Where Is the Centre?

Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that the cruise ship Odyssey, sold as a place to live out one’s days while circling the seven continents, had suspended its voyage in Cambodia because of fuel costs. Its 203 passengers had been told to leave, and the status of its 156 crew remained unclear.¹ There was nothing physically wrong with the ship. The hull was sound, yet it had stopped being a home. What had it really been depending on?

»maybe the centre of a building is whatever you can’t live without when you’re in it«

The architectural historian Robin Evans once asked a question that at first sounds absurd: where is the centre of a building? In his 1995 book The Projective Cast, Evans studied Renaissance churches built around a single central point.² On the plan, the answer is obvious: the spot equidistant from everything else. Yet the centre a visitor feels from inside doesn’t necessarily coincide with that point. The drawn centre is only a claim about what a building is arranged around, and claims can be wrong. On a ship like the Odyssey, the drawing would perhaps put that centre in an atrium or on a pool deck. But if a drawing can mislead about a church, it can mislead about a ship: the centre it shows may not be the one the building actually depends on.

The architecture critic Reyner Banham pointed to what the drawing leaves out. In his 1969 book The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, he argued that architectural history had focused on walls and structure, while what makes a building habitable is its services: heating, ventilation, lighting, and power.³ Four years earlier, in an article called »A Home Is Not a House«, he had imagined a dwelling as little more than a bubble of conditioned air.⁴ Seen this way, the Odyssey’s centre was never its atrium or pool deck. It was wherever its fuel came from, and its residents found that out the hard way when the price changed.

That gives us a preliminary answer to Evans’s question: maybe the centre of a building is whatever you can’t live without when you’re in it. That’s rarely on the drawing, and it tends to move outwards. On the Odyssey it was a fuel contract. For most of us it’s a power grid, a water main, a heating plant. Two other stories from the past few days show how far outwards it can go:

Yesterday, Space.com published an account of a building where the reliance on an outside centre becomes unusually clear. The astrobiologist Michaela Musilova spent five days living 7 metres under the sea, in a submerged research station used for simulated space missions.⁵ Its entrance is a »moon pool«, an opening through which divers swim straight in. Air, water, and power arrive from outside, and Musilova writes that apart from her three crewmates, the only sound was the systems keeping them alive. The building’s rooms are underwater. Its centre is not.

And earlier this week, a start-up called Cowboy Space went a step further. It unveiled Big Iron, a planned rocket whose upper stage would stay in orbit as a data centre, a warehouse of computers used to run AI.⁶ In space, the only way for heat to escape is by radiation, so the rocket’s skin has to double as a radiator: the envelope and the service become one object. It’s still a proposal, with a first flight planned for 2028, but the company talks about producing up to 20,000 such craft.

Why should a home care? Because a growing share of what keeps a modern home running, from its heating controls to its door locks, already depends on computers somewhere else. Spaceships have always kept their support on the ground. Here the inhabitants stay on Earth and the support goes up into space, so the centre of a home would no longer be a point inside it, or even a plant room beyond its walls, but a network around the entire planet.

So where is your home’s centre, really? Not where it seems to be on the plan. It’s wherever the thing you can’t live without comes from, and that place keeps moving further away from the walls: from a fuel contract, to a cable on the seabed, to a satellite above the weather.

The Odyssey’s passengers learned where their home was when the fuel ran out. We may learn where ours is when the sky goes quiet.

References