“Per aspera ad astra” : through hardship to the stars : investigation of functional and aesthetic characteristics of a lunar architecture

Abstract

In the early 1900’s we humans learnt how to soar through the sky with birds aided by our own creations. Forty years later we realized our power when we entered the Atomic Age in the arid deserts of New Mexico. Twenty-four years after, we strapped our fragile, susceptible bodies to rockets pointed to the stars. Within a lifetime we had escaped the terraqueous globe to which we had been confined for millions of years. We now stand on the shores of the final frontier. A last measure of our inquisitiveness. Like sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze. Space.

Humans behave in predictable ways. When the sun rises we wake. When the sun sets, we sleep. Some of us scamper home to the relative comforts of our personal existence to escape the enveloping darkness. Our refuge. Our place. We venture outside to breathe the oxygen that keeps us alive, we dip our feet in the water from which life came and we take comfort from the reassuring heat of the sun peering through our atmosphere.

But what if we remove ourselves from this protective planet and venture to the moon, not to visit for a day, but to live for six months. What becomes of the human condition?

Where is the point of refuge that we seek when we need shelter? Where is our architecture and what does it become on the moon?

Through related literature and precedent investigation this document pursues possible aesthetic and functional properties for an earthless architecture. The research pursues a speculative solution to the next great architectural evolution from an earth-based medium to one for the lunar landscape.