How Satellites Are Rebooting Building Design

Today’s electromagnetic and earth observation systems are propelling a future-habitats’ design movement that could be named Astrospatial Architecture.

- Davina Jackson

Spaceship Earth is back on the agenda with futuristic architects and environmental planners. Popularized by Richard Buckminster Fuller and other modern science pundits during America’s 1960s space race against Russia, this term remains the most evocative of several concepts which promote the accelerating ambition to manage holistically our planet’s environmental systems.

In this century, the Spaceship Earth dream is being facilitated by tele computation tools originally devised to fly airplanes, rockets and satellites. Pulsing the scenes flickering across our myriad screens are the semiconductor and sensor-enabled infrastructures of massive parallelism; connecting non-visual data across globally distributed grids of processors, portals and storage banks. As predicted by Al Gore in his 1992 proposal for a “Digital Earth” global climate model, parallelism seems to be the only systems architecture, and conceptual metaphor, that could “cope with the enormous volume of data that will be routinely beamed down from orbit”.

How will all these bits of information help architects to envisage structures made of atoms? This question, published in 1995 by William J. Mitchell to extrapolate the urban development implications of common access to the Internet, still highlights the crucial paradox and paradigm for professionals dealing with virtual architecture. He wrote: “The network is the urban site before us, an invitation to design and construct the City of Bits (capital of the twenty-first century). ... But this new settlement will turn classical categories inside out and will reconstruct the discourse in which architects have engaged from classical times until now. ... How shall we shape it?”