Digital Cloud Inspires Physical One Proposed for London Skies
Normally when we speak of "the cloud," we're talking about intangible bits and bytes stored on the Web. That digital cloud has inspired the design of the very much tangible The Cloud, one of the finalists in a competition to build a tourist attraction in London's planned 2012 Olympic Village. The Cloud was designed by an international team of architects, scientists, and artists, including people from Google and MIT. The proposed structure would consist primarily of bubbles -- constructed of an advanced plastic called Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, interconnected, and resting atop a series of 400-foot-tall towers.
Of course, if this design ended with space-age plastics, you wouldn't be seeing it on Switched. The ambitions for the design are lofty enough to live up to its heavenly name. The spheres would serve as an observation deck, while the walls would be used to project highlights from the games, results and scores from events, and information about the city (provided by Google). Projected information would serve as a tribute to the digital cloud of data that inspired the design of the structure.
The Cloud also earns its green cred by being a zero-emissions building. The monument to the Internet age will primarily pull power from solar cells, both on the ground and embedded in the walls of the bubbles. It will also draw electricity from mini-hydroelectric generators pushed by rain and waste water, as well as from elevators' regenerative brakes (similar to those of a Prius).
However, the most innovative part of the Cloud might be its financial, rather than structural, blueprint. In lieu of relying on large private investors and government funding, the Cloud will be funded by micro-donations from people around the globe. A site has been set up, raisethecloud.org, where anyone will be able to go and make a small donation (generally under $10) to help fund what has been described as a "sculptural spectacle" by a senior curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art. The design of the building will evolve with the amount of money available to the construction team. One of the architects, Carlo Ratti, told the BBC, "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."
It will be some time before we know if the Cloud will indeed be built, and it still has to beat back a few other competitors for the prize of becoming the centerpiece of the Olympic Village. But we're crossing our fingers that this monument to the decentralized nature of the Internet and to the power of crowd-sourcing finds itself "floating" above the East End of London in time for the 2012 games. [From: The BBC and RaisetheCloud.org]
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