Application Deadline: Sep.5
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How the Studio Works
Weekly Remote Studio Sessions Collaborative development using a shared visual workspace.
Small Cohort Engaged learning and lasting professional relationships.
Individual Focus Weekly 1:1 time with mentor.
Guest Experts Critics and speakers from NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, leading architecture firms, and research institutions.
Project-Based Learning Develop a Space architecture project from concept to completion.
Why a Studio?
A studio is an active, curiousity-fueled process of open research, iteration, 1:1 mentorship, and peer-to-peer learning. Through a studio, you gain a working understanding by designing the thing you’re trying to understand. The best part is that you create something original and visual that is yours to keep and share.
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What You'll Create
Over 9 weeks, you'll design and develop a complete, portfolio-quality space architecture project of your choosing:
- Mixed-use Space Station
- Lunar Research Base
- Deep Space Habitat
- Single Person Spacecraft
Who Is It For?
The course is intended for students and professionals who want exposure to the real design problems of traveling, living, and working in Space, understanding of the principles that make space habitats work, and the opportunity to develop one themselves.
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Architects & Interior Designers
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Understand how extreme environments inform better design everywhere.
- Build their Space architecture portfolio
- Transition into design for human spaceflight
Industrial Designers
- Expand your scale and scope of design into spatial layout, system configuration, and concept of operations.
- Transition into design for human spaceflight.
Configuration Engineers
- Enrich your approach by adding design studio methods
- Learn through the studio model for the first time
Aerospace/ Mechanical Engineers
- Expand your scope from designing parts and subsystems to architecting holistic, human-supporting solutions.
- Transition into a design field.
Why Study Space Architecture?
Space Architecture is the theory and practice of creating habitable environments beyond Earth. Designing for Space changes how you think about terrestrial design and the world you inhabit.
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The realities of Space knock loose many of the constants of terrestrial design. Differing gravity regimes challenge conventions of usability, experience, and orientation. By necessity of holding air pressure, the structure is a curved shell yet equipment and systems remain rectilinear, presenting a "squaring the circle" problem which requires inventive arrangements. Habitats are made on Earth and delivered to Space on rockets that are >95% fuel by mass, forcing an extreme mass constraint, not the mention a volumetric one. Since occupants can't leave the building, more attention needs to be put into the interior environment and how much of the outside world is let in.
There are few actual inhabitants but their lives are scrutinized and consumed, alongside the design itself.
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Achieving the barely-possible feat of a viable Space habitat requires exceptional communication and collaboration with discplines such as structural engineering, environmental control and life support systems, vehicle integration & test, human psychology and physiology, logistics, and launch operations.
All of this comes together to stretch the reach of the form and the societal narratives that archtiecture embodies. Whether studied academically or pursued professionally, Space architecture helps us develop into designers capable of dealing with the future.
About Your Mentor
Jeffrey Montes, M.Arch is a practicing Space Architect that has built an influential portfolio of projects for Space that spans space stations, crew transport, lunar and Martian habitats, autonomous construction, spaceports, rovers, and piloting interfaces.
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Jeffrey earned the first Space Architect role in private aerospace when he started as Senior Space Architect at Blue Origin (2020-2025). At Blue, he helped win a $170M contract to design Orbital Reef, a successor to the aging International Space Station. As the company's leading design professional, and at the cusp of an era in which the aerospace industry is beginning to adopt Design methods, Jeffrey learned how to champion a humane design vision onto a classically over-constrained engineering problem. He led the team responsible for the design of spacecraft and for how those environments shape the astronaut experience. Prior to Blue, Jeffrey developed award-winning space habitat designs such as Mars Ice House (2015) and Labitat. Marsha (2019), which Jeffrey designed as Head of Space Architecture & Research at SpaceFactory, was awarded >$600,000 by NASA for Jeffrey’s innovative design and for the team’s success in making it a reality using semi-autonomous 3D-printing.
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Terrestrially, Jeffrey has worked on projects tiny and large as both designer and consulting specialist including 3D-printed sculptures, new and renovated homes and interiors, detailed building envelope design, and other concepts. In 2025 he founded Different Systems, a Seattle-based practice that integrates Space architecture and his passion for Earth’s living landscapes.
Jeffrey holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture and a Minor in Philosophy from Northeastern University and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University.
affiliations & contributions noted.
1. Space module interior
2. Mars Ice House by SEArch/ Clouds AO
3. Space station parti
4. Orbital Reef by Blue Origin (render: Adam Burch)
5. Space station module
6. The Works Lunar Spaceport for Open Lunar Foundation
7. Marsha by Spacefactory (render: Plomp)