I’m way too busy to blog this properly, but you must read about this. There is a new project from an international team of architects and designers to create a giant floating connected and publicly accessible cloud in the London skies. The project will be sponsored on a donation basis, which has some chances of failing, but then again, could inspire some rich pockets if they get sufficiently inspired by it.
The construction would include 120m- (400ft-) tall mesh towers and a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that can be used to display images and data. The Cloud, as it is known, would also be used an observation deck and park.
Its designers plan to raise the funds to build it by asking for micro-donations from millions of people.”It’s really about people coming together to raise the Cloud,” Carlo Ratti, one of the architects behind the design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told BBC News. “We can build our Cloud with £5m or £50m. The flexibility of the structural system will allow us to tune the size of the Cloud to the level of funding that is reached.”
‘Data streams’
The Cloud was shortlisted in a competition set-up by London Mayor Boris Johnson. The structure draws on work by artist Tomas Saraceno, a German-based designer who has previously shown off huge inflatable sculptures.
It is envisaged that the spheres would be made of a plastic known as Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE), the material used to build the Beijing Aquatic Centre. The different spheres would act as structural elements, habitable spaces, decoration and LCD screens on which data could be projected.
“We could provide a custom feed of…searches made by Londoners during the Olympics to give a real time ‘barometer’ of the city’s interests and mood,” said Google, one of the supporters of the project, which has also offered to provide the information feeds.Ramps, stairs and lifts would carry people to the top of the structure to look out over the city.
‘Zero power’
The inflatable elements of the building would sit on top slender, lightweight towers, stabilised by a net of metal cables. Damping technology, similar to that used in Japanese skyscrapers to resist earthquakes, would prevent the towers being buffeted by the wind.
The structure would also be used to harvest all the energy it produces according to Professor Ratti. “It would be a zero power cloud,” he said. As well as solar cells on the ground and inside some of the spheres, the lifts would use regenerative braking, similar to that in some hybrid cars. That way, the designers say, potential energy from visitors to the top of the tower can be harnessed into useful electricity.
The team have launched a fundraising website called raisethecloud.org and are now looking for a site for the tower.
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