Feeling at Home as a Dimension of Resilience in Architecture for Extreme Environments

As human exploration advances into increasingly hostile and isolated environments, such as extraterrestrial habitats on Mars, the Moon, or deep-sea stations, the concept of resilience must evolve beyond its traditional technical and physiological dimensions.

This need becomes particularly critical in contexts of long-duration habitation, where survival alone is insufficient to guarantee long-term operational stability and human wellbeing.

Central to this assertion is the recognition that resilience entails examining construction in relation to permanence, which may also be understood as a sense of feeling at home, shifting resilience from a purely performance-based concept to a relational and experiential condition.

This perspective requires redirecting science, technology, and design toward the conditions that enable habitation to become sustainable, meaningful, and socially durable.

This includes environmental adaptation, understood as the strategic use of local raw materials and regenerative systems, reducing dependency on external supply chains and increasing environmental compatibility, as well as the processes accompanying construction, which involve the complex relationships between these local materials, the tools, crafts, and other elements that make construction possible.

These construction–material ecologies play a decisive role in transforming temporary shelters into places of permanence.

Finally, it encompasses cultural embeddedness, which acknowledges the importance of cultural identity, symbolic practices, and sensory experiences that converge in the creation of an atmosphere of resilience, influencing perception of safety, cohesion, and long-term habitability.

The literature on this concept is fragmented due to the complexity and interdisciplinary nature of the aspects involved in the state of feeling at home.

Architecture, design, sociology and anthropology, nutrition, indoor environmental quality (thermal, acoustic, lighting, olfactory), tactile experience, physical activity, structural safety, and risk perception all contribute to this condition, yet are rarely addressed within a unified framework.

A common view across disciplines is missing in the related literature, yet it is of fundamental importance to understand and to design the future of resilient spatial architecture, both in extraterrestrial settings and in climate-stressed environments on Earth.

This abstract proposes a theoretical framework for understanding resilience in these terms, emphasizing the integration of cultural, psychological, material, and collaborative factors in the sustainable design of long-term human settlements in hostile environments.

By reframing resilience as the capacity to sustain a sense of “being at home”, the framework offers a shared conceptual ground for interdisciplinary dialogue across environmental sciences, engineering, architecture, and the social sciences.

 It challenges the prevailing techno-centric framing of resilience in extreme environments, arguing instead for a holistic approach that embraces human complexity, cultural roots, and collaborative innovation, with direct implications for climate adaptation, remote communities, and future off-Earth settlements.