The Superficial Dichotomy of ‘Earthness’ and ‘Spaceness’
The designs of orbital cities can be evaluated on two metrics: ‘earthness’, how well they replicate Earth-like conditions, and ‘spaceness’, how effectively they incorporate space-specific conditions.
O’Neill exemplifies the former approach, planning for an “ordinary human life, complete with gravity, atmosphere, sunshine, growing plants, trees, and animals”, he thought “in terms of something earthlike, not just a space station”, and set his measure of success to be the ‘earthness’ of his orbital city. Island Three thus has mirrors tethered to the cylinders replicating the sun, which “slowly open in the morning […] move in the sky only as fast as it does on Earth”, while ensuring that its inhabitants within its artificial, Earth-like gravity experience “no sense of rotation, though the cylinder will be turning once every two minutes”28 to create this Newtonian reality. To make his orbital cities as earthlike as possible, he attempted to engineer the ‘spaceness’ out of his cylinders.
Conversely, Sherwood embraced the ‘spaceness’ of his ‘site’; intending to adapt to the conditions of space. Instead of recreating a terrestrial sky with sunrises and sunsets marking time, Sherwood offers “unobstructed, uninterrupted nadir (Earth) and zenith (stars) views, [and d]ark space views without washout by locally reflected sunlight”, with “ceiling windows [that] enable the Earthscape to become the sky”30 for its habitable microgravity spaces, while counterweights in the form of solar arrays and heat-exchange stacks are anchored to the sun-facing side of the orbital city’s spine for maximum exposure to the sun’s radiation.
Furthermore, he treats vacuum and microgravity as design parameters rather than flaws. For example, this city will have “microgravity, partial-weight and artificial-weight zones”, with partially-filled chambers which “will afford sporting and recreational opportunities that take advantage of the large-scale behavior of liquids in microgravity”.
The Functional Orbital City: a Human Enclosure
Yet this apparent opposition masks a deeper alignment. Both architects share a commitment to the Modernist tenets of functionalism, creating a closed-system with functional separation that primarily mediates the inhabitant’s relationship with the space environment. Spaces are organized according to the four functions of the Functional City outlined in the 1933 Charter of Athens: dwelling, recreation, work, and transportation. Both assume that the orbital city houses working populations, thus a functionalist method is adopted to manage the population and to create an efficient architecture defined by the requirements of work.
For O’Neill, he envisioned the inhabitant of his cylinder building and assembling complete solar-power stations, working in facilities for “processing lunar materials into finished products” within “thin, nonrotating disc of zero-gravity industries” anchored to the end of each cylinder as well as on lunar mines. Working areas are clearly separated from “low-rise, terraced apartments” for dwelling and recreational spaces such as “four small cinemas, quite a few good small restaurants, and many amateur theatrical and musical groups”, connected by transportation via bicycles, electric vehicles, and magneplanes capable of “reaching in less than a minute a speed of three hundred miles per hour in silence”. This zoning ensured that the messiness of industrial production does not intrude into dwellings and interfere with either domestic or leisure spaces.
Sherwood uses his modules as zones of their own, tailored to specific functions such as living quarters for dwelling, recreational and team sports spaces for leisure, or vacuum hangers and material depots for work, with specification for “[a]nti-proximity among work, living and social areas”. These modules are then tethered to the infrastructural backbone, consisting of a main spine with dendritic ribs. Through this modular logic, Sherwood designed an even more refined Functional City than O’Neill, with each module serving one specialised function, preventing any overlap of activities.
Orbital Zoos: An Architecture of Enclosure
Despite their differences, both proposals function as enclosures. Their population are not treated as an evolving species, but as a biological collection to be preserved. This approach mirrors the foundational logic of ‘zoo’ architecture - designed to sustain life while stripping it of its agency and evolutionary trajectory.
As Irus Braverman argues in her book Zooland, zoos operate under the belief that the “city is therefore precisely where nature, wildness, and animals should be - safe under the constant regulatory gaze of zoo staff and the public”, highlighting how caring for these animals is “inevitably an expression of power over them”, for it is predicated on the complete dependence of animals upon human care for their survival. Part of this care includes naturalising their spaces, curating carefully controlled ‘wild’ environments for the animals to inhabit, and managing every aspect of how they live.
An orbital city with orchestrated weather, simulated diurnal cycles, and planned activities in designated zones, is a high-tech zoo for humanity. Although Sherwood’s orbital city is capable of overall growth, its individual modules remain static enclosures. Each module is hyper-optimised for a specific task, preventing any significant transformation. Thus while there appear to be choices between modules, they in fact move only within the set of functionally defined spaces. This limitation mirrors O’Neill’s Three Islands, where apparent freedom is constrained by the rigid design of functional zones.
This enclosure and the preservation of a terrestrial past, creates an orbital city that is a site of stagnation. Regardless of the passing generations, inhabitants remain biological relics, frozen in the era of those who first entered space. Like zoo animals, they become living specimens carefully bred to maintain sustainable populations within this high-tech enclosure. By recreating Earth, orbital cities enforce biopolitical stasis, sheltering a population within a simulation of a planet they may never walk on, much like a captive ‘wild’ animals who might no longer survive outside the zoo’s ‘wilderness’.
Architecture is the key to escape this crisis of stasis. Architecture first ought to question its anthropocentric basis. To design only for the human of the twenty-first century is to imagine the future as the present repeated. Instead, architecture should facilitate the emergence of a new inhabitant: the space-native cyborg.
Interplanetary Architecture: An Evolving Scaffold for Space-Native Cyborgs
Donna Haraway’s cyborg is “a hybrid of machine and organism”, this “cybernetic organism” rejects the notion of biological purity. In this paradigm, architecture is not meant to keep a human ‘human’, but acts instead as a scaffold for the human-cyborg transition.
To become the cyborg requires symposia, kin making - the process of “making persons, not necessarily as individuals or humans”. This metabolic kinship begin with making kin with the life-support systems sustaining them - the human with the air scrubber manufacturing the air they breath, and the air scrubber with the human maintaining it - and leads to a sympoetic relationship, forming the first step towards a cyborg society.
IPA is thus about creating spaces and opportunity for kin-making, starting with the paradigm shift towards acknowledgement of machinic entities as inhabitants of the interplanetary spacescape alongside biological ones. There will be plenty of opportunities, for the primary tasks to carry out in space such as lunar mining and orbital construction will be outsourced to machines and robots who then cohabit with the humans in this architecture that providing spaces fostering their kin-making, whether by creating varieties of shared spaces or potential gradients of interface with the space-environment for its inhabitants.
This paradigm shift requires the acceptance of machinic entities to be inhabitants of the interplanetary spacescape alongside biological ones. It also acknowledges that the transition from a terrestrial human to a space-native cyborg is a multi-generational process requiring a timeline of adaptation.
Sensory Bridges: Mediating the Transition
In the near-future, while space-faring is in its infancy state, recreation of Earth-like conditions as O’Neill and Sherwood proposed remains necessary, both for biological survival and psychological stability. To mediate the evolution then, adaptive technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) can be utilised. Currently used on the ISS to simulate Earth-based activities such as biking up a hill, it has the potential to serve as a sensory bridge within the IPA. It allows Earth-born generations to negotiate the shift from terrestrial experiences to microgravity-native ones, offering a digital realm they can explore while bypassing physiological constraints imposed by the space environment, psychologically preparing them for it. The technology can also bridge the difference in the way humans and other entities sense the world, acting as a cognitive interface preparing humans for an eventual cybernetic transition.
While Sherwood’s LEO Parti was initially proposed for biological users, its modularity can accommodate the ‘Human Exclusion Zones’ — spaces optimised for machinic senses rather than human comfort. Rather than treating them as ‘messy’ industrial areas to be sequestered away from dwellings as O’Neill attempted, they are integrated as essential components of the cyborg habitat. By acknowledging the spatial needs of the machinic entities, IPA dissolves the traditional hierarchy of the human as the user and the machine as the tool, viewing them instead as co-inhabitants of a shared, hybrid space.
Consequently, architecture ceases to be a static shield, evolving alongside its inhabitants instead as an active participant in their transformation. By rejecting the tenets of the Functional City and fixed notions of the human, IPA breaks away from a binary that creates architectures of enclosures enforcing biopolitical stagnation upon its inhabitants. It is no longer a zoo, but instead the foundational scaffold for a space-native ecology.