The Big Bang in T³ Gowdy Cosmological Models

We establish a formal relationship between stationary axisymmetric spacetimes and $T^3$ Gowdy cosmological models which allows us to derive several preliminary results about the generation of exact cosmological solutions and their possible behavior near the initial singularity. In particular, we argue that it is possible to generate a Gowdy model from its values at the singularity and that this could be used to construct cosmological solutions with any desired spatial behavior at the Big Bang.