Women Making STEAM: Dr. Katarzyna Balug (Online)
Life in a Bubble: From the Suburb to the Space Habitat
Wednesday, September 30
6:00pm - 7:00pm
Join us for our 3rd Annual Women Making STEAM lecture series, fully on Zoom. We invite local women professionals to share their impacts and research contributions in the fields of STEAM.
STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Art, and Math. This year, we are joined by a special group of women who are leaders, educators, researchers, and creators in the STEAM world. Don't miss out engaging with these brillant thinkers as they share their journey through a traditionally male-dominated industry and how their work has contributed to communities, globally.
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Life in a Bubble: From the Suburb to the Space Habitat
At a time of rapid development of prefabricated, cookie-cutter suburban neighborhoods in the US, California architect Wallace Neff envisioned homes that resembled bubbles. Formwork in the shape of a large rubber balloon would be sprayed with thin layers of concrete for quick, inexpensive, and durable single family structures, called Airforms. In 1941, he convinced Goodyear Tire and Company to manufacture a large balloon for the first Airform neighborhood: ten homes for defense workers outside of Washington, D.C. This talk will trace Neff’s decades-long efforts to house the world’s population in his structures, which saw only limited success on Earth—they were too unconventional. Then, it will consider the enduring presence of inflatable bubbles in space habitat designs since the early 1960s, initially championed by Goodyear. One of two remaining Airhouses in the US today is in Hobe Sound, Florida, where it has withstood decades of hurricanes and floods. The talk will examine whether the bubble is best relegated to space, or whether we might reconsider its benefits for housing on Earth.
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About Dr. Katarzyna Balug:
Katarzyna Balug, PhD is a historian of modern and contemporary architecture. Her research explores feedback loops between techno-political change and subjectivity as mediated by architectural experiments. Balug’s current book project examines air-filled inflatable structures prevalent in the 1960s as a prescient meditation on human relations with the planet and its environment informed by the Space Race. Her curatorial work and public art practice reflect her commitment to making knowledge accessible and cultivating public space as a site of critique. Balug’s writing been published in, among others, Geoforum, Critical Sociology (co-authored), and the edited volume NASA in the American South (University of Florida Press). She holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from Harvard University and was previously a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
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Upcoming talks:
Monday, September 21, 7-8pm
Dr. Rhona Trauvitch, Fiction-Science Pattern Mapping in Literary STEM
Wednesday, September 23, 6-7pm
Dr. Rebecca Clark, The Past & Future of Human-Environmental Interaction in Florida
This program is made possible by the Broward Public Library Foundation.

A Service of the Broward County Board of County Commissioners.
AGE GROUP: | Tweens | Teens | New Adults | Families | Everyone | Adults |
EVENT TYPE: | Technology | Speaker | Online/Virtual | Discussion/Lecture | Author Events | Arts & Cultural |
Online - Broward County Library
| Mon, Oct 19 | 12:00AM to 11:45PM |
| Tue, Oct 20 | 12:00AM to 11:45PM |
| Wed, Oct 21 | 12:00AM to 11:45PM |
| Thu, Oct 22 | 12:00AM to 11:45PM |
| Fri, Oct 23 | 12:00AM to 11:45PM |
| Sat, Oct 24 | 12:00AM to 11:45PM |
| Sun, Oct 25 | 12:00AM to 11:45PM |
The Online Branch features a wide variety of online events you can access from anywhere.

