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| - As we’ve noted many times, the defining aspect of life in space is life indoors. But, what sort of life? Though the very grand, vast, fantastical spaces Marshal Savage described in the original TMP are likely to be a much later development, the environment of Avalon habitats, even in early periods, is likely to be far from claustrophobic and far removed from the military submarine environment of the pre-fab outposts commonly proposed. The most challenging aspect of the design of Avalon habitats will be the crafting of spaces creating an impression of an outdoor environment even though the entire habitat is enclosed and, for the most part, subterranean. Though most of us in industrialized countries today spend most of our time indoors, the sense of a relationship between indoor and outdoor
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| abstract
| - As we’ve noted many times, the defining aspect of life in space is life indoors. But, what sort of life? Though the very grand, vast, fantastical spaces Marshal Savage described in the original TMP are likely to be a much later development, the environment of Avalon habitats, even in early periods, is likely to be far from claustrophobic and far removed from the military submarine environment of the pre-fab outposts commonly proposed. The most challenging aspect of the design of Avalon habitats will be the crafting of spaces creating an impression of an outdoor environment even though the entire habitat is enclosed and, for the most part, subterranean. Though most of us in industrialized countries today spend most of our time indoors, the sense of a relationship between indoor and outdoor environments is psychologically important. How does one create this in a place where everything is indoors? There is no perfect simulation of a natural outdoor space and even transparent domes cannot completely fool the senses. But this is not a new problem and as builders and architects of even the ancient past have learned, crafting the impression of exterior environments indoors is not that difficult to accomplish. When Buckminster Fuller started working with large geodesic domes, such as the Biosphere American Pavilion at Expo 67, he encountered an interesting reaction from visitors to these structures. Given enough distance, brightness, independence of interior structures, and some obscuring of perimeter edges, people would readily accept a geodesic dome structure as a ‘second sky’ and regard its interior as another kind of exterior. Fuller inadvertently rediscovered something ancient architects were very familiar with and which explains their obsession with domes and vaulted spaces in political and religious architecture. Many ancient forms of religious structure were very deliberate attempts to craft an impression of a different, special, world. A microcosm where the cosmic order of the supranatural reality of a particular mythic system could be portrayed in a visceral way, creating a transcendent personal experience simply by entering the space. To enter these places was to be transported to a higher reality where one’s relationship to the divine and supernatural was made plain, and often reinforced by art and sculpture depicting deities or particularly important mythological stories. At first certain special places in the natural landscape were employed as such ritual spaces but as construction technology advanced builders found ways to recreate in built structure the transcendent aspects of these special natural places. One of their key discoveries was the perception-stretching aspect of edgeless, cornerless, forms. Without visual dimensional cues like corners, it becomes difficult to judge dimensions of a space. A round courtyard may sometimes seem much larger in areas than a rectangular one simply by virtue of a lack of corners. A smooth surfaced arched roof, from the inside, more voluminous than one with a visible peak. Though less apparent in small volumes, in large spaces such edgeless shapes, with the proper lighting and color, can lose their sense of substance, becoming virtual hollow spaces, portals to a virtually larger area. Painters of frescos commonly exploited this aspect for a trompe-l'œil effect, turning smooth cornerless arched ceilings into virtual atriums under a painted sky. Domes were especially good in this respect as long as their apparent perimeter edges could be kept obscured or ‘framed’ in some way by other perimeter structure. (much as the mountain walls of a valley frame the horizon in some places –there are few places other than at sea or in deserts and plains where a completely flat horizon is apparent) One of the most famous ancient examples demonstrating all these aspects combined was the Roman Pantheon where a vast dome covered in alcoves once housing statues and plaques of many deities creates an impressive microcosm around and over the floor-bound occupant –creating a vast interior outdoors and very plainly putting man in his place in the cosmos. Curiously, architectural historians tend to be more interested in the exterior and technological features of the domed structures of antiquity –their size, their structural systems, their external decoration– than their interiors. Perhaps this is because when domes are used right, they tend to have no ‘interior’. They become perceptually invisible relative to anything else inside them. Like Fuller’s Biosphere, as far as visitors are concerned they turn into another sky. Today, with our science of optics and acoustics, new lighting technologies, sophisticated indoor gardening and water feature systems, and new radically large span construction techniques, our potential for building on these ancient methods to create ‘interior outdoors’ is greater than ever. Certainly, we are still far from fooling anyone with a simulation of the real thing, but history shows us that isn’t strictly necessary for the required sense of comfort associated with access to an outdoor space. It’s enough to have some open space, often gardened or with water features, with some aspects of the outdoors. And we are using this capability in surprising ways. The small intimate domed spaces of a planetarium become, with the lights turned down, quite literally a whole universe. Tourist trains and aircraft now have virtual light-changing skies on their ceilings to help fight a sense of claustrophobia over long trips. Museums and even luxury homes now have virtual skies in various rooms, complete with moving clouds and stars. Casinos and theme parks build city streets and whole classic European public squares indoors. And sports stadiums, now often entirely enclosed, serve as vast sheltered open spaces for thousands. If you want to get a feel for what living on the Moon or Mars may actually be like, don’t look to the mock-ups of tin-can habitats from NASA or the like. Look at the Eden Project greenhouse dome in the UK () or the Tropical Islands indoor beach resort built in a German airship hangar. () Transparency doesn’t seem to matter much to the sense of an exterior environment with such structures, though size certainly helps. It is generally enough that the overhead structure is relatively large in span, out of reach, edgeless and cornerless, and sufficiently well lit. There’s no question that large spaces like greenhouse domes and airship hangars are indeed enclosures. They cannot offer the aspect of the wide-open plains or the sea. And yet they aren’t interiors in the way that rooms in a house or office building are interiors. They are in-between. They have the aspect of an open-topped but enclosed atrium or courtyard. And this can be just enough of a sense of the outdoors to be comfortable. Light is the defining aspect of the sky. We don’t need to see clouds to have an impression of a sky and most large domed enclosures have not been truly transparent. You could reconstruct the Eden Project domes with some more advanced form of electroluminescent or fiber-optic lighting panel instead of its texlon membrane cell panels and the interior aspect would be exactly the same. And this is exactly what the settlers of Avalon will do in creating their own underground interior outdoors, from the atriums of personal homes to the natural lava tubes some scientists speculate may be wider than Central Park in New York City.
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