“Weaponry is rarely a topic of discussion among designers,” writes Chappell Ellison for Good Magazine. “Guns and grenades will most likely never be on display at the Museum of Modern Art, despite the countless designers and engineers involved in creating them.” Though conspicuously absent from the utopian trajectory of design, objects created for conflict have greatly influenced our built environment. In fact, the most enduring material innovations can likely be traced back to some military origin.

Israel’s Iron Dome has no problem being identified as an expression of military force. Having successfully intercepted 60 rockets launched from Gaza just last week, the Iron Dome—a defense system six years in the making—has garnered increased attention. The system is designed to detect and defend against rockets at a range of 4 to 70 kilometers, and with its recent 90 percent success rate, the creators at Rafael Advanced Defense Systems are hoping to woo countries like South Korea, where there is a constant threat of short-range missile fires, to become its newest clients.

Image courtesy Rafael.

Rafael markets its military breakthrough with an illustration of a city encapsulated in a transparent, snow-globe-like dome. But, as Ellison explained for Good Magazine, “the Iron Dome hardly embodies its larger-than-life moniker.” While allusions to the immense, hermetically guarded Death Star may come to mind, the boxy, tan-colored tracking radar units that make the Iron Dome are visually more akin to “a piece of farm equipment you might see in the opening scenes of Star Wars: Episode IV, when Luke sullenly ambles across the horizon of his desert-like planet.”

Nonetheless, the Dome can hardly hide behind its metaphorical name. By deploying $10,000 to $50,000 rockets upon tracking incoming enemy fire, the implementation of the Dome marks a costly shift towards a more active Israeli defense. The Iron Dome is what Ellison calls “a physical manifestation of human conflict,” one that “serves to remind the world of a seemingly endless, painful conflict between two determined factions.” It has undoubtedly saved lives, but it does not, as Rafael’s image suggests, enable civilian life prosper peacefully during wartime.

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The moving platform in Rem Koolhaas’ Maison à Bordeaux allows the inhabitant to access a series of stacked volumes without having to move. Photo via.

Some of the most memorable works of architecture have arisen from life’s unfortunate setbacks: a near-fatal car accident led a wheelchair-bound man in France to commission the Maison à Bordeaux, Rem Koolhaas’ shining example of alternative interior circulation. Frank Lloyd Wright similarly designed a home in 1948 for Kenneth Laurent, a disabled war veteran whose life was made easier by Wright’s spacious, curvilinear plan. In contemporary Tokyo, Takeshi Hosaka architects designed a peculiar home for a deaf couple and their family, enabling the parents to communicate with their young children even from considerable distances.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left no shortage of injuries and setbacks. But as NPR reports, a significant number of wounded U.S. soldiers wish to remain in uniform. At a U.S. Army fort in Virginia, developers are now overseeing a grand housing experiment called the Wounded Warrior Home, which is setting out to repair and retrofit 2,100 homes to accommodate disabled soldiers. Read on.

An ocular window installed in a ‘Wounded Warrior’ house.

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Photo via Wired

Late last week, Iran celebrated its acquisition of a CIA-operated stealth drone that crashed in its territory. Photos and videos were released, showing a slick bat-shaped aircraft, grounded and jarringly out of place in a gymnasium-like setting in Tehran, its white, streamlined shell teeming with intelligence-revealing and reverse engineering possibilities. Moreover, the prized specimen was shown elevated on a podium, photographed against a colorful banner that reads “Death to America, Death to Israel, Death to England,” and in case those fighting words weren’t enough, another banner strung along the bottom of the podium reads, “America can’t do a damn thing,” reports Newsweek.

Photo via Newsweek

True, President Obama has already sent out a preliminary “can I have my drone back, please?” request, which was met with an expected negative response. Does this mean America really can’t do a damn thing? According to Wired, America has already done quite a few things, all of which rest in the drone’s design. Though Iran will probably enlist a fleet of scientists and engineers from equally curious sometime Iranian-allies China and Russia—both of whom have been known to routinely copy military hardware—aircraft designers in the U.S. are still quite hopeful that the drone dissection will reveal little more beyond the geometry of its seemingly Eero Saarinen-inspired, radar-evading airframe. Key components such as the alloys and non-metal composites in the undetectable exhaust ducting may be simple to identify but highly difficult to reproduce, reflecting decades of cutting-edge research. And the radar sensors, if in tact in the crashed drone, require foreign software to read—software that includes classified anti-tamper measures.

Simply put, the drone will require a great deal of work to reveal its inner workings, much more than a simple pry. It is, after all, an object crafted to embody the height of concealment and obscuration in an age when information is perhaps too readily available.

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