“One of the pleasures of great works of architecture and engineering is that you can visit them,” writes architect David Nixon. That’s impossible for the International Space Station, which is basically the most expensive and least-visited house ever constructed. “It is all the more surprising, then, that so little has been published on it,” Nixon continues in the foreword to his new book documenting the 40-year design process. “Not much more than a few paperback books, now out of date, and a pictorial reference guide from [NASA] are available for an achievement that is widely regarded as the engineering and construction masterpiece of modern times.”

Indeed, straightforward information about its design and construction is surprisingly difficult to come by, and it’s easy to understand why. As Nixon—who has spent his career as an architect designing for space programs, including the ISS—explains, the design was evolving right up until the final assembly just a few years ago. The shifting geopolitical climate, funding cuts, and legislative setbacks altered the construction plan over and over. It took thousands of on-the-ground engineers and hundreds of astronauts to finish it. It’s no wonder there’s no cohesive account of its design, especially one written from an architectural perspective.

Soviet-borne interior design was more humane than its American counterpart.

So for the past seven years, Nixon has compiled the architectural history of the ISS, published next month under the title International Space Station Architecture Beyond Earth. The 250-page book documents the complex political and social currents that led to its creation, but the most unfathomable thing about its story is, by far, the fact that it was built at all. As Nixon puts it: “The International Space Station’s supreme achievement is its construction.”

The ISS’s Closest Living Relative Is CERN

The space station might be an entirely new building type, but it does have a relative here on Earth. Nixon says that the Large Hadron Collider is the closest comparable structure on this planet—for two reasons. First, an incredibly lengthy international collaboration was required to orchestrate its construction over decades. Second, its site is underground, where it was extremely difficult to run a complicated construction project.

Space Has A Smell, And A Sound

Considering that the vast majority of its designers had never been into space, the task of designing the station’s interiors involved unthinkable blindspots ranging from the smells to the sounds of the space. Designers had to consider everything from the color of the walls, including one ill-advised experiment with salmon (supposed to be a “soothing” color), to the acoustic effects of the interior, all without being able to experience any of those environmental conditions themselves. In some cases, their choices had unexpected results, as recounted by astronauts very vividly in the book.

For example, astronaut Nicole Stott explains that because of the changes in temperature on the surface of the modules, the spaces often echo with a startling creaking (“at first it is slightly alarming, but soon becomes familiar,” she writes). Equally surprising, she says that space itself has a smell:

“A big surprise to me was the ‘smell of space.’ By that, I mean what something smells like after being exposed to the vacuum of space. The best example is the suit used for a spacewalk right after a crew member re-enters the station from the airlock. I’ve heard different descriptions, but to me space has a sweet, metallic smell similar to that of an overheating car radiator.”

The Russian-Designed Modules Are Cozier

The collaboration between Russia and the U.S. on the station’s design during the Bush administration was a metaphor for a grander political detente, as the book recounts. But that didn’t mean that cultural differences didn’t still exist, even in the two countries’ approach to design. Stott describes how Soviet-borne interior design was more humane than its American counterpart: