Ground Control

Jeffrey S. Nesbit is an architect, urbanist, and founding director of the research group Grounding Design. Nesbit is currently Assistant Professor in History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism at Temple University, and previously taught at several institutions, including Harvard University, Northeastern University, University of North Carolina Charlotte, University of New Mexico, and Texas Tech University.

“We all know the images of rockets lifting off from Cape Canaveral; we see as if the blockhouses and assembly buildings, the launch control facilities, gantries and massive concrete pads are as they must have always been. Jeffrey S. Nesbit’s Ground Control helps us see space architecture otherwise: as a technical land borrowing from imaginative, industrial, and military sources, a complex shaped by architectural modernism but also by science fiction—here we see through Nesbit’s book a monument to progress, a bastion of national power, and a symbolic dividing wall between earthly wetlands and outerspace wilderness. A fascinating exploration of the all-too modern spaceport.”Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University, USA

• 1. Introduction: The Space Complex 2. Interiority and the Vision of Power 3. Speed and the Image of Rationality 4. Enclosure and the Garden in the Machine 5. Redundancy and the Administrative Apparatus 6. Range and the Recovery Capsule 7. Earthmoving and the Endless Frontier