ABSTRACT
In 1976 architectural students at the University of Minnesota built their own self-sustaining ecological house. They named it “‘Ouroboros’ after a mythical dragon which survived by eating its own tail and feces.”2 This is a telling image of what ecological architecture came to be in the 1970s: a way of designing in which architecture was modeled on the closed circulation of material within a defined space. The chief source of inspiration for this mood of design was spaceships, and this chapter explores how and why imagined and real environments in space came to serve as models for ecological design of earthly landscapes and buildings. It claims that life in space came to represent the peaceful, rational, and environmentally friendly alternative to the destructive, irrational, ecological crisis down on Earth. Spaceship management aimed narrowly at the biological survival of astronauts, an ethic which also came to dominate ecological design proposals onboard Spaceship Earth. The result was a design program at the expense of a wider aesthetic and social understanding of the human condition. This chapter reviews the work of leading ecological designers of the period, such as Ian L. McHarg, John Todd and the New Alchemists, Alexander Pike and John Frazer, Brenda and Robert Vale, Ken Yeang, Phil Hawes, and many others. It situates their projects in view of ecological research methods of the period and puts forward an understanding of their thinking in view of space exploration.
