[1] Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 13.

[2] Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976).

[3] Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 1-12. As compared to Norbert Wiener’s antiaircraft predictor machines, or the “centralized computer control” of military weaponry and strategic systems pointed out by Paul Edwards, it seems the cyborg dichotomous boundaries are further stripped from the nature of closed-world meta-structures in the world. Edwards declares, “the key theme of closed-world discourse was global surveillance and control through high-technology military power.” He continues by suggesting the closed world under the Truman doctrine focused on the “secretive communist society” (containment metaphor), was “self-containment to maintain its integrity,” and that the “global stage as a whole was a closed world.” Such practices, argued by Edwards, intimately linked “metaphors, beliefs, and ideologies to practices, policies, and technologies of the Cold War.”

[4] David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

[5] Leo Marx, Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

[6] Thomas Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 128-131. Hughes describes American painter Charles Sheeler’s work from the 1930s as one who replaces the traditional landscape with the technological one. Hughes points out Sheeler was well known as having a “passionate response to the machine sublime.” It is no coincidence that American culture by the early 1960s became fully absorbed into the machine’s aesthetic, especially at the illustrious scale of the rocket.

[7] Much like those we see during spacecraft rendezvous and docking sequences in outer space.

[8] Henri Lefevre, Production of Space, 234.

[9] Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969).

[10] See Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).

[11] As described in NASA’s public material regarding its JSC tram tour.

[12] See Fred Scharmen; see also Felicity Scott (2016), “Securing Adjustable Climate,” in James Graham (ed.), Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, New York and Zurich: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City and Lars Müller Publishers. Approximately 15 years later, in 1975, six years after landing on the moon, NASA’s Ames Research Center proposed a torus-shaped space colony. Including the typical suburban artifacts from American living, the Toroidal Space Colony project—directed by Princeton University physicist Gerard O’Neill—was funded through NASA’s Ames Research Center. Rendered as “suburbia in space”, the proposal included single-family residences and agricultural plots enclosed by a tubular shell regulating an artificial atmosphere for life and plant growth. The space station and settlement buildings were rendered with the same suburban typologies you would find on Earth—evidence of a disconnect between megastructure and the enclosure fixed to old suburban artifacts.