When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made żeby 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 book is the story of that spacesuit. It is a story of the triumph over the military-industrial complex aby the International Latex Corporation, best known żeby its consumer brand of "Playtex" -- a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics.
Playtex's spacesuit went up against hard armor-like spacesuits designed żeby military contractors and favored aby NASA's engineers. It was only when those attempts failed--when traditional engineering firms could not integrate the body into mission requirements--that Playtex, with its intimate expertise, got the job.
In Spacesuit, Nicholas de Monchaux tells the story of the twenty-one-layer spacesuit in twenty-one chapters addressing twenty-one topics relevant to the suit, the body, and the technology of the twentieth century.He touches, among other things, on 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.
An argument for a design philosophy of better, not more.Never have we wanted, owned, and wasted so much stuff. Our consumptive path through modern...84,58 zł
An argument that what makes science distinctive is its emphasis on evidence and scientists' willingness to change theories on the basis of new...62,44 zł
An up-to-date overview of the field of connectomics, introducing concepts and mechanisms underlying brain network change at different stages....225,96 zł
A concise overview of machine learning--computer programs that learn from data--the basis of such applications as voice recognition and driverless...60,06 zł
With the publication of The Image of the City in 1959, Kevin Lynch embarked upon the process of exploring city form. Good City Form is both a...323,06 zł
The Robotics Primer offers a broadly accessible introduction to robotics for students at pre-university and university levels, robot hobbyists,...225,96 zł
Climate engineering -- which could slow the pace of global warming aby injecting reflective particles into the upper atmosphere -- has emerged...37,12 zł
The conceptual history of cognitive science remains for the most part unwritten. In this groundbreaking book, Jean-Pierre Dupuy--one of the principal...174,04 zł
Among architects and preservationists, the writings of Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) have long been considered major resources. They inspired a...216,43 zł
In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Pier Vittorio Aureli proposes that a sharpened formal consciousness in architecture is a precondition...149,41 zł
Earth Moves, Bernard Cache's first major work, conceptualizes a series of architectural images as vehicles for two important developments. First,...164,90 zł
Opinie i recenzje użytkowników
Dodaj opinie lub recenzję dla Spacesuit. Twój komentarz zostanie wyświetlony po moderacji.