The Space Urchin is a design competition project for the Jacques Rougerie Foundation, presenting Architecture and innovation in space. The brief of the project was to design an orbital or starspace port speculating a vessel that can sustain in space orbiting the Moon. While this project serves as a gateway becoming a spaceport featuring a place where people can exchange information for the future decades.

Space Urchin is inspired by the biological form, anatomy and the communal herd of sea urchins. This proposition imagines the starport as an interplanetary infrastructure through three principal ecologies: “Resilient Skin Ecology, Space Junk Ecology and Herd Ecology.” Our project used a gaming engine tool called Unreal Engine to visualise speculative architecture in real time. This helped us to critique storytelling and visualise environments through research and inspiration from biological form to NASA technological developments.

Resilient Skin Ecology: The artificial skin is an assembly of independent systems generating an ecology of resilience, rejuvenation, and sustenance. This takes inspiration from the sea urchin’s biological surface, where the skins consist needles rocket system that docks on the surface, providing food, water and energy.

Space Junk Ecology: This addresses the 22,000 large objects orbiting the earth with broken satellites and bits of old rockets from past space exhibitions. This attachment on the space urchin’s surface is to collect debris and recycle and repurpose its materials for repairs.

Herd Ecology: This looks at the sea urchin herd-like formation behaviours, speculating a future expansion into an urban planetary system that assembles as a modular system of the project.

Contributors: 

Tutors: 

Patrick Macasaet & Andre Wee 

Students: 

Dingqiao Deng, Hanlin Wang, Hyunju Kim, Jackson Le, Jingchao Li, Jingyi Wu, Kenny Lam, Khor Yan Chun, Ma Longfei, Minxuan Hou, Oupu Wang, Qinling Yao, Shao Tian Teo, Zechen Huang, Sherina Suhartanji, Shuming Zhou, Yi Lou