Once in a while one has to lift the gaze from the alleys and streets and set the eyes higher for a bigger view. Why not as big as the entire universe?

The Tuesday announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics seemed like a good occasion to do takes this view, because it was widely expected to go to a team that used a very practical and beautifully architectural idea to prove Einstein's highly theoretical concept of gravitational waves. Exactly 100 years ago Einstein also cautioned that those waves could never be experimentally proven. Well, he was wrong, but so were those who were sure the proof what get the Nobel Prize.

Ligo, precision architecture

This is about the celebration of two pieces of architecture worth $505 million that had broken ground in 1994 and had to overcome a bunch of  scientific, financial and congressional hurdles until they were positioned as a perfect L each 2.5 miles (4km) long.

And not only is this a very large piece of symmetrical architecture, it also comes in duplicate. For scientific reasons and also for nice geopolitical balance, the facilities are a set of identical twins working in unison as a single “observatory”: one in Hanford in southeastern Washington State and the other in rural Livingston, Louisiana, collaboratively operated between CalTech and MIT. Both facilities also display symmetry a classic element of architecture. 

The architecture that so perfectly represents a set of x and y coordinates is known in scientific circles as LIGO, or Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.