Slide Show

As the International Space Station flew over New York on March 23 (yielding this dazzling nighttime cityscape), it’s safe to say that crew members were not thinking about Danforth W. Toan. But 45 years earlier, before some of the crew members were even born, he was thinking about them.

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Mr. Toan, who died on Jan. 16 at 94, was among the first architects to wrestle seriously with the challenges of creating long-term living quarters in space. He is better known in his profession as the designer of academic buildings, especially libraries, and better known among his neighbors in Tappan, N.Y., as a leader of the 1990s “Vinyl Wars,” which pitted traditionalists who favored the historic look of clapboard — he was one of them — against homeowners who wanted the freedom to reclad their homes in vinyl siding.

What captivated me, however, were Mr. Toan’s explorations of how to make a space station habitable, as well as the simple tools he brought to his task: sketchpads, color slides, videotape and scale models that were almost literally built of bubble gum and baling wire.

In 1967, his architectural firm, Warner Burns Toan Lunde of 724 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, won a contract to advise the Grumman Corporation of Bethpage, N.Y., for what would eventually be Grumman’s bid to construct an orbiting space station. Mr. Toan worked on the project for the next 20 years, until Grumman was bypassed as a prime contractor by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

“We have to find some compromise between the cockpit environment of present spacecraft and the luxury of a hotel,” he told John Noble Wilford of The New York Times early in 1969.

On Nov. 1 that year, a few months after Apollo 11 had successfully landed on the moon, The New Yorker published an interview with Mr. Toan that considered the challenge of a prolonged stay in space. “The problem cannot be solved by reference to the Apollo spacecraft,” the magazine said, “for the difference between building a craft in which three men spend eight days to make a round trip to the moon and one in which groups of a dozen men will be spending six-month hitches in space is the difference between designing a car and designing a house.”

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Mr. Toan was quick to grasp that a space station, though extraordinarily confined, would offer advantages available in no other environment: zero gravity, for starters.

“Space expands in proportion to how much of it you can use, almost as if you had increased its size,” he said. “A cell seven feet square is very constricting, but if the cell were seven feet high, making a volume of 343 cubic feet, and if the man inside it could float around, reorienting himself however he wanted — curling up on the ceiling if he got tired of the floor — the space would seem much bigger.”

The New Yorker noted, “Mr. Toan has anticipated the need for a certain amount of privacy, and, accordingly, on each deck there are four private rooms, each of them a cubicle seven feet on a side.” It added that the architect had “solved the problem of keeping an astronaut down in his bunk by providing a strap to go across his waist, but he said he wasn’t sure this was the best solution, because the head and feet would be left floating. He was now thinking of putting the astronaut into a sort of lightly restraining sleeping bag.”

Flash forward to an amateur video made in the mid-1980s in a Grumman hangar at Bethpage, starring Mr. Toan’s young architectural colleagues as blue-suited astronauts in their space station home. An astronaut played by Rick Bell (now executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects) is shown, with bedtime reading, cosseted in a lightly restraining sleeping bag on one wall.

Flash forward another 20 years to Capt. Sunita L. Williams, commander of the 33rd expedition to the space station in 2012, as she gave a guided video tour of the crew’s quarters: four private spaces arrayed around the central passageway. And what’s on one wall of her room? “I’ve got a sleeping bag right here that we sleep in,” she said, “so we don’t — sort of like a little bit of a cover — we don’t fly all over the place.”

Mr. Bell said that Mr. Toan, whom he considered a mentor, was “always thinking outside the box,” which had made him an ideal choice as a subcontractor for Grumman. “They wanted someone who could think about habitability in the abstract,” Mr. Bell said.

For inspiration, Mr. Toan would watch “Star Trek” with his son, Braden. He also made a point of seeing “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“He just couldn’t believe the whole thing was happening,” the younger Mr. Toan recalled. “Dad normally got up at 9. When this started, he’d wake up at 5 because he was so excited.”