Böcker av Jeffrey S Nesbit

Ground Control: A Design History of Technical Lands and NASA's Space Complex explores the infrastructural history of the United States rocket launch complex. Working primarily between 1950, the year of the first rocket launch at Cape Canaveral, to 1969, the Apollo moon landing, the book highlights the evolution of its overlooked architecture and infrastructural landscape in parallel to US aerospace history. The cases outlined in this book survey the varying architectural histories and aesthetic motivations that helped produce America's public image of early space exploration. The built environment of the U.S. space complex shows how its expanded infrastructural landscape tended to align with national Cold War politics and themes found in the age of modernity. Examples across often inaccessible sites of remote landscape help explain the contingent histories and deep association of an American aesthetic, land-use, and ultimately a form of nation-building practices. Ground Control offers a new way of understanding how technological uses of place-based science were designed and constructed in support of both industrial and military activities in postwar America. This book will be of interest to researchers, scholars, students, and anyone with a general interest in the history of American infrastructure, land use, and space exploration.

A total of 15 shipyards had been constructed along the United States coastlines. As early as 1767, the U.S. Navy engineered and manufactued landscapes to fabricate and maintain battleship fleets, keep up with technological upgrades, and sustain military agendas. Today, only five remain, leaving former shipyards as massive voids in the ever-expanding urban metropolis. This design research traces inactive shipyards as a context of productive memory and reveal new knowledge on geographies of military infrastructure and power.