Rendering of the Mars Dune Alpha habitat. Image courtesy of ICON and BIG.

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise…

The Bard’s characterization of 16th-century England from Richard II could serve as a mantra for those looking towards the future and to the Red Planet as a dazzling high-tec Paradisus where human settlements will eventually give way to sustained habitation as our century turns over into the next, and to — what some feel — will generate better and more just manmade civilizations in this galaxy and beyond. 

Such is the case for many architects of a later vintage. Yet, among those vying for a place at the throne of interplanetary building, Bjarke Ingels Group has been one of the most successful. The firm has gained the official sanction of NASA to build the prototype for what may eventually become humankind’s first foray into life on a foreign planet. 

While we have to start somewhere, and though small, BIG’s Mars Dune Alpha project could have monumental implications for the future of space building and humanity at large. With this in mind Jakob Lange, BIG’s space team leader, spoke with Archinect about the 1,700-square-foot living experiment currently taking shape at the Johnson Space Center in Texas.

When did your interest in space begin, and how did you come about being involved in the Mars Dune Alpha project at BIG? 

I started very young. As a kid, I read comic books and enjoyed cartoons about space. When I started engineering school at the university, I was supposed to do robotics but changed course midway. Eventually, I found a home at BIG where it turns out most partners have an interest in science fiction and in space. We had a meeting, about eight years ago, and we started discussing the future of architecture and also the fact that we saw more and more instances and talks about space in general as a "new frontier." So we decided to actively engage in this. I think when you actually go for something proactively, you see that things occur. 

We were able to get in contact with the Dubai Future Foundation, where we pitched the idea of creating a manual for architecture in space. This is a book that we call The Architect's Guide to the Galaxy, and together we did a project called Mars Science City which was sort of our first real space project. It was going to be this science center outside Dubai, where they were going to invite people from all over the world as scientists would come together to share knowledge and test their different kinds of technologies in this environment. After that, we've been in contact with a few people, one designing a habitat in one of the lava tubes on the Moon. We've been looking at this donut-shaped building for the Artemus program, Olympus, which is supposed to be the first real habitat on the Moon encrypted from lunar regolith, the dust or the sand from the ground. Lastly, we are involved in a project, which is set in an Earth analog, simulating conditions that you would find on Mars.

The primary goal of this mission is to study human behaviors; a little less important is the development of the architecture.

What’s the most important thing about designing the habitat in terms of the crew's mental health, and how did the firm's research into human behaviors get incorporated into its overall project approach? What was the motivation to keep it sort of spread out on one floor? 

First and foremost, this is a study of the way these astronauts are going to interact and live their daily lives. Our second priority is how the building is operated. The primary goal of this mission is to study human behaviors; a little less important is the development of the architecture. One thing that was important was to distinguish whether this was built on Earth versus on Mars. We wanted to achieve similar situations as you would on Mars in terms of the social interactions, though we could, as you are saying, stack the program if you wanted to. But because of the physical constraints of the space, we had to build this here on Earth which limited us in terms of how it was all organized. You could say we could have stacked it into three floors and made a much more efficient volume, and maybe you would do that on Mars. Yet, in this case, it was smarter to spread it out in this way. If you compare it to our Lunar habitat, it has the same way of distributing the program. It’s the same principle, just different kinds of outside geometries and volumes.

Bjarke Ingels called this project “an architect’s dream.” This really is a massive interplanetary construction effort. In terms of engineering, what will it entail? Are there any patentable technologies that might come out of it as in the Apollo program? 

Here on Earth, when we are building buildings, we are using wet chemistry. So we have to use hot chemistry instead, which essentially is sintering. You would create something that looks like toothpaste that you can smear, and you can then 3D print this structure from the sand on Mars. You don’t need to bring a lot of building material from Earth, all you need to do is bring the machinery that can build the buildings. You simply bring the machine that can sinter the soil into this very strong material. 

The first task is to understand the physical constraints of this lava and how the forces are going to interact with the building material. What we found out is that the bigger the structures you make, the higher the pressure you are getting on the walls. If you were to do a dome, the pressure on the walls would be very large. But instead, if you were to do a donut shape, the cross-section of that building is much smaller, even though you can have the same footprint inside, which reduces the stress on the walls. The shape is not uncommon for NASA, they’ve actually experimented with this shape for their spaceships before. On the Apollo program, there were tons of innovations made, from insulation to LASIK eye surgery operations that were [originally] used to steer the spaceship. There’s a long list that came out of that. You could say that hot chemistry is not something that’s needed on Earth but on the Moon. We don’t have water, so it’s necessary for us and our collaborator (ICON) to start developing the technology.

How does your design compare to the plans for speculative habitats from other firms that have been publicized? 

I think we have been learning a lot from what's been put out there previously, and there are some great examples. For instance, we are 3D printing almost a shelf-like structure on the donuts, and then we are pouring sand in there so that we don't have to 3D print all of it because essentially, we need a wall thickness of up to two meters to protect from the radiation. So instead of 3D printing everything, we are pouring sand onto the structure. This is something that a lot of the other projects haven’t been doing. 

I think maybe one of the differences is that our design is very much derived from the physical constraints. So it's almost like going back to the root of the problems or challenges and saying: If we have 3D printing, we can’t have a big dome, but we can do a donut. And what would this donut look like if we are applying all the forces on it and the constraints with the 3D printing? And because 3D printing doesn't like to be horizontal, it will have to be a bit pyramid-shaped. Then we need this shelf structure on the outside, and the shelf structure in itself also cannot be horizontal. It starts creating these kinds of diagonal lines that all follow the rules of 3D print technology. So in a way, the physical constraints become the final image of the building itself. 

 I think maybe one of the differences is that our design is very much derived from the physical constraints.

We are not applying any sort of artistic intervention. We are not creating unnecessary kinds of shapes up there because it only increases the complexity of building on the Moon or on Mars. It’s important to understand that if you go there, it's already super difficult and hard to build. You don't want to add complexity in the form of curvy walls if it doesn't benefit you. It could be that a curved wall increases the strength, but you shouldn't work against the forces. I think if you compare, you see some of the alternative visions for what architecture on the Moon and Mars, and beyond could look like. There are unnecessary sorts of moves, and we are trying to boil it down to the essence, in so many words. It's bare-bones, and it's optimized to its performance, which is what creates the architecture and from our perspective, it's a quite beautiful sort of architecture.

Edward O. Wilson wrote that we are creating a “Star Wars civilization with Stone Age emotions and godlike technology.” Do you find anything inherently flawed about beginning a permanent human presence on another planet at a time when our own society is rapidly accelerating its demise? 

I think if you look at how much money we spend on planet Earth every year, what is currently spent on going into space is a tiny fraction of that. I think if you look at the Apollo program, it's not a tiny fraction that was developed [in terms of] technologies that are helping us today. It's MRI and scanners and other technologies that are really needed. Then, maybe, one of the most important things is trying to have people live in an alien world where there is nothing, you would have to create a sustainable way of living. Because you have nothing, you have to produce food, drinking water, energy, from almost nothing. If you can apply a little bit of this technology back on Earth, I'm sure that this could also help tackle some of the challenges that we are facing on Earth currently. I truly believe in this positive way of thinking about going into space — that we will use this tool to overcome even greater challenges.

In certain ways, do you think the comfort that you live in makes it possible to even conceptualize colonizing another planet? 

I don't think it's exclusively for us to think big thoughts about big ideas. I think that this goes along with our practices here, that ideas can come from anybody. It can come from the intern. He or she might be the one that actually brings forward the idea that cracks the code of a specific project. Likewise designing for a world outside, you might need to or it might actually be the thing that gives you the advantage to live in an undeveloped part of this world because your priorities are something else. It could be that's what gives you the advantages needed to crack the code for living on another planet.

In that respect, I think it's important that you create a diverse team of people from every type of background. Of course, we are fortunate enough here at BIG that NASA asked us to look at this challenge, but internally, we have people from all over the world joining in on this. So we are quite a diverse team. 

The past few years have been preoccupied with instability in global politics and the coronavirus, which may distract from the fact that this is only four to five years from happening: What do you anticipate the reaction here being? What will life be like on Earth after we go to Mars?

It’s a good question. I think just getting back to the Moon is going to be an incredible feat, and I think we are going to get high-res 3D images back as we've never seen before. It's almost going to be like being there. I definitely think it's going to be a unifying thing in the Western World. I suppose the challenge is that it's also kind of a part of this "space race," so it needs to somehow go beyond that for it to unify the entire world. Maybe that's the climate crisis. 

I really think that a lot of the space technologies that they will need to figure out in the next couple of years will help us eventually solve the climate crisis here on Earth. I think those technologies that will be developed, maybe by a U.S. company, will be open source or offered free for everybody to implement because they can help in the climate crisis. So in that way, I think the space endeavor can help accelerate that journey.