The Physical Framework For Seleneca
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General Description
Seleneca was conceived by its founders to be a true independent multi-functional and permanent community on the Moon, and not designed around the formula for a military or research base by an Earth based government or corporation. During our colonial times of lunar settlement, life here on the Moon was like living in a submarine in one of Earth’s oceans. People worked in confined spaces, slept in small quarters or shared bunk rooms, and ate in mess halls. Everyone can live that way for a while, but it is hard to sustain the lack of privacy in the long term. Seleneca’s founders drew the analogy to the settlement of the British Colony of Virginia where Jamestown, the first settlement, was built as a fort with walls and people lived in shared quarters. Later, after about 90 years, it was abandoned for the City of Williamsburg Virginia, a planned community, that implemented a classic urban geometry in its arrangement of streets and blocks and in its placement of public buildings. Seleneca sets up the structure for a normal life, like Williamsburg did for the early European Virginians.
When work began by the founders to organize the physical parts for Seleneca, they looked at the basic framework found in every village, town, and city that had existed for thousands of years. In the simplest terms, cities and towns consist of building and streets, and the success of each city or town depends on the physical relationship of those buildings to the streets they front. When a community gets it right, people want to be there, and when it is not good, no one will enjoy going there. When people find a place to be desirable, then the livability is good, business is good, and the people there take pride of ownership and have a heightened sense of belonging.
The Building-to-Street Relationship
Every form of human community has streets or pathways that connect to and link up buildings, whether they are houses or places of work, recreation, or assembly. Houses and buildings offer privacy and protection from outside influences. Streets and gathering places offer us the opportunity for public interaction as they provide the easiest and safest routes between buildings or to outside destinations. Most buildings have doors and windows that open to streets (if not, they should) but it is how they interconnect that establishes whether they have a good building-to-street relationship. These items describe the aspects that help cause a good building-to-street relationship:
- Operational doors that open directly to the street at a repetitive frequency of every 15 to 23 meters (50 to 75 feet),
- Facades with doors and windows that cover 25% to 70% at the ground floor and 20% or more on floors above,
- Building elements such as porches, balconies, marquees, awnings etc that offer interest to the facade and have a functional purpose such as offering use of outdoor space and in places with sun and rain, shade and shelter to the pedestrians on the sidewalk.
- Creative facade design that draws attention to offer a sense of place which also helps with wayfinding.
Applying the Building -to-Street Relationship
Below is a series of basic cartoons with notations that explain how the relationship of buildings to their streets was interpreted for Seleneca’s organizational framework. To freeze an image, just click on it, and then advance the slides with the side arrows.
The Building Type
On Earth, when we think of a house or a stand-alone building, most often we think of it situated in the middle of its property with yards on all sides. With no atmosphere on the Moon, it doesn’t make sense to have individual houses each with their own airlock for a door and a moon buggy parked outside in a driveway. There would be a wasteful loss of precious breathable air if people continue the same number of repetitive comings and goings, like they do from their buildings and cars on Earth.
The Courtyard Building Type
In searching for an alternative model, the founders looked at the courtyard building types that can be found in the ancient cities around the Mediterranean Sea. The Spanish brought the same building forms to Latin America. With this building type the houses are built to the edges of their yards, leaving the center open for a private outdoor space. In some of the historic buildings there were multiple apartments that each faced the same courtyard. This is almost the reverse “footprint” of the building from the modern approach. In the past, this building type evolved to secure their homes from the outside by walling it off. On the Moon, this is ideal because the outdoor space is contained by walls that can then be roofed, providing a breathable atmosphere and a sense of the outdoors with privacy. This type of building also works well for hotels, and office buildings, and can be adapted for a mix of uses within the same building.
Lunar Courtyard Building Connections
The lunar courtyard building will need to connect to not just one street, but to two different streets. This safety precaution is similar to on Earth where there are two ways to escape fire or other danger. Since the streets will be part of an environmentally controlled labyrinth, if a street suddenly decompressed or had a fire spread through it, the occupants of a building should have another means for escape.
Although the courtyard is not a true open space because it has a roof, it offers the same psychological effect when the ceiling is designed differently from the ceiling of the rooms of the house. The ceiling of the courtyard should be higher than the building surrounding it. It can have an angled shape/structure that slopes up to a central lantern that lets in sunlight. With a chamber inside the lantern filled with water, a translucent gel, or combination, light passes through, but harmful solar and cosmic radiation is filtered out. The sloped ceiling bounces and spreads the light. Outside, on top of the lantern, mirrors are used to track the sun, directing the light into the courtyard below. Since Seleneca is at the 62nd parallel of latitude, the sun stays low to the horizon, making the mirror essential. With mirrors, radiation can pass through them, but doesn’t get reflected by them. Seleneca’s courtyards are landscaped with plants that offer natural benefits of providing color, absorbing carbon dioxide, and releases oxygen.
The Streets Are Buildings
Since the streets have roofs supported by walls, they are actually a series of similar buildings placed end-to-end. And like all the buildings of Seleneca, they must support the weight of the lunar regolith above (a lesser force than it is on Earth) and maintain the interior air pressure (greater than on Earth due to the lack of atmosphere outside). For the design of the street roofs, the designers used a rounded vault to minimize the perception from below of a limit to the “sky.” Lighting is used to simulate day and night as on Earth regardless of the lunar day or night taking place outside. Like in our buildings, most of the streets have light chimneys with mirrors on top to reflect sunlight inside. Although the character of the light is not the same as on Earth, our biorhythms stay in sync.
Each street “segment” is linked together by couplings. The street segments have openings in the sides, large enough so that they align with openings in the buildings/houses to have windows and doors that open to the streets, just like on Earth. The buildings and street segments are installed to sit directly next to each other, with little to no gaps between them.
Building Facades
The building facades have a functional purpose and an aesthetic one. Functionally they provide an air-tight seal between the street segments and the buildings that front them. The facades are made of panels and forms that adapt to a variety of designs. They are made from various materials, mostly locally produced that include iron, aluminum, and masonry. They are typicality finished with locally manufactured paint and ceramic tiles, and/or with panels of glass and metal alloys.
The flexibility of design for the building facades is to provide an aesthetic opportunity. Just as on Earth, it is usually the buildings and their facades that make places unique. This provides an artistic outlet for those with creative instincts and ambitions. The long and monotonous corridors that might harm the mental well-being of our long-term residents are avoided here. Finding one’s way about the city is made easier by our unique landmark building facades.
To facilitate more variety in the design of facades, the openings in the sides of the street segments are made large, to accommodate windows in differing locations when comparing one facade to another.
Protective Cover of Regolith
The soil (or lunar regolith) around Seleneca was first mined for elements and minerals. The city was built in one of the areas excavated and graded flat. The spoils from the mining operation were brought back and set on top of the City for it to:
- act as a shield from solar and galactic radiation,
- provide an insulting blanket to reduce some of the structural stress caused by our pressurized atmosphere inside and from the large outdoor temperature swings, and
- Reduce the static charge on the surface, that many of us are sensitive to, when the sun rises.
Daytime surface temperatures here at the latitude of 62 degrees north, range from 34 ⁰C (94 ⁰F) to 46 ⁰C (116 ⁰F), and towards the end of the night, from -198 ⁰C (-325 ⁰F) to -183 ⁰C (-297 ⁰F). A day and a night on the Moon last about 13.5 days each. Near the equator the nighttime temperatures are just a little bit “warmer” but the mid-day temperatures can reach 123 ⁰C (253 ⁰F). That is above the boiling point for water!.
A Kit of Parts
The majority of the City of Seleneca was created by just a few components, like having a kit of parts. The parts are organized by these categories:
- Buildings
- Facade Systems
- Street Segments
- Street Couplings
- Unique Assemblies
The shells of these components are made of Lunar Concrete. They were manufactured in a mobile pneumatic enclosure and each was set in place one by one.
