Constance Adams

Constance Adams is an architect who REALLY knows how to work with space.

As founding partner and president of Synthesis International, Constance Adams spent fifteen years as a specialist in high-performance architecture and design innovation for human spaceflight. Supporting missions from NASA’s Johnson Space Center through work that included surface habitats for lunar/Mars exploration, long-duration crew transit spacecraft, vehicle architecture for the X-38 Crew Return Vehicle and the Orbital Space Plane, she also helped develop the operational and integration protocols for the Japanese HTV Cargo spacecraft for the International Space Station and consulted with the team that designed the Virgin Galactic Terminal building at New Mexico’s Spaceport America.

Her work with NASA sensitized her to issues of human-machine interface, sustainable systems, biomimetic design and the need for new ways of mitigating risk in the design and building professions. Her commitment to sustainable design now extends to the development of business and economic models suited to the creation and maintenance of long-term social and financial health across our cultural ecosystem.

In early 2011, Constance co-founded Rocket Ranch, a company whose central goal is to avert a crisis in America’s intellectual capital and innovation infrastructure by tapping into the extraordinary talent of several thousand displaced Space Shuttle scientists and engineers to address technical challenges in other industries. Relying on advanced crowdsourcing models and financial ingenuity, Rocket Ranch is positioned to evolve into a quasi-public research center to replace the defunct Bell Labs and Xerox PARC.

Most recently, she’s co-founder and CTO of HOUZE Advanced Building Science, a for-profit venture seeking to build relationships throughout the building materials, methods and technologies fields in order to produce affordable zero-energy housing all over America.

Constance has taught space architecture and design at Yale University, the University of Houston and elsewhere, collaborates with National Geographic Learning and the JASON Project on the development of science curricula for elementary and middle school aged kids and has spoken at the first Architectural Record ‘Innovations Conference’, the Pop!Tech ‘Radical Craft’ conference, and several times at the AIAS and AIA National Conventions.

Her work has been published in Metropolis, Wired, Newsweek, The New York Times, I.D., Popular Science, Architectural Record, Der Spiegel and other journals and has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale School of Architecture. She has won several NASA awards for her innovative technologies and holds the design copyright on the first human-rated inflatable spacecraft. National Geographic has honored her since 2005 as an ‘Emerging Explorer’ for her work in space and terrestrial architecture and the adaptive transfer of sustainable technologies.

A Senior Member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Constance holds degrees from Harvard/Radcliffe College and Yale University, and currently lives in Houston with her family and a flock of cantankerous hens.