I performed a vanity search on Google last night, and stumbled on a thread titled “One very strange graphic” on the Google Group sci.space.history.

WOW!  I love the internet.

Of course, the thread was started about this graphic, blogged about here and here.

I’ll leave you to read the thread (there’s only 60 or so posts, most wandering off topic to space toilets, etc), but here are some highlights:

Where did this come from?  Someone out there did a lot of work to create this sort of graphic. 

…

Who the frack is Andrew Liebchen, anyway?

…

The horrible thing about all this is that this comes from this website: 
http://5dollarglasses.blogspot.com/2008_12_01_archive.html 
Where he basicly states that he’s going to use this as his graduate 
thesis from college. 
So what do we do now? 
If, on the one hand, we just ignore it, he might end up going right down 
the tubes if they figure out his argument is fucked. 
If, on the other hand, we point out his errors to him in regard to this 
so he can fix it up, there is a real possibility that we might be in 
violation of The Prime Directive and giving him outside help that his 
fellow graduate students don’t have. 
But I know what James T. Kirk would do. 
That’s why I’m going to get in touch with him in the next couple of 
days, and tell him to revise things a bit, and also blow up that 
computer that’s enslaving his life, like Vaal did…

[editors note:  Prime Directive.]…

In fact, it would be hard to come up with something more subtly 
screwed-up than this illustration, both in details and the overall 
concept it’s trying to argue for. 

And, after I posted on the group to give some background to the graphic and my thesis topic (making sure to point out I am studying architecture not spacecraft design):

Thank God you didn’t keep running up that road, because you’d have been screwed, blued, and tattooed if anyone who was to judge your original thesis dissertation had looked into it in detail. 
It was pure, blind, chance that I ever ran into it, and frankly I think 
you might want to thank your lucky stars for pure, blind, chance having 
intervened on your behalf right now, at the appropriate moment. 
You sir, are apparently “lucky”. :-) 

Yes, I am lucky!  This one takes the cake:

…Ah-HAH! That explains the heavy use of big glass plates with 
polished brass trim, the big gargoyles at the four corners of the 
Soyuz, and the big Zen Rock waterfall along the back wall of the 
Apollo CM. 

All in all, I am flattered; though it is a little difficult to swallow the negativity the anonymity inspires.  Its alright though, I can take the critical response…in fact I am grateful that I can see how a graphical work is questioned when the respondants are given no context, or choose to ignore the conceptual dialectic surrounding it.

And its funny too.

ANDREW LIEBCHEN DP 2009-2 from risd architecture on Vimeo.

fig. a                                                                             fig. b

fig. c                                                                             fig. d

fig. e                                                                             fig. f

fig. g                                                                             fig. h

fig. i                                                                             fig. j

(See all of the above LARGER on Flickr)

It’s been a while.  So first, a Flashback!

Tuesday, March 10, 2009:  Crit day

With a herculean out-pouring of charm and charisma, I presented the few objects (figs. a - e above) and fewer drawings (figs. f - g above) I had produced.  Included were the spinners pictured in the previous post (the collapse of manufacturing and agriculture, the piercing of the picturesque, etc).  Also present were a cleaver wheel chart graphically describing the relationship between algae cultivation and hydrogen fuel (fig. e above), and a failed attempt at a perpetual motion machine (not pictured above)(you and I both no that ALL perpetual motion machines are doomed to failure, this one just more so that all the others).  The machine begs one to consider the futility of energy production cycles in any form: production, consumption, production, and so on.

Enrique says to, “find a site,” and “to define the difference between manufacturing ground and the agricultural ground.”  (to him, this distinction is the elephant versus the termite, great metaphor).  Also, he feels that have yet to begin to operate on my problem architecturally, and so at times critics have a hard time finding their way into the project.  Also, I am to write a program.

Oh, and don’t forget that everyone thinks I’m obsessed with circles (see all figs. above).

Wednesday, March 11, 2009 – present

So, to put off writing a program, naturally, I make some diagrams: charting the space/time of a Soyuz launch campaign on a polar grid (fig. f), scale comparison of cultivation area for multiple launching systems (fig. g), and typology comparison of possible thumbnails solutions (fig. h)…Not much program written.  I HAVE to write something resembling a preliminary program this weekend so that I can carve foam on Monday.

So, what about this program?  So far…

I am drawn to The River as a solution for hydrogen production (agriculture) and rocket assembly (manufacturing) integration.  The river is a manufactured one.  Maybe it shadows a dead river, or overshadows a highway (another kind of river).  The River draws water from a source, adds algae, and flows downstream over a period of four days, which is the hydrogen production cycle of the algae. In time, the algae in the river converts solar energy into enough hydrogen to fuel the rocket assembled at the Delta.  It is tended by a farmer or farmers who live on the river.

The Delta, like the River itself, is artificial.  Algae are skimmed from the headwaters, and the water flows over the surface of the delta.  The delta itself is a kind of mat-building holding the functions of the launch facility, organized into several thematic strands.  Theses strands include (as of this minute): Launch Vehicle assembly, Payload prep, Visitor, Administration, and Launch management.  The strands wind discretely through the mat, but the nature of the mat is a kind of foam, with programmed area as the expanding bubbles, and circulation the solid that encloses/defines the bubbles.  In this way, these discrete program themes should become related. 

Throw in variable artificial topography, flowing water, and a huge bowl for launching rockets, and it should be a good time.  Sound vague, right?  Good, I’ve got wiggle room!

The River and the Delta

The farmer’s land is not land at all, but water.  Water is not really water because it is covered by glass.  The farmer farms the river, a linear aquaculture of hydrogen producing pond scum.  Deprived of oxygen and sulfur and set in the sun in 10 cm thick pan, slowly flowing, the algae spontaneously produces hydrogen for four days before exhausting itself.  The river may not be a river in the literal sense being horizontal or flowing or meandering, it may be floating, etc.  How does the farmer live, in such closeness to his river?

At the Delta, water is returned to the natural cycle.  In a long, narrow room, rockets arrive by rail and are unloaded, assembled, and mated with their cargoes.  These cargoes arrive in a similar fashion as the rocket, but must be segregated in a series of clean rooms to protect their finicky electronics.  So, at one end, a railroad.  At the other a bowl and a tower.  The bowl contains the fiery gases of the rocket launch.  A great amount of water floods the bowl as a rocket launches, and is vaporized.  A lattice tower supports the rocket prior to launch.  Administrators have their own tower safely away from which they can monitor the launch.  Does water cover all this and flow into the bowl?

Wheel charts are useful ephemera.  Unlike essentially value-less commemorative coins, collectable stamps, and the like, wheel charts are interactive and informative.  There are two basic components: a disc with a polar table of data, and a second disc on top of the first that is a frame with which the data can be interpreted.  The circle at once suggests a dynamism, but the wheel chart is in a way static, the information enclosed in the circle cannot be expanded.  The circle is the most symmetrical shape, yet the wheel chart requires a certain amount of asymmetry in order to function.  Of course, the original circles in nature are the celestial bodies, long revered for the predictability and perfection.

The wheel above relies on juxtaposition and obfuscation to subvert romanticism and linear narrative.  At once, humanity’s oldest organized pursuit (farming) is place atop its newest (the crushing industry needed to fuel America’s consumer culture).  The two are not mutually exclusive, but seem to be worlds apart.  I would characterize both images as fairly romantic, in that they picturesque-ly gloss over the harsh realities of each.  Cutting holes and filling them with miniature, changeable compositions in a way brings back the small moments of humanity and connection lost in overwhelming multiplicity of the bottom image.

How is this architectural?  Forgetting literal translation of wheel chart as building (dynamic architecture, circular floorplates, whatever) this object implies that an industrial scene, framed by seemingly unrelated (but in reality dependant) content, re-imposes a kind of slowness.  Cartesian rationality still exists in global sense, fully intact below the rotating frame but is locally modified by the rotating frame.  Jessica Hefland:

“Indeed if the astronomical volvelles [wheel charts] of the incunabula onece sought to compress three dimensions of data into two, it might be said that modern wheels…do precisely the opposite, employing kinetic conceits to infer added depth and increased dimensionality, challenging the surface, and with it, our notions of where the surface actually is, if indeed it exists at all.”  

Check out my Wintersession booklet on Issuu:

Enrique sent me an email with some thoughts about our first pin-up on Sunday.  He mentioned that I probably didn’t want my project to be lost in nostalgia for the space race; that Clarke and Kubrick were reacting to present conditions for them.  But, he does think that distance of history could be an asset, depending upon how I continue to frame my problem.  Below is my response:

From: Andrew Liebchen [aliebche@g.risd.edu]

To: ‘Enrique Martinez’

CC:

Subject: RE: Notes from Yesterday

Enrique-

Thanks for the feedback.  The thing that interests me about the 60’s and 70’s is that it was a time when mainstream America was genuinely interested in space exploration in a way that it hasn’t been since (except when something goes disasterously wrong).  Today, the only people who get excited about space are children.  The Apollo-Soyuz moment is particularly compelling because it is awkwardly bracketed between two eras:  the excitement of going to the moon, and the endless monotony of the space shuttle.

Today, really interesting things are happening in the burgeoning commercial spaceflight industry.  For example, the commercial cargo (and perhaps manned) flights to  the International Space Station will fill in the gap between the end of the Space Shuttle program and the beginning of NASA’s new Constellation program.  While this is troubling for all the usual reasons brought up when the privatization of government function is discussed, it is thrilling for other reasons.  No longer will access to space be limited to highly trained astronauts on government salaries and the super-rich, but as cost decreases and factors of safety increase, going to space will seem closer to us all.

So, should terrestrial launch facilities hold a government cost-engineered affordable-drop-ceiling aesthetic?  Or do we take a page from mid-century airport architecture and build infrastructural human space that celebrates and enriches the act and experience of going into orbit?  Obviously, I am all about the latter.

Did you take pictures when you visited the platforms?  I’d like to check them out.

Also, I have class on Wednesday morning (until noon).

Thanks!

-Andrew.

It all began with a misunderstanding, a miscommunication created by an imprecise translation from analog to digital.  The degree project board presented a device on which a signaler would apparently draw a circuit diagram, causing corresponding LEDs to light for a view.  By the cunning or laziness of the device’s creator, the signaler was unaware if there was a direct relationship to the diagram he was creating and which LEDs lit up for the viewer.  Both signaler and viewer are hopelessly confused.

Erwin Schrodinger proposed a thought experiment in 1935.  He imagined a steel box, which contained a small amount of a radioactive material, a Geiger counter, a hammer, a container with an amount of cyanide, and a cat.  If the Geiger counter detects a particle from the radioactive material, the hammer is dropped on the container of cyanide, killing the cat.  Early consensus in the field of quantum mechanics held that the cat exists in two superimposed states, dead and alive.  Not until the lid is opened do the two states collapse into only one.

 An orbital détente was staged on July 17, 1975 as two space capsules, Apollo and Soyuz, docked for the first time.  The American craft is a fat assembly of platonic solids: cone stacked on cylinder, gleaming silver in the pure sunlight.  The Soviet craft is complicated, joined modules lacking reductive geometries.  Given that each was built for a similar mission: taking a man to the moon and back, how is it that they came to look so different?

Schrodinger had a problem with the common interpretation of his thought experiment: what happened to the opposing state when the lid was open.  His assertion is simple.  At the moment the lid is opened, reality splits into two. In one reality, the cat is alive and in the other, it is dead.  The Apollo and Soyuz craft are an entangled pair of dead cat and alive cat in reverse.  Given different cultural and engineering histories, policies, and even aesthetics each craft developed simultaneously, re-entangling in orbit in 1975.

As a culture, how do we remember these great achievements of spaceflight?  Primarily by the obsolete capsules we keep in museums and by cheap ephemera and commemoratives sold in nearby gift shops.  Manned spaceflight’s cultural legacy is not Velcro or tempurpedic mattresses, but junk kept under glass or left in orbit, eventually becoming meteorites in the upper atmosphere.  The legacy of manned spaceflight has not be thoroughly appreciated by architects:  we though Archigram got us off the hook.

It is worth another look now that our profession again looks to take up the cause of saving humanity from itself.  How to we remember technocratic wonders of a past age?  In their obsolescence, what are their capacity as symbols, as ephemeral collectors of dreams?

TVCC burns; the Pruitt-Igoe of this architectural era.  

The solid void of CCTV is void again.

The drawings above were produced by a drawing machine (a great RISD architecture genre) in construction for the past few days. 

The drawing machine consists of four parts: 

1.) The launch pad is a level surface five inches above the floor.  A 4 - 1/8 inch square is cut in the center, into which is seated the…

2.) The transport assembly consisting of a rubber stopper with a styrene tube piercing vertically through the center.  The tube is attached to a length of vinyl tubing which leads to…

3.) A bicycle pump provides the pneumatic pressure required to launch the…

4.) Rocket which is loaded with an amount of charcoal powder.

The charcoal particulate spew from the launch of the pneumatic rocket is registered on the paper.

Throughout the historical the historical progression of spacecraft and the related ground-support infrastructure, it is striking that the developmental decisions are made cumulatively with economy as a primary concern.  The space capsules in are museums are rarely results of heroic individual design efforts, but a kind of agglomeration—a metamorphosis like the formation of marble—of countless engineered decisions, revisions, improvements, and leave-well-enough-alone, though it takes an act of policy to begin the processes (see spheres vs. cones or JFK).

I’ve made drawing machine (or some kind of overly complicated machine) at least once a year since I’ve been at RISD.  This time, I’ve documented the development of the device in a single isometric drawing from conception to current configuration. Once this drawing is finished, it will describe a developmental history full of hypotheses that become facts, false starts, idealism that metamorphs into pragmatic conclusion, and so on.  In short, the drawing is an archeological chart of the layered progression of the construct.

The drawings the machine produced at face value border on mere form-finding (which is dangerous), and have less value right now than the process of making the drawing machine (which is not to say that the drawings will not prove useful in the future).  The construction of the machine is so valuable, it is like a miniature history of the development of the space program, as manifested in the active and ghost buildings on Merritt Island and the spacecraft launched there.  The legacy of decisions, mistakes, and discoveries are pulled forward through time, institutionalized, corrected, and regularized by the small triumph of economy. 

There is little doubt that my project should focus on a launch complex in the spring.  This exploration therefore is the beginning of a diagram or thumbnail sketch.  All the components for a launch system are here in micro:  static platform, the rocket transporter, fuel production, recovery.

Two take-aways from my valuable conversation with Olga Mesa today:

 1) The latest writings that are trying to link the spacecraft discourse to architecture’s current obsession with sustainability may be premature (or at least under-developed).  She encouraged me not to take the time I need to develop my topic; only this way will the conceptual work be able to flourish.

 2) The graphic work thus far can be read as more than just in the style of commemoratives.  Instead, the style imparts constraints that can be valuable to process.  For instance, if a thumbnail sketch (that is, a three-dimensional parti that clearly captures the essence of a project) is drawn as a commemorative coin, the rules applied to the coin (two sided, narrative, etc.) can enhance the conceit of the thumbnail sketch.  This confluence–commemorative (coin, plate, stamp, etc) and thumbnail sketch—really gives me a strong working conceit as I move forward.

So, in the great RISD tradition, I continue to build my launch pad drawing machine.  Hopefully, my first test launch will take place on Thursday, and start producing drawings on Friday.