The Unmentionables Symposium

Populating the Red Planet: Design for Martian Pioneers

Launched in 2017 at the Helms Design Center in Los Angeles, the Unmentionables Symposium, is a biannual event created, produced and hosted by the Department of Interior Architecture at Woodbury University in Los Angeles, and is intended to serve as a provocation for marginalia, taboos, illicit ideas, and undertheorized issues to be let out of the woodwork; providing unrestricted terrain to explore notions of critical interiority and the constructed environment.  

The group of Lara Hoad, Todd Erlandson and Vera Mulyani presented their research and theories around the unimaginable interior for exploration on Mars, and speculated on the importance of interior designed spaces that support the human psyche and the exigencies of living environments in alien climes, while calling for the dissolving of intellectual boundaries and the inclusion of architects and designers in the future Mars habitat conversation, and why it is imperative to the success of human settlement.  The presentation was discussed in a panel moderated by the editor of Metropolis Magazine, Susan S Szenasy and was subsequentially published in the academic journal “Interiors”.

www.unmentionablessympousuim.com

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/20419112.2018.1485382?src=recsys&journalCode=rfin20

Images left to right: Unmentionables Symposium Poster, interior of the International Space Station (ISS) courtesy of NASA, interior of future Mars habitat “The Ice House” courtesy of SEArch/CLOUDS AO