Located on the Equator, the settlements of Aquarius will face a serious challenge in maintaining a cool environment for residents. Two aspects of the architectural design of the full-scale colony structures are intended to deal with this. One is the use of an all-over garden cover, which not only creates an attractive naturalistic environment while producing some food, but also shades the colony from the sun and moderates humidity. The other is the use of a unified terraced mountain-form superstructure with all residences built into the edges of each structural terrace, with windows and enclosure panels well recessed from the edges. This effectively puts all the functional spaces of the colony ‘under ground’, making the most of that plant cover and the latent thermal mass of the concrete s