CENTER FOR COSMOLOGY (c4c)
2007
Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA
Cosmology is ever-complexifying as a confluence of ideas from historical precedents, belief-systems, and non-scientific disciplines enrich the discourse. Yet, as cosmologist Martin Rees noted, cosmology is still about what we do not know. Architecture becomes a part of experiment to encourage collaborations between physicists and other persons in search of the Truth.
I propose the Center for Cosmology on the peak of Mount Mauna Kea, the White Mountain; a place for fellowship research and intense interdisciplinary interaction. It is deeply rooted in the conviction that the convergence of scientific and non-scientific cosmological ideas can enrich the contemporary discourse on the origins, mechanics, and eventualities of the Universe. The ineffable object engaged with the landscape refuses any totalizing system to null didactic transmittance of formal and spatial experiences. Rather this project embraces ambiguity, loss, multivalence, mystery and serendipity. That is not a Post-Modern proposal, nor does it aspire to be concretized in any epochs. C4C is a reflection of contemporaneity in which mystery and mythology are strange bedfellows of scientific discipline that can only deduce this trans-substantial realm by positivistic means.
The external monolith, conceived as a polygonal manifestation of ten-dimensional P-Branes Theory, is a deceiving shell that barely contains the palimpsest of ramps and shafts that is ready to burst out of this confinement. These ramps compose a circulatory procession that is based on what Michel Serres calls Goose’s Game, or jeu de l’ioe. The paths that circumnavigate the center inscribes alignments of sides with certain celestial events and analytical consideration of Blaise Pascal’s Mystic Hexagrams. The static form morphs as one perambulates along this path, once again denying any sort of humanistic singular focus and in its place exacts multiplicity of centers.
How can anybody conceive of “Architecture of Cosmology”? I am reminded of what Victor Hugo said, and later recorded in Le Promontoire du Songe, upon arriving at his friend’s observatory outside Paris: “If Nothing has a Form, it would be this.”
This quote strikes me for three reasons:
One; How can this Nothing have a Form?
Two; If Nothing has a Form, then is it not Something?
Three; If a Form can be Nothing, then does Form really exist?
What Victor Hugo calls Nothing is what appears to be the great void of universe. However, with all of its apparent emptiness, there are unfathomable number of stars and planets. Thus the vectors and points to human eyes, what had been referred to as the firmament, this Nothingness, does in fact have a Form all constantly rotating one against one another. Yet, even these forms are questionable. As Einstein speculated in his General Relativity Theory, the space and time have shape. Light, which has temporal dimension and spatial consequences, is bent by masses until it reaches a receptacle media. The masses of celestial objects millions of light-years away exert gravitational refraction of light, thus even a minutest of angle of incident can cause an enormous shift. With these conditions, what we see are still illusions, ever-shifting simulacra of reality. There lies existential dilemma of some stars billions of light-years away that may have been extinguish by supernova, collision or merely moving on to the next step of star life. We are seeing the past at an astronomical scale. If architecture is to be an analogy to this seeming antimony of reason, then emphasis must be placed on multifarious dialectics.