Please join the MDes Program for GROUND CONTROL, a book talk by Jeffrey S. Nesbit (DDes '20)

GROUND CONTROL: Jeffrey S. Nesbit in conversation with Antoine Picon

Thursday, February 20, 2025, 12:30 PM | Gund Hall, Frances Loeb Library Lobby

Ground Control: A Design History of Technical Lands and NASA’s Space Complex explores the infrastructural history of the United States rocket launch complex. Working primarily between 1950, the year of the first rocket launch at Cape Canaveral, to 1969, the Apollo moon landing, the book highlights the evolution of its overlooked architecture and infrastructural landscape in parallel to US aerospace history. The cases outlined in this book survey the varying architectural histories and aesthetic motivations that helped produce America’s public image of early space exploration. The built environment of the U.S. space complex shows how its expanded infrastructural landscape tended to align with national Cold War politics and themes found in the age of modernity. Examples across often inaccessible sites of remote landscape help explain the contingent histories and deep association of an American aesthetic, land-use, and ultimately a form of nation-building practices. Ground Control offers a new way of understanding how technological uses of place-based science were designed and constructed in support of both industrial and military activities in postwar America.

Jeffrey S. Nesbit (DDes '20) is an architect, urbanist, and founding director of the research group Grounding Design. His experience spanning over a decade includes leading design teams for public architecture and large-scale urban projects, along with managing sponsored design research projects for city governments, local institutions, and NGOs. Nesbit’s research focuses on processes of urbanization, infrastructure, and the evolution of "technical lands." Nesbit has published several books, journal articles, and book chapters on “infrastructural urbanization” and has been host and producer of three interdisciplinary podcasts series. He received a Doctor of Design degree (DDes) from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he was also a research fellow in the Office for Urbanization.