A Sydney firm is part of the international team creating a digital light sculpture funded entirely by public donations.
The landmark structure, to commemorate the London 2012 Olympics, will be cloud of inflatable, light-emitting spheres that will be visible from all over London.
Arup is providing engineering expertise, with Dan Hill and Heico Schepers from the Sydney office involved in the project. The team also includes Italian architects Carlo Ratti and Walter Nicolino, along with British architect Alex Haw.
The size of the cloud will evolve based on the value of contributions gathered by a global ‘cloudraising’ effort, supported by digital platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
“Our main idea is to apply to architecture some of the distributed processes that are currently revolutionizing the digital world,” Professor Ratti said. “For instance, we would like the cloud to become a symbol of global ownership built through a bottom up fundraising effort.”
The experience will be both physical and visceral, senior consultant at Arup, Dan Hill, said.
Moving inside the cloud will be like floating inside a three-dimensional display, animated by information feeds that could include energy use, spectator numbers, decibel levels, medal updates, transport patterns, mobile phone activity, internet traffic, and others. "The cloud develops our ongoing interest in the idea of the 'civic-scale smart meter', acting as a real-time feedback loop on collective urban activity," Hill said.
“[It’s] all about altitude, atmosphere, and exposure to the climate,” Hill said. “Yet it is also digital, virtual and electronic; it is skin threaded with an addressable 3D matrix of LED pixels, alive to the touch, rippling in response to data and presence. As people climb the cloud and survey the city through these veils of glowing data, augmented reality interfaces overlay multimedia visualisations onto the cloud’s view of London.”
The cloud will also be a collective energy harvesting effort. People can choose to ascend the cloud by foot or bicycle. The lifts that bring people back down have regenerative braking systems similar to those in hybrid cars that generate electricity.
The Cloud was initially designed for the 2012 Olympic Park, although other sites in London are also currently being explored. The team states that no public funding will be required. "We can build our Cloud with 5 million pounds or 50 million," says team member Walter Nicolino. "The flexibility of the structural system will allow us to tune the size of the Cloud to the level of funding that is reached."
Other members of the team include artist Tomas Saraceno, digital designer Alex Haw, lightweight-structures expert Joerg Schleich, landscape architects Agence Ter and Google. Those advising the team include writer Umberto Eco and and MIT professor and artist Antoni Muntadas.
