Clouds Architecture Office's concept designs for the Avatar X space exploration campus in Japan, will have a robotics research centre suspended over an man-made crater.
New York-based architecture firm Clouds Architecture Office designed the space technology research campus for Avatar X in old mining site in Oita prefecture, Kyushu, which already resembles a lunar landscape.

The crater at the centre of the site will be sculpted to exaggerate it's moon-like appearance. Suspended 18 metres above the bottom of the crater with steel cables, the Avatar X Lab will be made from transparent and translucent panels of fluoropolymer membrane wrapped around a steel frame.
Carbon fibre partitions, honeycomb aluminium floor plates and fibre-reinforced plastic trims will help keep the multi-storey structure's weight down.
"The form of the floating structure was informed by pressure vessels common in space architecture, which tend to be cylindrical in shape," Masayuki Sono, architect and co-founder of Clouds Architecture Office, told Dezeen.
Pieces of space architecture, such as the International Space Station, are human habitats that can exist beyond the earth's surfaces. Their forms are dictated by the different forces that exist in the vacuum of outer space, which begins 62 miles above sea level at the Kármán line.

"Space architecture tends to be low mass, compact and high performance, since much of the construction material has to launched into space aboard a rocke...