Migrating terrestrial life beyond the stratosphere requires a selective curation of the biosphere: a decision on what is preserved and what is abandoned. Within the pragmatic discourse of orbital habitat design, nature was viewed as a curated asset. Both O’Neill and Sherwood selected a specific modern conception of ‘nature’, either akin to a zoological exhibit or reduced to a functional resource pool designed to support human life and food production.
Manicured Nature
O’Neill’s orbital nature aligns with biophilia, defined by E.O. Wilson as human’s “innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes”. His imagined population of ordinary humans required “growing plants, trees, and animals” to maintain psychological stability. Yet this biophilia was strictly regulated. Aside from “grass, trees, and flowers” and “a highly efficient, totally recycling agriculture no longer at the mercy of weather and climate”, he proposed to “take along those species which we want and which form parts of a complete ecological chain, but to leave behind some parasitic types”, allocating nature its place in the forests and parks tucked away in valleys between artificial mountains up to 10,000 feet tall formed on the cylinder endcaps’ inner surfaces, a landscape reminiscent of Earth’s.
This curation resembles the practice of zoogeography, an interpretation of nature that represents them by geographically legible ‘images’ rather than habitat or taxonomic complexity. The resulting “illusion of nature” is enhanced through what is commonly referred to as immersion design. By selecting ‘pleasant’ species and discarding ‘parasitic types’, and by situating them in selected mountains, valleys, forests, and lakes, O’Neill designs a new nature for space equivalent to a high-tech zoo. Like the humans they support psychologically, the flora and fauna are kept evolutionarily stagnant, frozen in a living biological museum.
By attempting to recreate Earth, O’Neill created a ‘manicured’ nature, functioning as a biological amenity. Here, life has been taxonomized, managed, and objectified, complex ecosystems reduced to a standing-reserve from which psychological comfort is extracted, in an act Martin Heidegger calls Enframing (Gestell) — ordering nature for human use.
enframed Nature
Brent Sherwood’s LEO parti carried this Enframing to its industrial conclusion. While he shared a little of O’Neill’s biophilia, such that “hydroponically-grown plants will provide the psychological relief of proximity to living nature” throughout “social, recreational and residential architecture”, he looked beyond the aesthetic and psychological lens to arrive at a functional lens.
For Sherwood, water was “broadly useful for buffering life support capacity, for shielding against space radiation, and for recreation” instead of the lakes O’Neill envisioned. Speculating that mature life support system will “evolve away from physico-chemical technology except for specialized or small applications", he saw the potential for ‘ecological’ life support technologies using “soil-bed reactors and estuarine-flow reactors, populated by micro-organisms and plants, to reclaim atmosphere and water, and for the concentration and removal of toxic chemicals.”
In Sherwood’s parti, orbital nature is an assemblage of functional fragments of the Earth — entities that may be alive, but only due to their usefulness. If O’Neill’s nature is an exhibition for his inhabitants, Sherwood’s is a component of his city. Both exist as assets held captive within a rigid, mechanical hierarchy, illustrating the functionalist mindset both Sherwood and O’Neill fell victim to. This is what Bruno Latour describes as the Great Divides, the modern belief that “we are the only ones who differentiate absolutely between Nature and Culture, between Science and Society”. By ‘purifying’ nature, both remain confident that life can be removed from its terrestrial context and maintained as a static amenity.
The Failure of Captive Ecologies
This illusion that we can manage nature in isolation reflects what Braverman identified as ‘pastoral power’ humans extend over the zoo, where humans are portrayed as “omnipotent agents who can destroy and redeem nature enables the emergence of zoo professionals as the animals’ exclusive caregivers, effectively instituting their power of care”. In the real world, however, Biosphere II reveals that a biosphere cannot be managed in captivity.
Unlike Island Three, which remained theoretical, Biosphere II was built as an experimental laboratory to study biospheres. The two-year-long experiment revealed that nature cannot be ‘enframed’ as a static asset. Artificial intervention was required constantly to balance food chains and atmospheric levels, and unforeseen incidents included the loss of pollinators to invasive ‘crazy ants’ and hundreds of fire worms who need to be removed.
Yet Biosphere II’s failures were failures of managing nature, not of closed ecologies. What survived was not Augustine and Hawes’s curated biome of coherent forest patches and balanced crops. What thrived was the unplanned: crazy ants, fire worms, microbial consortia colonising unexpected substrates. Biosphere II showed that forcing a pre-set Earth-like biome to remain static is a recipe for failure, a clear reminder that life is fundamentally ‘self-organising’. As posited by James Lovelock in his Gaia Hypothesis and subsequently demonstrated in his 1983 Daisyworld model, life proactively modifies its environment to sustain itself. Architectural simulations of singular, idealised conditions inevitably produces rigid enclosures incapable of accommodating this dynamism.
From Zookeepers to Participants
To break away from this mindset, we must shift from imagining humans as the ‘zookeepers’ with mastery over the separate entity of nature to recognising our place within a world of ‘quasi-objects’. There is no ‘pure nature’ to be replicated in space, all that leads to is the attempt to curate an exhibition, or create a functional system. Instead, IPA is designed with the view of human inhabitants as participants in an expanded, space-native ecology in which the hierarchy of ‘users’ and ‘tools’, or ‘humans’ and ‘natures’ and other modern binaries are dismantled. Thus instead of viewing the human’s surroundings as ‘resources’ and ‘functions’, creating the orbital cities designing habitats to contain life, IPA is instead one that grows alongside its ecology, as part of it.
This can be achieved by leveraging emerging technologies such as wooden satellites, bio-ink printing which enables for 3-D printing with bio-materials to seed a growing, living structure, much like the mycelium-based structures of the myco-architecture for space in which mycelial and feedstock material are seeded in the initial structure and initiated through water — furthermore there is the potential incorporation of the bacterium Bacillus subtilus for enhancing sensing capabilities of the habitat.
With this shift, an architecture that ‘grows’ itself emerges, creating spatially a ‘nature’ that is physically indistinguishable from being ‘culture’, or ‘structure’. This sympoetic environment to lay the grounds for a space-native nature escapes the modernist framework. Breaking away from not only this mental divide to be overcome, but also the mental constraints that nature must look like terrestrial places. This entered the modern imagination through the zoo, which presents nature as “geographically situated in exotic lands, harmonious and sanitised, devoid of human presence, and juxtaposed to modern urban life”, “reinforcing an understanding of humans and nature as separate and alien”. It is also important to embrace a nature not beholden to Earth, and therefore not just an Earth-mimicry biome. It requires the inclusion of not just flora and fauna, but other members of the biosphere, from mushrooms to bacterias.
Hence, a shift needs to be made, towards the seeding of a biosphere where subsequently, organisms are allowed to adapt to space-native abiotic environmental conditions — the microgravity and the high radiation.
A space-native ecology may resemble no terrestrial biome. It may be dominated by extremophilic archaea, fungi tolerating high radiation, genetically drifted plants no longer recognisable as crops. Its aesthetic may be alien — not sublime mountains but biofilms on structural surfaces. This is not failure; it is speciation. Embracing a nature not beholden to Earth requires inclusion not just of flora and fauna but of fungi, bacteria, and other biosphere members, subsequently allowed to adapt to space-native abiotic conditions: microgravity, high radiation.
the Bio-Technosphere
In the paradigm of IPA, the distinction between the biological and the mechanical dissolves through a shared metabolism. While the Modernist approach led O’Neill and Sherwood to act as curators of biospheric fragments, the architect of the IPA acts as a facilitator of a bio-technosphere operating on the principle of radical interdependence. Within the IPA, every organism is both its own entity and a component of a hybrid; biological or mechanical, they are co-participants in a homeostatic process mirroring the self-organising capabilities of Earth’s biosphere.
In this environment, entities replicate and evolve based on space-ecological pressures rather than industrial quotas until they arrive at homeostasis. Soil-bed reactors may evolve alongside saprophytic fungal systems, competing for space with estuarine-flow reactors depending on shared atmospheric resources produced by mechanical air-scrubbers, which in turn generate heat absorbed and emitted into space by IPA’s living structures. No longer subject to a hierarchy of exclusions, these entities act as cyborg kins occupying different niches in a space-ecology. IPA thus challenges and transcends the notion of space architecture functioning as a protective envelope. As an active participant in the process of homeostasis, it grows and evolves alongside its inhabitants, simultaneously being a care-taker and the recipients of care.
Seeding the Future
This resolves the Latourian trap by dissolving the ‘Great Divide’, which had conceptually separated inhabitants from each other and from their habitat. Humans are no longer ‘pure’ biological entities viewing their surroundings as objects to be ordered, classified, and managed. They have instead entered the state of a cyborg whose kinship expands to include the entire techno-ecological system. Survival is a result of their shared agency — a state wherein the lungs, the scrubbers, and the reactors breathe as one.
Ultimately, IPA does not seek to freeze a moment of Earth’s history into a biological museum. Instead, it embraces an Earth-like evolutionary approach. Life on our planet has never been static; it is a story of resilience, of organisms thriving amid catastrophes, gradually transforming a barren rock into the vibrant world we know today. By moving beyond the “manicured” and “enframed” simulacra envisioned by O’Neill and Sherwood, IPA replaces preconceived finality with a fertile scaffold — creating the conditions for a new evolutionary trajectory and seeding a space-native ecology.