Orbital Habitation.
A landscape untied from reality: living, moving and keeping time without a stable ground.
What becomes of a floor plan when the floor is no longer the reference for inhabiting a space?
Orbital Habitation explores a near-zero-gravity environment through the routines of long-term workers and short-term visitors. The degree project develops from the earlier research title Near-zero Gravity Habitation: Portal between Veracity and Forgery. Its final proposition uses a continuous guardrail to organize movement, distinguish activities and make an unfamiliar interior landscape navigable.
- Context
- Pratt Institute · Degree project
- Development
- Fall 2023 research / Spring 2024
- Final subtitle
- A Landscape Untied From Reality
- Setting
- Speculative habitat in Earth orbit
- Research collaboration
- Siyue You & Kexin Hong, Fall 2023
A daily cycle drawn in space.
The habitat separates two ways of experiencing time. Workers follow a designed twenty-four-hour routine, while visitors encounter spaces that change their sense of orientation, distance and duration. Three looped bands correspond to morning, afternoon and evening; their axes are arranged at 120 degrees around a central spine.
The central sequence accommodates docking, an overview lounge, worker and visitor living areas, bathing and laundry, and private pods. Garden and laboratory modules connect the time zones. Smaller connection nodes hold proposed solar, mechanical and storage functions, giving the larger circulation diagram a program at the scale of everyday occupation.
Morning, afternoon and evening loops meet the central docking and living spine.
The guardrail becomes a floor plan.
A rail provides continuity through a world that cannot be organized by a single horizontal ground plane. It guides the body, delineates functional areas and records a route in three dimensions. The pink lines in the drawings follow that route through planted surfaces, rooms and connecting passages.
To represent the interior, a cylindrical module is unrolled into parallel surfaces and then rotated into a sectional arrangement at 120-degree intervals. The drawing exposes relationships that a conventional plan would flatten. A 360-degree garden, reading room, café, agricultural storage, visitor transition corridor and research lab become connected territories around the module’s circumference.
Unrolling and rotating the module exposes its inhabitable surfaces; pink rails trace movement.
The sectional model connects terrain-like surfaces, enclosed rooms and circulation.
Making an unfamiliar landscape tangible.
The research brought together orbital living conditions, virtual perception, daily schedules and vegetation under directed light. Studies of orientation and interior landscapes helped frame a central question: how can architecture offer recognizable cues without simply recreating a terrestrial room?
The physical section model tests that question through contoured green surfaces, circulation rails, enclosed rooms and changes in light. Day and night photographs reveal different readings of the same assembly. Alongside the unrolled drawings and the larger site model, it turns the speculative habitat into a sequence that can be inspected from the scale of a body to the scale of the whole system.
Illumination changes the reading of the model’s interior surfaces and routes.
Degree-project development at Pratt Institute, 2023–2024. The Fall 2023 research booklet credits Siyue (Steve) You and Kexin (Kelsey) Hong; listed critics are Yetunde Olaiya, Ostap Rudakevyh and Molly Davy. The habitat is a speculative architectural proposal.
