Maybe it’s the technicians coolly watching their computer screens at Mission Control in Houston. Or the towering rocket gantries at Cape Canaveral. Or the sleek, minimalist forms of the rockets themselves.
Whatever image comes to mind, space travel often seems like the ultimate exercise in form following function, a perfectly rational enterprise run by engineers in which there is no room for anything other than cold, hard science.
Well, Houston, it ain’t that simple, as an eye opening new exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago makes clear.
The show, titled “2001: Building for Space Travel,” provides enticing glimpses into a future that may bring space hotels and inflatable, tent-like structures on Mars. It also sheds new light on Cold War space rivalries and our place in the cosmos, past and present.
But the exhibit really takes off when it documents the surprising interplay that has occurred between fantasy and reality-in particular, the way movies and other items of popular culture have influenced a field that seemed totally dominated by engineers.
For instance, Stanley Kubrick’s epic portrayal of space travel in the 1968 movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” so impressed German-born engineer Wernher von Braun that he urged the designers of the Skylab space station to see the film so they might learn design lessons from its modular, airplane-like interiors.
By the end of the museum show, we learn that space travel is shaped by art as well as science, taste as well as technology, architects as well as engineers. We also come across a design issue that is very down-to-earth: How can architects and designers make living in space – where there is no gravity, and no up or down – more habitable.
The timing of the exhibit, which the Art Institute’s chief architecture curator John Zukowsky co-organized with the Museum of Flight in Seattle, is no coincidence.
Beyond the obvious connection to “2001: A Space Odyssey,” this year marks the 40th anniversary of manned space flight and the 20th anniversary of the first orbital flight of the space shuttle. Conveniently, too, the 15-year-old Russian space station Mir plunged into the South Pacific last month. A hanging miniaturized Mir is one of more than 110 models, drawings, prints, and space history artifacts on display.
The show draws strength from Chicago architect Doug Garofalo’s evocative, otherwordly exhibit design, which lines the museum’s horseshoe-shaped architecture gallery with silvery polyester on one wall and a bent steel skeleton on the other. Space artifacts sit atop curvy wood pedestals, which resemble little creatures.
The exhibit also envelops us with space-related sounds. At the beginning, we hear a piped-in recording of a countdown and launch sequence. At the end, there’s an astronaut’s heartbeat, a reminder that being out on the frontier can be excruciatingly lonely.
People, not high-tech gadgetry, are the focus of the exhibit, so it is appropriate that the show starts with a question that some of us have asked from time to time: “What is my place in this great big universe?”
Architecture helps give our bearings. The globelike domes of planetariums and observatories echo the shapes of the planets even as they facilitate the functions they house. Chicago’s 71-year-old Adler Planetarium, the first in the Western Hemisphere, is a particularly distinguished example.
Early visions of space, we learn, grew out of the nautical tradition of exploring, which is why we use the word “skipper” for the captain of the spaceship and the word “bridge” to mark the command post where the skipper stands. The American West has been equally influential in shaping our view of the cosmos — not only as a frontier to be explored, but also as a place where there clearly are good guys and bad guys. In a perfect symbol of the Cold War’s superpower standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, one display case in the show houses a collection of miniature white rockets lined up directly opposite a collection of miniature black rockets, with only a line between them, like a line drawn in the sand.
Politics further colors our vision of space. The red ball of Soviet space capsules didn’t just allude to the trademark color of communism; the spherical shape, as Zukowsky nicely speculates, came to represent the global universality of the socialist vision, at least in Russian eyes.
To Americans, that very same red ball was a symbol of fear, a reason to think that they might lose control of space, and thus, control of the world. One of the show’s most memorable images is the cover of an American scouting magazine, which depicts a young scout watching the Soviet Sputnik satellite whiz threateningly over an American city.
These examples are revealing, as are the looks we get at little-known architectural firms, like Urbahn Associates, which designed such familiar structures as the 525-foot-high Vertical Assembly Building (VAB) in which Saturn V rockets were made.
At the time of its completion in 1965, the VAB was the world’s biggest building, with more cubic feet than the Empire State Building and the Chicago Merchandise Mart combined. The namesake of Urbahn Associates, Max Urbahn, also was part of the design team for Fermilab in west suburban Batavia. He died in 1995.
Yet the show is at its intriguing best when it explores how ideas ricochet with ease between the earthly and the extraterrrestrial, pop culture and science.
In his 1929 movie “The Woman in the Moon,” which appeared just three years after Robert Goddard launched the first rocket, German director Fritz Lang departed from the custom of portraying the moonship as an object shot from a cannon and showed it instead as a multi-stage rocket — just as his scientific advisers said he should. The movie, in turn, inspired the rocket engineers who would design the German V-2s that rained down on London during World War II.
Yet if life imitates art, art also imitates life, as some wonderful juxtapositions make clear.
We see, for example, a sleek 1950s painting by artist Chesley Bonestell of a multi-stage rocket streaking through space, one of many Bonestell illustrations that appeared in magazines like Collier’s and helped make space travel seem truly feasible, not just a science fiction fantasy. Alongside the painting is a kid’s lunchbox with a knockoff drawing that pictures the same rocket heading for a wagon-wheeled space station.
Further illustrating space travel’s hold on the popular imagination, the show displays a poster for the 1979 James Bond movie “Moonraker,” which surrounds the British spy with astrovixens and the U.S. space shuttle. The shuttle, which already had been introduced to the American public, was still two years away from its maiden voyage into space. But it still merited a starring role in the film.
To Zukowsky’s credit, the show doesn’t get lost in Hollywood razzle-dazzle; the exhibit still takes up the issue of humanizing space travel. In the wall text, for example, the curator pointedly notes that architects and designers were ignored in the early U.S. space missions, in which astronauts were stuffed into cramped compartments.
It was only with the development of Skylab in the late 1960s and early 1970s that NASA consulted the noted industrial designer Raymond Loewy to make spacecraft interiors more habitable. Recent designs have called for private compartments, exercise quarters and other features to make space stations more like a home away from home.
The quality of these truly high-rise living quarters matters because, as the show makes tantalizingly clear, space travel is likely to become more widespread in the not-too-distant future. Studies show that there is a market for space tourism.
The show also breaks new ground in showing us the proposed inflatable structures, called TransHabs, that would create bigger living spaces on both space stations and the surfaces of planets like Mars. Zukowsky imaginatively compares the TransHabs to balloon frame houses, which were invented in Chicago in 1832, envisioning them spreading across the Martian landscape like so many suburban tract homes.
There are some minor faults in the exhibit — images that are placed out of their thematic sequence, for example, are confusing. But on the whole, the show is wonderfully lucid in its treatment of what easily could have been a baffling subject. The soaring achievement of “2001: Building for Space Travel” is that it gives us a richer and more humanistic understanding of our journey to “the final frontier” — and what it all means for life back on Earth.
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“2001: Building for Space Travel” will appear in the Kisho Kurokawa Gallery of Architecture (Gallery 227) through Oct. 21.
