Mies made light, precise, rational, reductive envelopes of space.
Site location, building orientation and geometry, building envelope, arrangement of spaces, and local climatic characteristics are elements that the design team must address, for the result to have a distinct impact on both the occupants' environment and the efficiency of the building.
This nonlinear relationship suggests "envelopes" of allowable space demonstrating that large temperature and/or pH differences drive concomitantly large evolutionary divergences and that communities inhabiting similar temperature and pH ranges are not necessarily evolutionarily related.
"We invent spaceships, we invent space procedures, we push back the edges of the envelope of how we understand space flight.
This approach demonstrated that supplementary in situ duct cryopumping would not be needed, provided that the required heat-transfer performance could be met without any encroachment of the elements beyond the space envelope of the existing inertial duct protection plates.
In addition, there are many other (often conflicting) design requirements/constraints, such as minimising cost, noise and space envelope of the system (particularly for retrofit in existing buildings), maximising thermal performance and consideration of maintenance (e.g. filter accessibility and service intervals).
He wrote a list of requirements on the back of an envelope: a space, two assistants, and a small budget for materials or equipment for each show – and soon realised that when "you can't do any of the things associated with big shows, suddenly the system sort of falls away leaving the artist, and the curator, free to experiment".
But if you give me an envelope and a pen, I'll find myself scribbling till I run out of space, then turning the envelope inside out to keep writing.
The "new space" industry is getting more exciting with every passing year, where startups in Silicon Valley like Made in Space are working with NASA and other groups to push the envelope of what is possible with space missions.
