Angkor Wat - City as Cosmos

Angkor Wat composes a monumental reality of scales bridging the world of the human to the cosmos. Built on Asian traditions, it borrows from Hindu and Buddhist beliefs and is in honor of the god Vishnu. As the preserver of the Universe, the temple bridges the preservation of the cosmos with the preservation of the people. The large Baray system sustains life and is the spiritual representation of the seas surrounding Mount Meru, font of the Hindu cosmos. The massive scale challenges how axial and spatial composition could be grasped by a human, but through changes in plan and form, the scale becomes vast. Does human perception then jump to the scale of the cosmos? What would living be like in a place of such magnitude?