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First Light Pavilion
By : Casson Mann
GRANDS PRIX DU DESIGN – 16th edition
Discipline : Interior Design
Categories : Culture, Sport & Leisure / Museum & Gallery : Gold Certification
Casson Mann created the permanent exhibition for the First Light Pavilion, a purpose-built visitor centre at Jodrell Bank Observatory, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Cheshire, England.
The fully immersive and interactive exhibition presents the human story of Jodrell Bank, the world’s first radio astronomy site and home to the radio telescope that detected quasars, pulsars, black holes, and the rocket path of Sputnik 1. Casson Mann’s innovative design does justice to a story of human ingenuity and creativity – the First Light Pavilion delivers science, but in a poetic and original way.
Casson Mann’s most singular design move was to use the huge dish panels of the 1957 Lovell Telescope as the fabric of the exhibition. As the most important material evidence of the Jodrell Bank story, the telescope panels provide a structure for the exhibition, both physically and narratively. Visitors come into direct contact with the authentic metal panels that ‘looked’ towards the heavens and were touched by cosmic rays and ‘space dust.’
Our circular array of heavily patinated dish panels becomes an exploded digital canvas—a dynamic projection surface for multimedia. Digital projections include bicycles used by Jodrell scientists, astronomical charts overlaid with radio maps (showing constellations among the contours that visualise radio waves), and a Sputnik that flies across the entire array of panels. In this way, the history the telescope was witness to plays out across its surface.
Carefully choreographed displays work on a macro and micro level. Each huge dish panel demarcates a historical ‘chapter’, containing stories at a human scale—from the pioneering days of radio astronomy to Cold War-era Jodrell Bank, and its cultural legacy today. Together, they bring to life the inspiring story of how this team in the Cheshire countryside discovered extraordinary phenomena outside of human vision.
Casson Mann’s exceptional vision for the interior inspired the design of the building itself. Complementing the circular array of dish panels in the exhibition, the architect team designed a circular building in dialogue with the site’s heritage and cosmic mission—an inverted dome of the same 76m (249ft) diameter as the Lovell Telescope.
Collaboration
