Off-Earth - e-flux

Editors Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Marija Marić

Contributors Bethany Rigby, Ana María Gómez López, Fred Scharmen, Megan Eardley, Rory Rowan, Thandi Loewenson

Alongside ambitious promises of infinite resources, techno-utopian visions of futuristic space settlements, and neo-colonial ambitions of outer-planetary land grabs, space—and the Moon in particular—has become the latest resource frontier. It has also emerged as a field for the political renegotiation of human life beyond Earth, from the conditions of human labor to the racialized and gendered histories of bodily standards.

Off-Earth is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Luxembourg Center for Architecture (LUCA) and supported by the Luxembourg Ministry of Culture following "Down to Earth," the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Francelle Cane and Marija Marić.

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7 essays

Celestial Settler Frontiers

Thandi Loewenson

In the collection of National Archives in Harare, a curious series of documents detail accounts of historical astronomical discoveries, celestial phen...

The Geopolitical Economy of Space Resources

Rory Rowan

The First Space War? On October 31, 2023, the Houthi forces in Yemen launched two cruise missiles and one ballistic missile across the Red Sea towa...

Extracting Race, Extracting Space

Megan Eardley

If, during the Cold War space race, South African researchers shaped international debates about acclimatization and work in high heat, what might their design experiments teach us about the reproduction of race in extra planetary extractive regimes?

Code Space

Fred Scharmen

Architecture and infrastructure mediate our relationship with pre-existing environments. When the environment in question is as hostile as outer space, there is no existence possible without that mediation.

All in a Day’s Work

Ana María Gómez López

On December 30, 1973, the space crew of Skylab 4—Commander Lieutenant Colonel Gerald P. Carr, Dr. Edward G. Gibson, and Lieutenant Colonel William R. Pogue—called for an urgent meeting with NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas.

Surface Imaginaries

Bethany Rigby

For thousands of years, both natural and industrial processes have caused the bedrock of the Rio Tinto in Spain—a river that has been mined since antiquity and that now lends its name to a global mining conglomerate—to become highly acidic and full of heavy metals.

Editorial

Marija Marić and e-flux Architecture

Off-Earth is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Luxembourg Center for Architecture (LUCA) following "Down to Earth," the Luxembo...

Subject

Architecture, Extractivism, Planetarity, The Cosmos

Contributors

Thandi Loewenson Celestial Settler Frontiers
Rory Rowan The Geopolitical Economy of Space Resources
Megan Eardley Extracting Race, Extracting Space
Fred Scharmen Code Space
Ana María Gómez López All in a Day’s Work
Bethany Rigby Surface Imaginaries
Marija Marić and e-flux Architecture Editorial

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Subject