Closed Worlds: Encounters That Never Happened

The image of Earth from outer space was highly anticipated throughout the 1960s, and inspired a great deal of wonder in the general population. This iconic image reached the apex of its symbolism in 1968, through the famous Earthrise series taken by Apollo 8.

Portraying mankind entrapped in the finite space of a sphere, the image of Earth as perceived from space may be accountable, in part, for a feeling of anxiety in our collective cultural imagination. It resulted in the development of broad literature that projected plans for our future survival within what Buckminster Fuller famously called our ‘spaceship earth’.

Reyner Banham, with an environmental bubble; Hans Hollein, with a pill illustrating that “all is architecture”; Jacques Cousteau, with the Conshelf project that explored the inner space of the ocean; Walt Disney, with EPCOT as a reconstruction of a miniaturized and idealized world, and many others, have contributed substantially and in various ways to the discourse of closed worlds.

Encounters That Never Happened is presented in conjunction with Closed Worlds, an exhibition on view at Storefront for Art and Architecture. Organized in the format of three panels (Loops and Arrows, Outerspace/Innerspace, and Miniaturized Earth), the conference will explore historical and modern debates regarding the environment and the exploration of outer space, as well reflections of such debates on architectural discourse.

Contemporary historians, critics, and practitioners will participate through impersonations of historical figures, bringing to life texts, images, and theories that have shaped architecture discourse over the last five decades. The reanimated encounters between these figures, portrayed by contemporary voices whose work reflects theirs, will shed light upon a transformation in the field of ecology, from the purity of nature as a realm outside of the “manmade,” to a technologically mediated science of instrumentation.

This conference is presented in conjunction with Storefront’s exhibition Closed Worlds and the Closed Worlds Design Competition.