In a physical building–take any building at the college or high school you attended–you have hallways and classrooms. The hallways would symbolize the pathways of thoughts, and the class rooms sets of ideas, say about “evolution” or life after “death”, or about politics.
It may so happen that the hallways need to be jagged sometimes. It may so happen that the walls of the classroom need to be moved in 6″ or out 6″, or to become curved. The ceiling may need to go up, and the floor allowed to form craters and ridges, all to match and mirror new perceptions.
And you need to be able to remove walls, or sometimes, to walk through them. They need to be permeable, even if also self contained, like a cell.
I suppose in important respect your “building” needs to become a living, breathing, reactive animal or organism. It needs to live in the ecosystem of the world of constantly changing and evolving ideas and associated emotional states.
It’s obvious the electron could not have been discovered in a yurt. But I wonder if our thought leaders would be as rigid as they are if they lived in yurts.
I’ve lived in Oxford. I’ve spent time with friends in at least a couple of the colleges, mainly Christ Church and Magdalen. There is a physicality and architectural presence which I suspect is reassuring even to the most ardent atheists and nihilists. There is at least something tangible which FEELS nearly eternal, and certainly lasting.
People like Richard Dawkins live, emotionally, in spaces like that. They provide them with continuity, structure, purpose, and a means of life and living.
They also make them dogmatic, because to lose any of it is to lose all of it, and all of it is all they have.