Sky Pillar – Come & Check it Out!

Over the last two years, Sky Pillar, has emerged as a unique art and science collaboration, between Dalhousie School of Architecture, members of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Deanery. It has come together in beautiful ways and we are keen to share it! Sky Pillar is a solar noon alignment structure that will be used to translate celestial events from sky to landscape, and landscape to sky.

Sky Pillar will cast a shadow due North everyday at solar noon, the point at which the sun is highest in the sky on a given day. This shadow length will change throughout the year, falling shortest at summer solstice and longest at winter solstice. Through understanding the way in which shadows fall knowledge of the relationship between sun angles, seasons and celestial events begins to emerge. There will be landscape features installed around Sky Pillar that help to orient viewers to different celestial events, like summer solstice sunrise and sunrise on September 1st, The Deanery’s birthday.

The overarching organization of the landscape features comes from the idea of an orrery, which offers a scaled model of the solar system. Positioning Sky Pillar as the central point, or the Sun, orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars can be walked which offer an embodied understanding of scale within the solar system. Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune fall within the forested boundaries of The Deanery property.

This demonstrator project comes out of a multi-year design build collaboration between MBE Labs and The Deanery Project and Dalhousie.

Sky Pillar welcomes you day or night!

Material

The material that will be demonstrated in Sky Pillar is a biochar concrete, a carbon sequestering composite. The biochar used in early material explorations was harvested from an invasive knotweed patch onsite at The Deanery. Material properties of the various ratios of biochar to concrete, permeability, pH and compressive strength, are being analyzed.