The Black Hole

Justine Poulin

Location: Vienna

Floor Area:

Laboratories 1040 m2

Offices 1050 m2

Lecture‘s Room 200 m2

Cafeteria 200 m2

Library 280 m2

Designing an extra-terrestrial sample receiving and curation facility that requires to be operational within a decade requires a great deal of fore thought. The building must be able to face technical modulations, but more importantly, it must propose a design that will bridge time and current concerns. In the future, space discoveries may completely change the way we perceive and experience life. The concept of a black hole recalls this possibility. Its strong gravitational field attracts object to a center where the gravity is so strong that it distorts the four dimensions, including time, that constitute the basis of human knowledge. This unfolding of space brings up new perspectives and questions that are still not completely reachable yet. The shape of the building interprets the four dimensions’ distortion, as its interior space freely unfolds around an open hole, the center of attraction for the building. Everything gravitates around it, and shapes, fairly orthogonal on the edges of the building, merge into each other as they get closer to the center. This building is a celebration of lifechanging discoveries. Entering it, is like entering a world that is still undefined, a world that, with the help of the scientists, has the potential to be slowly revealed before our eyes.

Conceptual Approach

The interior shaping of the building interprets the black hole‘s effect once applied to three dimensional plans. As a blanket that gets pulled down from one point, the gravitational fields attracts central points, pushing other masses away, in an attraction/repulsion relationship. The mass displacement created by multiple attraction points suggests cavities, walls, and floors that were the starting point of designing this building’s massing.