Work completed for Professor Karen King's ARCH 602 studio, spring 2016 at the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning.

For this studio, we developed a semester-long competition entry for the International Velux Award. The competition parameters are very broad—the brief only stated that the project should investigate "the light of tomorrow." As such, I decided to use it as an opportunity for experimentation, and sought to design an architecture for Mars. As proposed by architectural theorist Neil Leach (and others), space architecture is the new frontier in design research. We can use what we learn in space architectures to design better buildings for Earthlings here at home.

In researching for this project, I had the opportunity to learn a great deal about the history of NASA and about the field of planetary science. Notably, the climate on Mars is extreme: the difference in gravity, soils, temperature and high levels of background radiation all make for a harsh design challenge.

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Charlotte McKernan © 2020