Nicholas de Monchaux spoke at the Google Mountain View campus on April 6, 2011, about his book Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo: When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This talk is the story of those spacesuits. It is a story of the Playtex Corporation's triumph over the military-industrial complex—a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics. The lecture touches on, amongst other things, eighteenth-century androids, Christian Dior's New Look, Atlas missiles, cybernetics and cyborgs, latex, JFK's carefully cultivated image, the CBS lunar broadcast soundstage, NASA's Mission Control, and the applications of Apollo-style engineering to city planning. The twenty-one-layer spacesuit, de Monchaux argues, offers an object lesson. It tells us about redundancy and interdependence and about the distinctions between natural and man-made complexity; it teaches us to know the virtues of adaptation and to see the future as a set of possibilities rather than a scripted scenario. About the author: Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect and urbanist focused on issues of nature, technology, and the city. He received his BA with distinction in Architecture, from Yale University, and his Professional Degree (M ...
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