Architects, engineers and artists have collaborated to propose a highly ambitious structure called the Cloud – which is intended to serve as both a monument and a real-time digital display for the London 2012 Olympics.
The size of the cloud will depend on the level of funding that is received; as it is intended that the structure will be built with money raised only through donations, and could be completed with as little as £5m or as much as £50m – and as you can see by the images that have been released, the structure could well end up dwarfing the stadium as well as other well known London landmarks including the London Eye.
The landmark structure will create a spatial, three-dimensional display that will be seen from all over London and fed by real-time information from all over the world. As an updated, high-tech version of the traditional observation deck, the Cloud engages visitors to participate in its creation with a vast collective energy-harvesting effort and invites everyone around the world to contribute to the Cloud by sponsoring an LED that will transmit messages.
The design team behind this revolutionary structure includes project leader and head of the MIT SENSEable Cities Laboratory Carlo Ratti; artist Tomas Saraceno; digital designer Alex Haw; lightweight-structures expert Joerg Schleich; the companies Arup, Agence Ter, and Google; and team advisers writer Umberto Eco and artist Antoni Muntadas.
Ratti calls this project “a new form of collective expression and experience and an updated symbol of our dawning age: code rather than carbon.” A true exercise in sustainability, this project is intended to reach carbon neutrality. Alex Haw explains that the Cloud will be a huge collective energy-harvesting effort. “People can choose to ascend the Cloud on foot or bicycle; the energy that it would take to descend the Cloud is converted, on the way down, into electricity through elevators with regenerative braking, similar to those that are present in hybrid cars,” he says. “The people’s energy, coupled with solar energy collected through on-site and off-site photovoltaic cells and various energy saving strategies will allow us to reach carbon neutrality, whereby the Cloud produces all the energy it uses.”
Joerg Schleich adds, “Our achievement is the high degree of transparency, the minimal use of material, and the vast volume created by the sphere—all on exceedingly slender columns, stabilized by a cable net.”
Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is yet to decide whether or not this proposal will be chosen. If it is, groups set up on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter, as well as advertising provided by Google on their search results and on their YouTube website will help to support the global ‘cloud raising’ effort.
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