Off-planet, one encounters the unfamiliar.
A sense of alienation manifests in moments. In realising that terrestrial ‘up’ and ‘down’ no longer apply to the body, a state Alcestis Oberg notes requires the mind to re-map its entire orientation; in experiencing the ‘Overview Effect’, used by Frank White to describe the state of awe when viewing Earth from space.
Should we still seek to recreate Earth here?
Gerard O’Neill provides an enduring vision for an orbital city, which crops up even today, whether in fictional media like Interstellar (2014) or in orbital colonies proposed by Blue Origin. Island Three, described in his 1976 book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, is a masterpiece of terrestrial simulacrum. It is a large-scale space habitat designed to house millions within a two counter rotating cylinders, complete with gravity, weather, and pastoral landscapes. By recreating Earth, he also created an enclosure for its inhabitants in space, maintaining the façade that they have never left home.
In 2009, Brent Sherwood sought to formalise the discipline of space architecture with Out of This World: The New Field of Space Architecture, in which he proposed his ‘LEO parti’ for orbital cities. In contrast to O’Neill’s approach, he took a more pragmatic and industrial approach, conceptualising a modular, incremental orbital city. In his parti, conditions like microgravity were design parameters rather than obstacles.
Despite their apparent differences, both remained inherently anthropocentric, underpinned by functionalist frameworks. Thus both orbital cities were zoned according to the tenets of the four functions of the city: Dwelling, Recreation, Work, and Transportation.
To introduce earthbound nature to space requires curation; once again, the functionalist mindset shone through in the treatment of nature as a controlled asset serving human needs, rather than a dynamic entity. O’Neill envisioned a curated nature reminiscent of Earth’s ecosystems, while Sherwood reduced nature to a resource pool, optimised for life support and human well-being.
These approaches rest on the false assumption of total control over nature, overlooking the unpredictable and emergent properties of life. Furthermore, both designs fail to account for ‘black swan’ events in the space environment — the tightly coupled rigid designs required for both O’Neill’s megastructure and Sherwood’s modular system to work results in systemic risks, social instability, and lack of optionality.
Interplanetary Architecture (IPA) as conceived in this essay hence rejects this paradigm in favour of an adaptive, space-native ecology. This essay advocates for an architecture that supports and integrates space-native ecologies, dissolving the conventional divide between nature and culture; it also argues for decentralisation, autonomy, and a shift towards an antifragile architecture through distributed, adaptive systems.