No other planet has captured our collective imagination as Mars since we first saw it as a star-like object in the night sky. Mars is a harsh, arid planet. Because of the rusty iron in the soil, it is referred to as the Red Planet. Like Earth, Mars has a very thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon, seasons, polar ice caps, volcanoes, canyons, and weather.

Both passionate about sci-fi and space, Ella Good and Nicki Kent position their work around space as a topic that broadens ideas on how we currently live and how we might live in the future. They use real science and science fiction as launching pads to investigate the connections between our present reality, the future, and the collective imagination.

Their pioneering public art project called Building a Martian House combines design, architecture, and technology to settle on the Red Planet. It is a prototype for a Martian house developed to resist the harsh Martian environment. The goal is to offer a perspective of our increasingly precarious Earth and encourage us to think about how we might live more sustainably by visualising how a tiny community would live there.

Over seven years, engineers, space scientists from the University of Bristol, Hugh Broughton Architects – world leaders in designing for extreme environments – design studio Pearce +, the general public, and a group of construction companies developed the design for the two-story house with a top floor made of an inflatable gold coated foil.  Ella and Nicki were very conscious that they needed many different specialists on the team to make the project happen. Gradually, others joined, too, from structural engineers to scientists.

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