Utrecht-based design firm Tinker imagineers will develop two major interiors for CERN’s new visitor center, the Science Gateway in Geneva. The gateway should be ready by the end of 2022.
This was announced on Thursday. In collaboration with other parties, the agency will create a space about the history of the universe, and one about the unsolved mysteries in physics. Visitors will be offered a total experience, through displays and objects, virtual reality, images and sound.
In the Back to the Big Bang space, visitors look back in time from star systems to quarks. ‘To the edge of what we know,’ Tinker said in a press release. ‘That’s where, at the edge of our knowledge, CERN research plays an important role.’
The second space is titled Into the Future. There, it deals with five big questions: gravity, extra dimensions, dark matter, antimatter and the vacuum. The interactive exhibit will also include a number of artworks inspired by the mysteries discussed.
The Science Gateway is a center of science education and culture with the goal of getting younger generations excited about science. The center will be a building by architect Renzo Piano that extends in two huge tubes across the main road next to CERN, with the striking CERN Globe on the other side.
The building will house exhibitions and laboratories for young people, as well as a large amphitheater for events with scientists and non-scientists. “A meeting place between science and the public,” architect Piano calls it.