As I take in his floating city within this exhibition, produced in collaboration with the National Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, it pulls at something visceral, something that doesn’t just linger in theory. This is pure, unapologetic utopianism, with just enough of an edge of realism that makes it all the more haunting.

His work feels like it has a distant cousin in the realm of pop culture: the Cloud City of Bespin from Star Wars lore. Both are suspended worlds, hovering above the constraints of a planet and existing somewhere between reality and myth. Cloud City—Lando Calrissian’s sleek metropolis drifting above the gas giant of Bespin—captures that same idea of a place removed from earthly limitations, designed to thrive in the skies, an oasis in an inhospitable environment. While Cloud City trades in sci-fi glamour, Kosice’s vision is something grittier, almost elemental, bound by his relentless focus on water as the lifeblood of survival in space. Unlike Cloud City’s polished, corporate gleam, La Ciudad Hidroespacial feels like a mid-century modern prototype of future reality, sculpted effortlessly in neon and Plexiglas. It still feels raw and somehow organic, at an atmospherically molecular level, as if it could grow and adapt to the needs of its inhabitants out of thin air.

The striking parallel, though, is in both cities’ vision of humanity existing above the surface, suspended and liberated, breaking free from the gravitational pull of convention. In the Cloud City of Star Wars, there's a sense of escapism, a world where luxury and isolation intertwine. In Kosice’s world, there’s a deeper resilience—a more practical kind of utopia that isn’t merely about living above but about creating a climate-resilient symbiosis by harnessing Earth’s atmosphere. It’s his sense of purpose that reminds me of my own journey working on projects like NEOM, a bold new project reimagining city life in Saudi Arabia’s desert, and NASA’s Orion Program. In our future, Earth-bound reality, we’re not just designing for spectacle; we’re designing with an intent to redefine what “home” means, whether in the clouds, the desert, or the vast unknown. Kosice’s city—and yes, even Cloud City and NEOM—remind us that if we’re bold enough, we can shape our surroundings to fit a vision that feels limitless.

Kosice (1924-2016) began this endeavor in 1946, against the backdrop of a world clawing its way out of war. He finished it in 1972, a year where the buzz of human ambition sent our kind beyond the Earth’s atmosphere to poke around the moon. The Hydrospatial City—driven by Kosice’s own preoccupations with water and space—seems impossible, alien, even ridiculous. It’s a world where humanity lives on floating pods that draw water from the air, that live with the atmosphere rather than against it. Standing here in the museum, Standing in the museum, there’s an odd flicker that Kosice was onto something—a raw instinct as raw and real as the time that I was part of a team at Bechtel, one of the world’s leading engineering firms, fighting to gain NASA’s approval for one of our design proposals.

Bechtel, after nearly three decades away from space engineering, was back with a mission to forge a gateway for NASA’s Orion program. The first time I stepped onto NASA’s turf as part of Bechtel’s proposal team, it was with a heady mix of awe and tension. We weren’t just proposing a new launch structure; we were forging a gateway, a launchpad for the Orion spacecraft’s leap back to the moon, maybe beyond. Building something with that kind of purpose isn’t just engineering; it’s also mythmaking and storytelling. The specs demanded precision, resilience, and an understanding of what this mobile launcher would mean for a new era of exploration. There’s a similarity in Kosice’s work—a man so obsessed with water and the idea of floating cities that he could practically taste it. He didn’t see limits in earthly terms; neither did we, as we soon witnessed our winning proposal for the ML2 evolved through design and construction stages within the NASA complex at Cape Canaveral, constructing a platform to endure the thrust and flame of future missions into the unknown.

Kosice’s designs for his Hydrospacial City—a mesh of suspended pods, harnessed energy, and atmospheric resilience—have a purity to them, a distilled vision that doesn’t answer to earthly constraints. And standing here immersing myself in his grand vision of the future, I think too about my recent work at NEOM, another moon shot project in its own way, one that isn’t just urban planning but a statement on how we imagine and live in our surroundings. Like Kosice, NEOM dares to step beyond what exists, to move into the wild territories of possibility and imagination. There’s a silent grit to it, a resolve to go big, to defy the rules of what a city should be and stretch into what it could be.

Was Kosice’s work speculative science fiction? or something more? Gyula La Ciudad Hidroespacial was indeed speculative, certainly, but calling it “science fiction” alone would miss its profound edge. His work went beyond fantastical futurism; it was grounded in real scientific principles and explored human adaptation. Kosice envisioned a world where humans could live sustainably in floating cities, leveraging atmospheric water to support life and blending seamlessly with the environment. His work was ahead of its time, challenging conventional urban and architectural norms long before sustainability became a global priority.

NASA recognized the visionary potential in Kosice’s work, particularly in the late 1970s when they were exploring concepts for space habitats and sustainable life-support systems. Kosice’s ideas about water sourcing and atmospheric harmony resonated with NASA’s goals for long-term human presence in space. In an internal review, NASA scientists validated several aspects of Kosice’s research, noting that his designs anticipated future needs for sustainable, closed-loop life-support systems—critical for both space exploration and Earth-bound urban resilience. His ideas on atmospheric water harvesting and modular construction were seen as theoretically sound and valuable for applications in extraterrestrial environments.

However, NASA’s enthusiasm was tempered by practical concerns. They questioned the construction costs and technical feasibility of Kosice’s floating cities, especially the energy requirements for sustaining such structures and the materials necessary to achieve stability in the open atmosphere. While they admired his foresight, the costs of building and maintaining such cities around the Earth—let alone in space—remained a significant hurdle. NASA's assessment ultimately underscored Kosice’s role not just as a speculative artist but as a visionary thinker whose work bordered on true scientific inquiry, hinting at possibilities that would be revisited as technology evolved. Kosice’s Hydrospatial City remains a landmark of ambitious thought, a testament to the enduring dialogue between art and science.

Both Kosice’s Hydrospatial City and NEOM now share an eerie commonality—each is built on ideals of cohabitation with our environment, whether in the sky or in an ultra-modern city that’s linear and vertically layered, designed to integrate with desert environments. Kosice wanted to use water as the lifeblood, a resource to sustain human life in a floating ecosystem, a vision that bordered on obsession. NEOM is turning to the desert's own unique resources—solar energy, wind, and green hydrogen production, and untapped biodiversity, aiming to build a place that doesn’t choke its environment but thrives within it, despite the harsh desert climate extremes.

Kosice's work isn’t that different from what I saw at NASA, and yet it feels like a mirror of what projects like NEOM are doing across the MENA region. Both are on different scales but resonate with the same desire to transcend the status quo, to step into new landscapes, literal or metaphorical.

Kosice’s city didn’t need validation; today it stands as art, a testament to an unfiltered vision of the future. What futurists, architects, engineers and imagineers are building, whether at NEOM or Cape Canaveral, doesn’t have that luxury. These projects must perform, prove their worth, and endure. But looking at Kosice’s Hydrospatial dreams, it’s clear that every ambitious project needs its own measure of the impractical, the impossible. Kosice may not have built a city in the clouds, but he crafted a vision that makes us feel it’s possible. It’s a reminder that even in an age of specs, deadlines, and weight limits, there’s still a place for audacity.

In Kosice’s world, water is suspended skyward, sustaining life yet to be. In the Orion Program, it was a humble launchpad, a testament to humanity’s ability to transcend our limitations and, quite literally, launch into new worlds. And in NEOM, it’s a call to create a city that speaks to both the future and the elemental truth of the land. I see it—each project, bound by its unique ambitions, but driven by the same mad belief: the future is worth every damn risk.