Parts per Milliion is an Institute for Cosmology and the Arts, set in Kielder, which seeks to honour cosmology’s effort to investigate the origins of matter, and architecturally explores the idea of sound and music being matter’s animating principle; its source of vibrance.

On a subtextual level, the project is a reframing of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice which explores cosmology and architecture’s poetic potential to place the human element amidst the vastness of the subject matter. The design methodology which combines spatial design, musical composition and filmmaking navigated cosmological and mythological terrain to generate an unfamiliar architectural / aesthetic vocabulary.

Tapping into an existing culture of cosmological thought in Kielder, with Kielder Observatory and Turrell’s Skyspace a stone’s throw away, the project’s hybrid pogramme stages a collision of empirical and non-empirical thought to theatrically interrogate scientific architectural convention. Urging collaborative research, private studies or sacristies; production spaces; Incubators; unified by shared study, social, and production spaces, circulation and ancillary amenities hope to furnish boot-on-the-ground scientific researchers and resident artists with an evocative intellectual and creative home. An Altar, Auditorium, Lecture Hall, and Visitor’s Centre complete with acoustic planetaria provide venue for the building’s intellectual content to become more than the reserve of its occupants; such that its cultural output might stir an incumbent generation of storytellers and cosmologists.

A 1.1km elevator journey below the surface, researchers inch towards the conclusive detection of dark matter in an underground laboratory whose depth hushes background radiation to a whisper – 1/1,000,000 of surface levels.

Life beyond practical use is scarcely expressed in scientific architectures. Accordingly, The project constitutes elements intended to last no longer than practically necessary amongst elements intended to endure indefinitely - pursuing the technical co-representation of disparate lifespans within a piece of architecture; one equipped to undergo dramatic programmatic and physical transformations.

Architecture was imagined as a tuned musical instrument - otherwise practical considerations became opportunities for musical expression. Mediating qualitative extremes, a resonant crypt percussive rainwater capture system fit into a broader, branching acoustic orchestration.