds I think for me also in this conversation about representation there is a sort of pedagogical agenda which is that if there is a sort of default attitude for how we understand images as ideological things you place it on the rendering it's just a sort of default position and I would like the reverse in this reading that maybe the rendering is the place where you can more easily locate the gaps than the diagrams all of these kind of planning documents which are full of the same sort of evidence of the world that produces them that are less accessible in that way and I think that for me is part of the tweak that you're making of a contemporary proposition which is that the whole sort of kind of discourse around the capitalist field's image and like it's a very sort of straightforward critique for us that I think are a little bit interesting Any last really quick question that you want to put on the table before we join to book sales Beautiful book Straight to the client, it's amazing Let's do this thing Thank you so much