Closed Worlds: Encounters That Never Happened

February 23, 2016 at 3:31 pm Leave a comment

Me (as Niel Armstrong) at 14:05

The image of Earth from outer space was highly anticipated throughout the 1960s, and inspired a great deal of wonder in the general population. This iconic image reached the apex of its symbolism in 1968, through the famous Earthrise series taken by Apollo 8. Portraying mankind entrapped in the finite space of a sphere, the image of Earth as perceived from space may be accountable, in part, for a feeling of anxiety in our collective cultural imagination. It resulted in the development of broad literature that projected plans for our future survival within what Buckminster Fuller famously called our ‘spaceship earth’. Reyner Banham, with an environmental bubble; Hans Hollein, with a pill illustrating that “all is architecture”; Jacques Cousteau, with the Conshelf project that explored the inner space of the ocean; and Walt Disney, with EPCOT as a reconstruction of a miniaturized and idealized world, among others, have contributed substantially and in various ways to the discourse of closed worlds.

Feb 27th 12-6 pm, The Cooper Union. Encounters That Never Happened is presented in conjunction with Closed Worlds, an exhibition on view at Storefront for Art and Architecture.