Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press)

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

Five Stars***** Houston Reader 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 remi. Dave English said International Latex Corporation's A7L. 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 th. Top notch - offers a parallax view for space cadets 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

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 Lessonsde 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. " - PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY, Starred ReviewWoven, as befits its topi

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