Jeffrey S. Nesbit

Today, designers, researchers, and scholars must responsibly engage the entangled networks and delineated systems far beyond boundaries of typical design practice to engage in thoughtful critique of the past and consider counter-imaginations of the future. Our discussion of the unseen begins first with an understanding of the power of sight. A look back at the technologies of control implicated in documenting the world reveals the closely intertwined evolution of imperial occupation and technological progress. Constructing Invisibility continues the exchanges initiated during the first symposium and builds upon the diversity of knowledge shared. The late French philosopher Bruno Latour reminds us that “politics has always been oriented toward objects, stakes, situations, material entities, bodies, landscapes, places. This is in effect the decisive discovery of political ecology: it is an object-oriented politics. Change the territories and you will also change the attitudes.” This issue uses these economies, landscapes, and places, including the boundless corporations and destructive climate realities, to better see the world. Further, the collection of essays seeks to understand how the construction of such sight impacts civilian occupation in the remaining world. Illuminating stories and places has become the aim of this volume, and shedding light on distant territories has become confounded by extremity, complexity, disparity, and secrecy.

This book isolates and dissects long-overlooked architectural typologies to unveil political aesthetics and protocols along geographic boundaries shaping contemporary society. Exclusions, Edges, and Ecologies is an investigation for identifying and documenting the infrastructural and architectural typologies along political boundaries. By revisiting building typology as a method, this project purposefully meets the entanglement between architecture and power structures. The study of the architectural type and the interrogation of architecture's role becomes its call for social and political change. New architectural imagination can be formed by revealing some of the most overlooked and dismissed spaces at the edges of architecture. Citizenry edges do not only begin and end at nation-state borders but expand from within the interior of common social junctures. City is no longer boundary by fortified walls or defined through the old binary--rural to urban, country to city, etc. Planetary grounds includes the imagination for breaching the edge of the atmosphere and a vast ecology of infrastructure to support the launch complex for leaving earth entirely. Exclusions, Edges, and Ecologies catalogs an architectural type across diverse historical and geopolitical scales, from the interior to vast territories of remote land, to reveal the edges of architecture and delaminate the boundaries of our contemporary design discourse.

Ground Control: A Design History of Technical Lands and NASA’s Space Complex explores the infrastructural history of the United States rocket launch complex. Working primarily between 1950, the year of the first rocket launch at Cape Canaveral, to 1969, the Apollo moon landing, the book highlights the evolution of its overlooked architecture and infrastructural landscape in parallel to US aerospace history. The cases outlined in this book survey the varying architectural histories and aesthetic motivations that helped produce America’s public image of early space exploration. The built environment of the U.S. space complex shows how its expanded infrastructural landscape tended to align with national Cold War politics and themes found in the age of modernity. Examples across often inaccessible sites of remote landscape help explain the contingent histories and deep association of an American aesthetic, land-use, and ultimately a form of nation-building practices. Ground Control offers a new way of understanding how technological uses of place-based science were designed and constructed in support of both industrial and military activities in postwar America. This book will be of interest to researchers, scholars, students, and anyone with a general interest in the history of American infrastructure, land use, and space exploration.

Ground Control: A Design History of Technical Lands and NASA’s Space Complex explores the infrastructural history of the United States rocket launch complex. Working primarily between 1950, the year of the first rocket launch at Cape Canaveral, to 1969, the Apollo moon landing, the book highlights the evolution of its overlooked architecture and infrastructural landscape in parallel to US aerospace history. The cases outlined in this book survey the varying architectural histories and aesthetic motivations that helped produce America’s public image of early space exploration. The built environment of the U.S. space complex shows how its expanded infrastructural landscape tended to align with national Cold War politics and themes found in the age of modernity. Examples across often inaccessible sites of remote landscape help explain the contingent histories and deep association of an American aesthetic, land-use, and ultimately a form of nation-building practices. Ground Control offers a new way of understanding how technological uses of place-based science were designed and constructed in support of both industrial and military activities in postwar America. This book will be of interest to researchers, scholars, students, and anyone with a general interest in the history of American infrastructure, land use, and space exploration.

Technical lands are spaces united by their "exceptional" status—their remote locations, delimited boundaries, secured accessibility, and vigilant management. Designating land as "technical" is thus a political act. Doing so entails dividing, marginalizing, and rendering portions of the Earth inaccessible and invisible. An anti-visuality of technical lands enables forms of hypervisibility and surveillance through the rhetorical veil of technology. Including the political and physical boundaries, technical lands are used in highly aestheticized geographies to resist debate surrounding production and governance. These critical sites and spaces range from disaster exclusion and demilitarized zones to prison yards, industrial extraction sites, airports, and spaceports. The identification and instrumentalization of technical lands have increased in scale and complexity since the rise of neoliberalization. Yet, the precise theoretical contours that define these geographies remain unclear. Technical Lands: A Critical Primer brings together authors from a diverse array of disciplines, geographies, and epistemologies to interrogate and theorize the meaning and increasing significance of technical lands.

Nature of Enclosure interrogates the role of architecture and urbanization in a post-pandemic society, to discuss topics from closed forms of capital to the exclusive boundaries of environment and politics. From Crystal Palace in 1851 to Buckminster Fuller's Spaceship Earth in 1969, nature became enclosed. Claimed to be a reaction of Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, Fuller's geodesic domes became symbols of American counterculture. Yet, from Fuller's description of Spaceship Earth "sea masters," the dome seems to prioritize an environment of occupation inside the dome, over those residing outside--a world of civilized control on its interior and wilderness, war, and wasteland on the other side. Overlapped by cultural consumption and politics, planetary imagination stimulates a useful framework for interrogating the human impact on environmental limitations over a technological foreground. The blurry lines between the engineered logic and cultural imagination are continually embedded and influenced by intuition in the cultural practices of capital enclosure. Theories, design practices, and the forms of imagination, including science fiction, open up critical questions on the status of our environment here on Earth. Nature of Enclosure is a series of conversations to gather experts from a range of disciplines, including architects, landscape architects, architectural historians, design theory scholars, geographers, historians of science and technology, and professionals at the intersection of architecture and the environment. Organized in three parts, (1) Nature of the Synthetic Environment, (2) Air, Capital and the Planetary Imaginary, and (3) Enclosed Boundaries of Political Geographies, this book continues the conversation with a collection of essays as both reflections from the provocative discussions and expanding the discourse of enclosed environments in architecture and design fields. With Contributions of Daisy Ames, Rachel Armstrong, Daniel Barber, Jordan Bimm, Galo Canizares, Mishuana Goeman, Mariano Gomez Luque, Aleksandra Jaeschke, Lydia Kallipoliti, Ersela Kripa, Mae-ling Lokko, Stephen Mueller, Joshua Nason, Antoine Picon, Shawn Rickenbacker, David Salomon, Fred Scharmen, Julia Smachylo, Geoffrey Th n, Jo l Vacheron, and Kathy Velikov.

A total of 15 shipyards had been constructed along the United States coastlines. As early as 1767, the U.S. Navy engineered and manufactued landscapes to fabricate and maintain battleship fleets, keep up with technological upgrades, and sustain military agendas. Today, only five remain, leaving former shipyards as massive voids in the ever-expanding urban metropolis. This design research traces inactive shipyards as a context of productive memory and reveal new knowledge on geographies of military infrastructure and power.