  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.
