Master's of Architecture Thesis - Winter 2015. Critics: Geoffrey Thun + Craig Borum. Team Members: Cait Cashner + Steve Sarver
Honorable Mention - Jacques Rougerie Innovation and Architecture for Space Competition 2015, Taubman College Thesis Honors
Project Description
Nokomis One is a techno-utopic frontier town, home to over one thousand pioneers researching, mining, and planting; working to establish the first permanent home on Mars. Founded as a base for asteroid mining and scientific research operations, the habitat’s initial outset as a rough bootstrapping camp enabled by technology to battle the elements, left an indelible mark. This spirit was matched by the creation of architecture that celebrates complex life-supporting infrastructures by embedding within collective sublime spaces of social delight. The balance of work and leisure, adventure and terror, loneliness and deep connection, are all brought into focus on Mars. In space, where the limitations are many, but the future architectural possibilities are immense, human intervention in this vast territory is an opportunity. The future created here shifts imagination of space from the foreign unknown and reinserts ideas of pleasure, desire, and even the mundane. Nokomis One has become the model for reimagining the environmental factors that drive the design and creation of new architectures in unknown worlds. Architecture will continue to mediate environments on new planets to create new cultural human sensibilities for plausible, desirable worlds.
The production of food and a habitable atmosphere are among the primary concerns for the settlement on Mars. Being too expensive and risk-laden to continually ship food from Earth to Mars, the settlement will need to build a greenhouse to grow their own sources of food. The construction of artificial atmospheres within the greenhouse is brought to the forefront given Mars’ atmosphere which lacks the ability to support human or plant life. This leads to an ontological reversal of air not just as an environment, but as a material itself with qualities that can be manipulated towards functional and social ends. Atmospheres are constructed to replicate ideal growing conditions for each plant species and organized into similar climate zones. Through the leveraging of Martian gravity and atmospheric composition combined with the spatial compression of typically massive climate systems, novel hybrid atmospheres occur. These conditions are exploited by evolutionary species of plant life and by social programs attuned to the air’s characteristics.
