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35%OFFNicholas de Monchaux - Spacesuit - 9780262015202 - V9780262015202
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Spacesuit

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Description for Spacesuit Paperback. How the twenty-one-layer Apollo spacesuit, made by Playtex, was a triumph of intimacy over engineering. Num Pages: 380 pages, 26 color illus., 114 b&w illus. BIC Classification: TTDS. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 234 x 183 x 25. Weight in Grams: 1144.

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 ... Read more

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.

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Product Details

Publisher
MIT Press Ltd United States
Number of pages
380
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2011
Condition
New
Number of Pages
380
Place of Publication
, United States
ISBN
9780262015202
SKU
V9780262015202
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
Ref
99-3

About Nicholas de Monchaux
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 Digest, and other publications.

Reviews for Spacesuit
The most delightful and memorable new book I read last year was 'Spacesuit,' by Nicholas de Monchaux ... [I]t offers a wonderful David & Goliath story about the triumph of Oldenburg-like soft objects over phallic, rigid ones, and of hard-working seamstresses over hard-nosed engineers. —The New Yorker Spacesuit pays worthy homage to that often overlooked but essential technology for ... Read more

Goodreads reviews for Spacesuit


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