British architecture firm Foster + Partners is responsible for some of world’s the most iconic buildings, including the Gherkin in London, and Hong Kong International Airport. Their latest secret project? The new Apple headquarters in Cupertino.

Xavier De Kestelier heads up the firm’s specialist modelling group: the in-house research team that has a mix of material specialists, mathematicians, aerospace engineers, architects, artists and acousticians who use geometry, computational fluid dynamics and virtual reality to design. Projects the team is working on include buildings in Abu Dhabi, Singapore and on the Moon. "We were asked by the European Space Agency to design a habitation for the Moon," de Kestelier says. "So we teamed up with Alta, a space engineering company and D-Shape, which has the largest 3D printer in the world, both from Italy. The result was an inflatable skeleton structure that can be transported flat-pack style, and robots that can use local materials like moon dust to 3D print a shell around the inflatable, using a bone-like cell structure." What's perhaps even more exciting is how those designs are now influencing buildings intended for Earth.

De Kestelier gave Wired a tour of the firm’s workshops, industrial laboratories and media studioses in Battersea.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK