McMansions on the MOON

Will gazillionaires gentrify the galaxy? With commercial space travel within reach, the masters of the universe are plotting for the next big frontier: starchitecture on the Milky Way.

- SPENCER BAILEY

Around a decade ago the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels had an epiphany.

His firm, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), already enjoyed a reputation for gutsy, boundary-pushing, borderline sci-fi projects when it was recruited to work on the Virgin Hyperloop, a cutting-edge transportation system made up of frictionless vacuum tubes that enable passenger pods to zoom at absurdly high speeds. He was fascinated by the speculative fiction of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, the groundbreaking writings of aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, and the innovative work being done at the Hawthorne, California, headquarters of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Then a meeting with the acclaimed science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, known for his Mars trilogy, electrified the architect’s imagination.

“He doesn’t use the term science fiction,” Ingels says of Robinson. “He uses the term future history.”

Thus began Ingels’s journey into the space age realm of lunar and Martian habitats. Today he’s no longer alone. The amount of investment, innovation, and media attention surrounding commercial space travel and such companies as SpaceX, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is creating a new frontier in architecture (with other firms, like Foster + Partners, also leading the way) and perhaps soon even interplanetary real estate deals. The future, as the oft quoted saying goes, may already be here, and the masters of the universe are living up to their name by engaging in a new sort of space race. We’re not talking Jetsons or Trekkies here. The entire world space economy was valued at a staggering $424 billion last year, according to the firm Euroconsult.