The International Space Station, that $160bn assemblage of aluminium, titanium, steel and Kevlar in which the Briton Tim Peake is currently living 250 miles above Earth, is a masterpiece of architecture and engineering to rank with the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge. So writes David Nixon, an architect who himself worked on aspects of its design. In this he is following a tradition in modern British architecture, which loves to find inspiration for Earth-bound buildings in things that fly and orbit.
It is certainly a wondrous thing, a bright, white, multi-winged dragonfly wider than the Statue of Liberty is tall, whose multiple layers of protection and servicing serve to protect a home for a few human beings at a time, in surroundings of extreme hostility to life. It had to be built in conditions of exceptional difficulty as if, as it says in Nixon’s book, one were building a ship in mid-ocean, from the keel up.
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