THE VAGRANT LIGHT OF STARS

The Einstein Tomb project was created as a memorial to the life and work of Albert Einstein, a symbolic structure in the same spirit as Boullee’s Cenotaph to Isaac Newton. Because the self-effacing Einstein—who transformed physics as much as Newton before him—explicitly stated that after his death he wanted no such memorial as a site of veneration, I designed it to be launched into deep space, traveling on a beam of light, never to be seen in terrestrial space and time. However, owing to the gravity-warped structure of space (which Einstein’s greatest work—his theory of gravitation—described) it would return to Earth in sidereal time, an infinite number of times, or at least until the end of time and space at the death of the universe.

This project was created for and published as number six in the Pamphlet Architecture series, which was begun by Steven Holl and William Stout, and is now in the able hands of the Princeton Architectural Press.

It was presented with some remarks of mine at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, on Saturday, September 26, at a book-launch event for Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG book, in which it appears.

LW