02.03.2012

AXIS Mundi

Axis Mundi - long building

The image that inspired this project is Max Ernst’s The Whole City, which portrays a man-made landscape that tends toward the heavens. Archimedes was another source – he once said “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” Axis Mundi does this, it moves the world by extruding it into the lever itself. The project draws also on the utopic megastructures of the 1960s with their epic, poetic creations, and the evolutionary structures of the Metabolists. Axis Mundi is a living sky-scraper, propelling human life into space.

Axis Mundi is a cosmic body. It is an ever-extending space – one which can carry on building onto itself ad infinitum. This structure is a connection; a vector and a containing space; it is a metabolistic structure which grows organically as it extends. It is landscape contained – forests and cities follow one another along the length of the building. Axis Mundi is a linear expression of our planet.

Axis Mundi extends from the earth’s surface and reaches towards the moon as the nearest mass to which it can be pinned for stability. The moon is a fixing point for the structure. The moon and the earth spin and orbit in such a way that the same facet of the moon is always visible from earth. By connecting the earth with its satellite at our planet’s north pole using a rotating super-rod, Axis Mundi extends into space, providing an extension to the earth.

The modulating line between the earth’s north pole and the moon’s north pole is the site of the building. Axis Mundi is fixed to the earth but has a sliding attachment to the moon which accounts for the 5° degree tilt with respect to its orbit. (This tilt means that the moon nods back and forth as it circumnavigates the earth; the north and south poles tilt toward the earth in alternation.)