ABOUT TEAM STUDENTS BRIEFS ADMISSION
COSMOS, WORLD, ARCHITECTURE
Studio Jacob WS25/26
We would typically make distinctions between buildings, worlds and cosmos. We imagine them at different scales, that they are different categories of thing. But this has not always been the case. In the Bible and other cultures of the ancient Near East (Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Sumer, etc.), the world was thought of as a building, a habitable space for humans and other creatures to live in.
There are other situations where buildings have been imagined as worlds (eg A Journey Around My Room a 1794 book by Xavier de Maistre). In this exercise we are deliberately blurring the boundary between distinctions of architecture and cosmos. We are in a zone of ‘constructive ambiguity’ where things can be both simultaneously. This is a conceptual ‘training’ for the project that will follow that will explore an architecture that is a whole world: The Cosmic Tower.