AENARA Builds a 1:1 Mars Habitat Wall for Powerhouse Parramatta

A full-scale cross-section of a Mars habitat imagined for the year 2075 opens on November 7, 2026, at the newly opened Powerhouse Parramatta in Sydney. The installation, called Off-World Habitat Wall Section, was designed by AENARA, the space architecture studio founded by Melodie Yashar, for the exhibition Task Eternal.

The project didn't appear out of thin air. AENARA developed it from a year-long feasibility study conducted alongside NASA collaborators, university researchers, and industry partners. The cutaway exposes what a habitat wall actually has to do: hold structural strata, carry mechanical utilities, and demonstrate the autonomous manufacturing techniques needed to keep people alive in extreme off-world environments.

What does the wall section actually show?

The engineering centers on a layered assembly. Robotic 3D printers form the outer shells from sulfur concrete mixed with local regolith — the loose Martian soil — through a process called in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU. The logic is simple: you can't ship buildings to Mars, so you print them from what's already on the ground.

Behind the printed shells sit four more critical layers:

• an inflatable pressure membrane that holds a breathable atmosphere
• radiation shielding
• high-performance thermal insulation
• integrated conduits routing water filtration, atmospheric recycling, data transfer, and power delivery

The installation shows how these systems coordinate inside a single wall rather than as separate bolted-on components.

Why daylight and windows matter on Mars

AENARA balances life-support engineering with crew psychology. The interior module incorporates daylighting strategies and expanded window viewports — a reminder that the hardest problem in a sealed habitat may be the human inside it. A wall that filters water and recycles air still fails if the crew can't see out.

The studio frames the work as a two-way transfer. Extreme-environment aerospace research feeds scalable construction methods that could apply both off-world and in terrestrial circular construction, where local materials and printed structures cut waste and transport.

Who's behind it?

AENARA Space, led by founder Melodie Yashar, engineered the structural assembly and produced the project visuals. JW Pictures photographed the finished installation. The exhibition imagery includes a map of Mars in-situ construction materials, renders of an early settlement, and detailed shots of the airlock and inflatable components.

The project arrived through designboom's DIY submissions feature, which publishes reader-submitted work.

With Task Eternal running at Powerhouse Parramatta from November 7, 2026, visitors will get a rare thing: a walk-up view of the exact wall thickness, conduit routing, and material logic that a 2075 Mars settlement would demand.