{"id":43856,"date":"2011-12-14T15:04:40","date_gmt":"2011-12-14T15:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/the-right-fit\/"},"modified":"2011-12-14T15:04:40","modified_gmt":"2011-12-14T15:04:40","slug":"the-right-fit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/the-right-fit\/","title":{"rendered":"The Right Fit"},"content":{"rendered":"

lareviewofbooks<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

ROSTEN WOO<\/p>\n

on how the spacesuit was made.<\/b>
\n
<\/p>\n

Spaceman <\/em> \u00a9 Ed Emshwiller, courtesy of the Emshwiller family<\/div>\n

Nicholas de Monchaux
Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo<\/i><\/b>
\nThe MIT Press, March 2011. 380 pp.<\/p>\n

Not long ago, I spent an afternoon inside Biosphere II, a 3.14-acre vivarium designed as an experimental \u201cself-contained\u201d ecosystem. Biosphere II hosted two missions \u2014 the second aborted in 1994 \u2014 in which scientists lived in the dome for a period of two years and six months respectively, in the end learning more about the effects of voluntary human confinement than ecology. The ambitiously named structure (Earth being Biosphere I) was repurposed as a kind of laboratory and tourist attraction. Best known today as the inspiration for the Pauly Shore movie Biodome<\/i>, the destination offers guided tours of thinly conceived ecosystems: a salty, brackish pond with a wave machine stands in for the ocean; huge vents cut into the site\u2019s floor supply an arid desert with a warm breeze. Most impressive are the building\u2019s soccer-field-sized \u201clungs\u201d: structures outfitted with rubber diaphragms that stretch to accommodate the expansion and contraction of internal air over the course of an Arizona day. Today, Biosphere II is mostly compelling as a thought experiment \u2014 one that you can walk around in. It seems unlikely that the simulated ocean will yield particularly useful experimental data, but as an art project or a philosophical provocation, it\u2019s pretty powerful. What does it mean to build a whole world? One inside of another? Standing in a constructed desert gazing through glass at a larger, surrounding desert, it\u2019s easy to start thinking about insides and outsides, about the membranes that at once separate atmospheres and contain them.<\/p>\n

Spacesuit<\/i>, architect Nicholas de Monchaux\u2019s wonderful material history, is mostly about these membranes. The book begins with that iconic photograph of Buzz Aldrin\u2019s figure against the surface of the moon \u2014 along with a simple question: \u201cWhy is this spacesuit soft?\u201d For an answer, de Monchaux finds it necessary to look as far back as 1783, pulling in examples from fields as far-flung as computer simulation, psychopharmacology, haute couture, and the work of Gil Scott-Heron.<\/p>\n

De Monchaux has constructed Spacesuit<\/i> (maybe slightly too cleverly) as a series of layers, each corresponding to the 21 layers that comprised the A7L space suit of the Apollo missions. The author revels in finding curious details from the material history of the world, and Spacesuit<\/i> bursts with dinner-party fodder: Did you know that the U.S. government\u2019s documentation of the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests created a worldwide film shortage? Or that the Apollo mission\u2019s computer-backup system was crafted into a binary pattern that was then physically woven into ropes? And that only seamstresses could be called upon to do this work properly?<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

lareviewofbooks: ROSTEN WOO on how the spacesuit was made. Spaceman \u00a9 Ed Emshwiller, courtesy of the Emshwiller family Nicholas de MonchauxSpacesuit: Fashioning Apollo The MIT Press, March 2011. 380 pp. Not long ago, I spent an afternoon inside Biosphere II, a 3.14-acre vivarium designed as an experimental \u201cself-contained\u201d ecosystem. Biosphere II hosted two missions \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[1537],"class_list":["post-43856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-critical-toys"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-bpm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43856\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}