Constance Adams, an architect who gave up designing skyscrapers to develop structures that would help travelers live with reasonable comfort on the International Space Station, Mars or the moon, died on Monday at her home in Houston. She was 53.

MaryScott Hagle, a friend and the guardian of Ms. Adams’s daughters, said the cause was colorectal cancer.

Ms. Adams had been interviewing for an architectural job in Houston in 1996 when she took a tour of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. The tour roused her curiosity and led to two decades of work that challenged her to create living facilities for humans in the rarefied environment of space.

“How could the child of a historian resist?” she said in an interview with Metropolis magazine in 1999. “This is a big historical effort of our time.”