Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo [Paperback]

Nicholas de de Monchaux (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 18, 2011

How the twenty-one-layer Apollo spacesuit, made by Playtex, was a triumph of intimacy over engineering.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The most delightful and memorable new book I read last year...
– Adam Gopnik, THE NEW YORKER.COM

The density of ideas and connections is intoxicating. De Monchaux swings masterfully between subjects, teasing out unexpected connections and spotting the seeds of contemporary life that were planted by the space race.
– ICON (UK)

[a] wonderful material history...
– LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

... a broad and creative appraisal of [the] suit's many contexts, encouraging readers to consider technology as design, shaped by the circumstances of its time, unfailingly and elegantly layered and crafted to serve a purpose.
– NATURE

... now the definitive investigation of this terrain.
– THE ATLANTIC.COM

"Berkeley architecture professor de Monchaux's thorough and artful history of the American spacesuit takes readers at a leisurely pace through the past...a wholly absorbing capsule of our history. "
- PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY, Starred Review

Woven, as befits its topic, with multiple and colored threads borrowed from an astounding variety of fields and domains--technology, politics, media, and fashion design, to name only a few--this path-breaking book provides an innovative reading of the space race. Above all, it illuminates the relevance of this race for designers from yesterday and today.
– ANTOINE PICON, Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, Harvard Graduate School of Design

…This surely is one of the most deeply researched books on design ever written.
– RALPH CAPLAN, author of _By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons

de Monchaux offers in this remarkable book a far-reaching and broad-based analysis of the spacesuit, interpreting it as far more than a functional garment protecting astronauts but also as an artifact at the nexus of society, science, and spacefaring...
– ROGER LAUNIUS, Senior Curator, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

About the Author

Nicholas de Monchaux is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley. His work has appeared in the architectural journal Log, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Architectural Design, and other publications.

Product Details

• Paperback: 380 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (March 18, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 026201520X
• ISBN-13: 978-0262015202
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.9 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #83,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #51 in Books > Arts & Photography > Fashion > History
  • #87 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Astronomy & Space Science > Aeronautics & Astronautics

More About the Author

Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect and urbanist . He is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UC Berkeley, and has worked as with Michael Hopkins & Partners in London, and Diller + Scofidio in New York.

de Monchaux's design work and criticism have been published in Architectural Design, Log, the New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine. His parametric study of ecologically transformed "gutterspace," Local Code/Real Estates, was a finalist in the WPA 2.0 Competition in 2009 and was featured at the 2010 Biennial of the Americas.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Top notch - offers a parallax view for space cadets April 25, 2011

By Fairleigh Brooks

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

As a certified space cadet I have read dozens of books about the history of space exploration and manned space flight, many more on aviation and astronomy. (I own a book, for example, called "Eject! The Complete History of U.S. Aircraft Escape Systems. Actually, it's pretty interesting.)

Virtually all of these books, excepting Mailer's "Of a Fire on the Moon," of course, were written by the anointed for the choir. They focus narrowly, or not too broadly, anyway, on a specific subject and the straightforward tangents of that subject. Michael de Monchaux's "Spacesuit - Fashioning Apollo" was not written for this audience, and the difference is compelling and fascinating. De Monchaux is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley.

Put succinctly, "Spacesuit - Fashioning Apollo" is the history of the spacesuit as a technology, specifically the Apollo spacesuit. To anyone who has explored the history of any technology - the photocopier, cell phone towers, bar codes, VCRs, etc., etc. - the gist that emerges quickly and throughout is how far back in time are the beginnings, and how divergent are the seminal paths that eventually merge to create this new thing. The beginnings of the Apollo spacesuit reach back to a Russian Jewish immigrant born in 1901, Abram Spanel. Spanel started the International Latex Corporation (ILC), better known as Playtex. Yep, the spacesuits that allowed moon-walking astronauts to survive were made by master seamstresses who had once made bras and girdles. Just imagine how this went over with the fighter jock personalities at NASA.

But moreover, this book is a cultural treatise about clothing the human body. NASA basically did not want the suit ILC proposed, which was an actual garment.... Most in NASA and the aerospace industry wanted to contain astronauts in hard, rigid suits (cans, really), not dress them in fabric. And yet, once all requirements were considered, ILC's concepts were chosen.

Rather than simply dissect how the Apollo spacesuit came to be, de Monchaux explores a spectrum of cultural powers and movements that made such a device possible, but not necessarily inevitable. The narrative explains that the only way to develop a spacesuit that worked fully was to maintain the round peg of the human body as the square-hole concepts of engineering and bureaucracy evolved to accommodate that concept. The concepts for rigid suits came up short. Regarding Apollo, they came up short rather completely.

This book is also an expose of the Cold War. Informed and inquisitive people have always known there were activities our democracy pursued that were far removed from our consuming, post-war suburban lives of ease and abundance. Even for the well educated, though, that knowledge tended to be cursory without the specific pursuit of a particular interest. Presented here both explicitly and implicitly is a window into the myriad of secret (or at least never publicized) programs, as well as the almost open-ended funding that paid for them.

Further, this books is about The Sixties, perhaps the most American decade in a century that was already America's. As de Monchaux tells the story, the Apollo suit is really emblematic of a conterculture. ILC's informal engineers were self taught, with little if any college experience, details that rankled the quantitative, degree-strewn POV of NASA and aerospace bureaucracies. Although from a generation well before Woodstock, ILC engineers found implicitness out of explicitness, while also finding ways to satisfy the calculations and methodologies the bureaucracies needed as much as demanded.

There is no doubt the initial purpose of Apollo, in 1961, was political, both domestically and internationally. As de Monchaux writes, "From the perspective of Kennedy's knowledge of the media's power in the cold war, the entire effort to go to the moon should be rightly understood as an elaborate apparatus for the production of a single television image. Kennedy approved plans to go to the moon because he - and perhaps particularly and peculiarly he - knew that the single image, however arduously achieved, could be magnified and extended globally, and, in an instant, change the world." There is also little doubt that for many, many space enthusiasts within NASA, the aerospace industry and the general world populace, by July 20, 1969 Apollo had evolved into an almost Renaissance-like quest in American culture that was at least transcendent. After all, fighter jocks don't become artists (Alan Bean) or poet/philosophers (Edgar Mitchell) without a life-altering experience.

Of all the pieces of equipment an astronaut needs, his or her spacesuit is in many ways the most important, considering the failure of a suit's most basic concept will lead to an agonizing and quick death. De Monchaux has structured his book to reflect the 21 layers that were sewn and bonded together to make the Apollo suit. In a very real sense, the suit was not only composed of 21 layers of nylon and mylar and teflon, but also layers of imagination, determination and temerity - the same sort of audacity that pushed our ancestors out of the liquid realm of the sea into the much thinner fluid of our atmosphere, that propelled us into that sky, and then beyond.

More than any system-within-the-system that emerged from this project, the Apollo spacesuit was likely the most incongruous - intuitive, not easily quantifiable, perhaps a genuine synthesis of art and science. How fitting that this piece of equipment preserved nakedness as much as could be (skinny dipping in the universe, if you will), and that it was the result not so much of if-then thinking as in asking "what if?" Read more ›

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars International Latex Corporation's A7L April 1, 2011

By Dave English VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

A beautiful bountiful book. This is a high quality look at the design (and what that design means to us in other contexts) of the Apollo spacesuit. It covers a lot of ground, engineered as the suits were, with handcrafted layers that perform many different yet interrelated functions. So we have chapters on the actual construction of the suit, and chapters on cities and simulation and JFK. It's sometimes wordy, is not afraid of big concepts, but it is always lively. A flexible mix of human and technical interactions. The point is that unlike most of the other systems that got us to the moon, a space suit is best fashioned to the evolved biological complexity of the human body, a second skin, rather than an engineered off-the-shelf hard shell.

We are treated to a smart romp that deftly combines fashion, politics, ergonomics, space travel, architecture, history, corporate culture and an iconic journey to the brave new frontier. There are lots of books on the Apollo moon missions, but however many you have this will be a unique addition to the understanding of how we got to make that first step on another world. Wonderfully illustrated, fully referenced. I hope you find this review helpful.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars***** April 2, 2011

By David A. Senechal

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Physically, "Fashioning Apollo" is quite an elegant book (even though it is soft-bound with a "rubberized" dust cover). Text and photos are all of superb quality, glossy throughout; and it has a nice smell to it (something you'll never get from a Kindle).

If you're looking for a nuts and bolts technical book, this isn't the book for you. There are several other excellent texts that fit that bill. This is more of a series of essays on a variety of subjects, not always directly related to the spacesuit, but somehow always returning. In some ways, it reminds me of "Of a Fire on the Moon" by Normal Mailer - more of a "feeling" than simply straight reportage.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but overall, I think it's a great book. It takes a variety of historical viewpoints, ranging from Dior fashions, to the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb, to the shocking state of JFK's health, to the fact that Wylie Post's eyepatch helped warm the icy oxygen that was pumped into his first altitude suit, and manages to pull them all together into a very well-written book.

Any shortcomings would be related to its intended audience: it doesn't seem "technical" enough to satisfy the space-geek-types, but there is not a huge pool of 'non-geeks' who are likely to be interested in this sort of thing. Having said that, "Fashioning Apollo" appears to have been well-researched, Mr. de Manchaux is obviously an accomplished writer, and I highly recommend this book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Revealing History One Layer At a Time April 14, 2011

By Alexander Norelli

Format:Paperback

Spacesuit, Fashioning Apollo explores the archaeology of its namesake, the surprisingly long history of its development rooted back as far as humans began entering altitudinous realms. Romancing new limits in the thinning air, proto-astronauts melded technology with humanity to create a means of entering higher atmospheres...on their way to none at all. The hard-won laurels left many casualties on the way to "higher" understanding. Part of this book, however, is the expression of history not as a single road leading to a distinct end (as so much seems in retrospect), but rather an ongoing act of utilized invention in pursuit of celestial goals. Spacesuit feels more like an archaeological examination of the strata of Apollo as opposed to the dramatized narrative retold so often. This book reveals new layers beneath the iconic appearances of our star-voyagers, and serves as an ode to managed complexity over blind simplification.

The literal layering of this history in 21 "layers", instead of chapters--same as the Apollo suit--works as an astute metaphor for the accrued acumen embodied in the technology that makes "great leaps" possible. By appropriating advanced materials and coupling them with an innovated sense of design, the International Latex Company (Playtex) was able to create a "soft suit" in blatant opposition to the stoic Saturn V rockets. Whereas some insisted the vacuum of space must be met with the solid shell of a "hard suit", Playtex's layered "soft" approach, derived from undergarment design, won out. And it was in the manufacturing of the suits--custom tailored for each astronaut-- that some of the only women involved in the Space-Race took part, a more subtle touch needed to sew the 64 stiches per inch required for the suit's viability.... These women certainly receive their dues, nearly all of "Layer 14--Handmade" is dedicated to their long unsung contribution in assembling many of the suit's 4,000 pieces.

The book itself, despite its weight, has agility. Within the 21 Layers are further divisions, almost on a molecular level, whereby anecdotes and snippets stack-up to form a multi-faceted compound view of the larger theme. Heightening understanding derived from the accumulation of vast amounts of information highlight the true complexities of human survival in space. And for all detractors apt to question even the purpose of going to the moon, the book is further interwoven with the history of computing, which was essential to the effort itself. Computational advances brought about to satisfy the needs of Apollo--everything from simulation, to telemetry, to live television broadcasting--have had influences so widespread that one can delineate a pre-Apollo and Post-Apollo era in this history of managed complexity.

The author, Nicolas de Michaux, does service to the unique theme of Space Fashion--and the greater theme of the handmade--by exploring its place within a vast system of the infinitely reproducible Apollo hardware. The actual Spacesuit, called "Almost Cuddly" by Neil Armstrong, affirms a place in our world for the custom, showing resistance, but in reality a compact, with the plethora of infinitely reproducing objects in our time. For the materials themselves are industrially produced, everything from Mylar, Nomex, Nylon, Latex, Teflon(almost all Dupont products) their application in Apollo was form-fitting and human in a way that would allow transport and survival in the most inhuman of places...the grey gleaming desert of the moon--the suit all the while retaining something of nonchalance and significance of riveted denim blue jeans. Read more ›