Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Meredith Sattler
This paper details how an undergraduate architecture history seminar on the emergent Science of Biospherics was leveraged as a pedagogical approach to expose students to the Anthropocene. The seminar was designed to link social-eco-technical considerations, and the design of constructed environments, to contemporary Anthropocene conversations while removing some of the angst many students experience when discussing climate change and other Anthropocene topics today. The first half of the paper describes the seminar’s approach to exploring Biospherics utilizing a curriculum developed by one of the participants in the early 1990’s Biosphere 2 enclosure experiment.1 The second half details several seminar members final projects as reflective of the successes and failures of this approach. Biospherics is a multi-disciplinary pursuit of knowledge that overlaps with many disciplines including Earth Systems Science, Ecological Systems Theory, Ecological Engineering, and manned outer space research programmes such as the design and inhabitation of Cabin Ecologies.2 Within its original Russian/Soviet context, it encompasses a much wider scope that includes Geology, Space Medicine, and some of the Transhumanist underpinnings within the Russian philosophical tradition of Cosmism. The founder of the discipline, Russian Geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky,3 defined it in 1926 as the study of the ways life acts as a geological force on Earth. He understood life forms to be catalyzing biogeochemical agents that transform molecules bound within the planetary environmental envelope of the Lithosphere/Biosphere, a distinct enclosure that envelopes the surface of the Earth from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the highest mountains, and exchanges little matter and energy with the remainder of the planet’s mass. In 2003, Russian Biophysicist, Biologist, and Biospherics Medical researcher Josef Gitelson further defined it as spanning scales from the whole Earth to a single space capsule, and as being devoted to two things: 1. modeling closed ecosystems in order to discover the mechanism that enables sustainable existence of the Earth’s closed ecosystem and 2. developing closed human life support systems capable of sustaining distant human space flights.4 Further, in 1996, Peter Eckart presented Biospherics as a new discipline that also created ground-based life support systems that provide a high quality of life under extreme Earth-biosphere conditions such as at polar latitudes, deserts, mountains, and under water.⁵ Biospherics is such a powerful way to introduce architecture students, and those from other disciplines, to the Anthropocene because it sees architectural and environmental envelopes as continuous, inseparable wholes, helping to dissolve our normative Western bias of understanding nature and culture as separate. The seminar members were given free rein to define the scope and format of their final projects which were required to contain both descriptive and analytical components. These projects included traditional research papers, letters to future generations, precedent studies, films, analysis of diagrams, and a curriculum for inhabitants of future space colonies, among others. The paper analyzes how effectively the projects not only addressed their Biospheric content, but also how it informed the students’ approaches to applying this knowledge to the Anthropocene today, and in the future.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.113.42
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7
