Professor Scharmen to Present at ACSA

Department of Architecture's Professor Frederick Scharmen will present his paper on NASA's space colony designs of the 1970s at the 101st Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) Conference in San Francisco.

This paper, The High Frontier, the Megastructure, and The Big Dumb Object, examines the space colony proposals of Gerard O'Neill, funded by the founders of the Whole Earth Catalog and NASA, as a design project of the 1970s. The relationship of the project's imagery to science fiction, design rendering, and engineering PR is outlined. The links between the organizational structure of these habitats and other Megastructural projects is explored. The social context of the work is seen against the backdrop of techno-utopian optimism characteristic of the era. Good Luck, Professor Scharmen.