An archive for space architecture.
Sixty years of habitats have been designed and flown, but there is no single place that holds the drawings, the decisions and the reasons behind them. This initiative brings that record together so the next generation of habitats is designed from what is already known. This work is supported by the Evermay Future Fellowship.
One record of how habitats were designed
The plan came out of nine weeks of conversations with curators, archivists and historians in Washington, D.C., during the Evermay Future Fellowship, which ended on October 24, 2026.
Take partDrawings and models
Plans, sections and physical models of habitats that flew and habitats that were only proposed.
Oral histories
Recorded conversations with the architects and engineers who designed them.
Design decisions
Why each choice was made, and what it traded away.
Open access
Open to students, studios and the teams designing the next stations and lunar habitats.
The reasons behind each habitat are scattered or lost
Collections keep the hardware that flew and the official program records. What they rarely keep is the working material of the people who designed where crews live: the sketches, the rejected options and the reasons one layout won over another. That material sits in personal files, closed offices and the memories of a retiring generation.
Constance Adams, the architect of NASA’s TransHab, is the clearest example of what it takes to save it. Her papers reached Yale largely because a documentary, Rebecca Carpenter’s The Space Architect, organized them on its way to the screen. It is the one worked case of a space architect’s archive reaching an institution, and it happened by chance.
No one collects the process
Finished hardware is preserved. The drawings, models and decisions that produced it usually are not.
The record is personal
Most of it is held by individual architects and engineers, with no plan for where it goes next.
New teams start from zero
Designers of commercial stations and lunar habitats cannot easily see what was tried before, or why it was dropped.
A conversation recorded at Evermay
Recorded at Evermay in Georgetown during the 2026 Evermay Future Fellowship.
Watch on YouTube