Zero Atmosphere Architecture
Jordan Geiger

But what about the other side of this coin: planning for loss, a life and an architecture without atmosphere? What of zero atmosphere architecture? Design for outer space has an intense but short history in its building culture and a long one in its philosophical and scientific roots. It atomizes ideas inherent to contemporary architectural and environmental issues - in particular, as both promote and argue notions of a commons as both public space and a public discourse. Further, designs for outer space have been developed as environments to test new fusions of architecture with human-computer interaction, literally in a vacuum. Each case promotes new ideas of shared space, of interface and human agency in the control of systems, of communications and digital media. Free of any fixed context, inherent scale or even an orientation in a weightless environment, space ships are the chiaroscuro of media architecture: portraits of interaction in high contrast.