Madison Cook's Foundation Design Lab "Eclipse Chapels" Exhibition

Madison Cook’s Foundation Design Lab recently shared their Eclipse Chapels in the Cowgill Lobby. This semester, the lab has been discovering solar geometry and its potential to make space. Specifically, they’ve been learning how to craft light through a process of drafting solar angles in plan (azimuth angles) and section (altitude angles). For the partial solar eclipse - which was 88.88% visible in Blacksburg on April 8 - the students prepared pin-hole instruments that could observe the moon passing between the sun and the earth. Despite cloudy conditions, they still gathered to experience the historic cosmic event. To memorialize the eclipse, the lab spent the rest of their semester developing architectural ideas for an “Eclipse Chapel”. This program encouraged students to continue their pursuits of form and space while imagining sacred moments for experiences with light. They wondered about the scales of these experiences from the collective to the intimate. The lab constructed a broad range of schemes and expanded their curiosities about time, circulation, scale, proportion, color, and atmosphere.