The Air from Other Planets is a speculation into the worlds that architects, landscape architects, and urban planners will soon create as the parameters of design control expand. Local climate design will become its own initiative and new definitions of physical boundaries and environmental contexts will emerge. This project informs the reader of the historical context of environmental controls and explores recent trajectories in research and practice that today offer architects an opportunity to embrace a more malleable environmental context for design.

Sean Lally founded the office WEATHERS to embrace the potential overlap between the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Recent projects include proposals for the Gdansk Museum of WWII; an extension to the Stockholm City Library; and a proposal for the urban redevelopment of Reykjavik, Iceland. Lally's work has been featured in exhibitions and he has lectured at a range of schools including University of Pennsylvania, Syracuse, Cornell, the Ohio State University, IAAC (Barcelona), KTH Stockholm, and ETH Zurich. He was an invited lecturer at the Climate and Architecture conference in Copenhagen (2009) as part of the global summit on climate change. His work and writings have appeared in a wide range of journals and publications including 306090, Harvard Design Magazine, Landscape World, Azure, and Surface. In 2011–12, he received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Lally's been a visiting instructor at UCLA, and an assistant professor at Rice School of Architecture before recently joining the University of Illinois at Chicago's School of Architecture as assistant professor in 2009. He is coeditor and a contributor to Softspace: From a Representation of Form to a Simulation of Space (Routledge, 2007), and most recently, the guest editor for the AD Journal issue Energies: New Material Boundaries (Wiley Press, 2009).