Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

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

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This book is the story of that spacesuit. It is a story of the triumph over the military-industrial complex by the International Latex Corporation, best known by its consumer brand of Playtex--a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics.

Playtex's spacesuit went up against hard armor-like spacesuits designed by military contractors and favored by NASA's engineers. It was only when those attempts failed--when traditional engineering firms could not integrate the body into mission requirements--that Playtex, with its intimate expertise, got the job.

In Spacesuit, Nicholas de Monchaux tells the story of the twenty-one-layer spacesuit in twenty-one chapters addressing twenty-one topics relevant to the suit, the body, and the technology of the twentieth century. He touches, among other things, on eighteenth-century androids, Christian Dior's New Look, Atlas missiles, cybernetics and cyborgs, latex, JFK's carefully cultivated image, the CBS lunar broadcast soundstage, NASA's Mission Control, and the applications of Apollo-style engineering to city planning. The twenty-one-layer spacesuit, de Monchaux argues, offers an object lesson. It tells us about redundancy and interdependence and about the distinctions between natural and man-made complexity; it teaches us to know the virtues of adaptation and to see the future as a set of possibilities rather than a scripted scenario.

Author: Nicholas De Monchaux
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 03/18/2011
Pages: 380
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 2.52lbs
Size: 9.20h x 7.12w x 1.01d
ISBN: 9780262015202
Audience: Young Adult


Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 02/25/2011 pg. 15
Publishers Weekly 04/18/2011
Library Journal 02/15/2011 pg. 128

About the Author
Nicholas de Monchaux is Professor and Head of Architecture at MIT and a partner in the architecture practice modem. He is the author of Local Code: 3,659 Proposals about Data, Design, and the Nature of Cities. His work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Lisbon Architecture Triennial, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, SFMOMA, and the Chicago MCA. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.


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