PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Fred Scharmen teaches architecture and urban design at Morgan State University's School of Architecture and Planning. He is the Co-Founder of the Working Group on Adaptive Systems, an art and design consultancy based in Baltimore, Maryland. His first book, Space Settlements was published in 2019. His writing has been published in The Journal of Architectural Education, Atlantic CityLab, Slate, Log, CLOG, Volume, and Domus. His architectural criticism has appeared in the Architect's Newspaper, and in the local alt-weekly Baltimore City Paper.
Intricately dissects seven foundational visions of humanity's future in space, from some of the most well-known and prolific engineers, thinkers, entrepreneurs, and science fiction writers in history. Scharmen's keen eye for structures and systems lets him tease out the com-mon threads of conquest, domination, hope, and fear that drive us towards the stars. -Erika Nesvold, co-founder of JustSpace Alliance An episodic history of space exploration through the eyes of an architect focusing, not in the concept of conquer and dominion, but in the flawed yet captivating desire to reinvent life anew. Fred Scharmen brilliantly navigates through stories of inventing worlds, multidimension-al and a-hierarchical, lingering between reality and fiction. -Lydia Kallipoliti, Author of The Architecture of Closed Worlds As if from a vantage point somewhere in the endangered atmosphere, Space Forces reflects back a sense of what humans are so far by telling stories about their dreams of space travel. Mixed with their eccentric curiosities is their desire to make colonized property out of everything, their racist depravity, their clanking apparatus of national sovereignty, their extractivist hoarding, and their feverish dreams of capital accumulation. These are the little heroes of this little planet busy pursuing their rational plans to dominate it and those who might repair it. -Keller Easterling, author of Medium Design
