Harvard Graduate School of Design

10¹⁰ Years: A Cosmographic Atlas of Collapsed Scales by Dana Barale (MDes, Narratives ’26) @danarch explores the relationship between architecture, scientific observation, and the vast scales of the universe. Developed under instructor Marina Otero Verzier, the project uses speculative instruments and spatial interventions to investigate how we perceive phenomena beyond human scales of space and time.

Barale investigates Super-Kamiokande, a neutrino observatory buried one kilometer beneath a mountain in Japan, as an architecture that enables inquiries into the most abstract questions of the universe. Through a series of speculative instruments, visual interventions, and scalar tests, the project examines how subatomic, biological, architectural, geological, and cosmological scales become entangled within systems of detection under extreme temporality. Conceived as an atlas, the installation assembles fragmented interfaces through which deep cosmic pasts, elemental media, and posthuman regimes of perception become rendered into spatial encounters that mirrors the multi-scalar condition of the detector.