Thecloud Project

THE CLOUD The Cloud / broadcasting the climate of humanity

Tomas Saraceno - Artworks

“Without the fog, London wouldn’t be a beautiful city” Claude Monet writing to his wife, Alice, during one of his long visits to England. Olympic & Expo structures – with their mute mass, their ponderous monumentality, and their conspicuous expenditure on immovable objects – are outmoded. Our proposal is as light as air itself – a tribute to a digital age of bits and atoms beyond the antiquity of steel and glass – a structure which reveals the connected networks of a common humanity fuelling the Olympics, their 2012 host city, and the world itself. The Cloud proposes a new form of monument – a new form of collective expression and experience, and an updated symbol of our dawning age. It proposes an entirely new form of observation deck, high above the Olympics – one from which one can not only see the whole of London, but the whole of the world, immersed in the euphoric gusts of weather and world data. It offers London’s highest park and an immersion within both our great clouded skies and the cosmos of our dataworlds – as well as a live information system transmitting data and imagery from around the city and the world. It presents the perfect Olympic symbol – a million unbounded particles contributing briefly towards a vast, beautiful, constantly-fluctuating whole. London, with its diversity, internationalism and tolerance, unites countries; the Cloud unites all people.

2500 B.C. / Pyramids

1851 A.D. / Crystal Palace

1890 A.D. / Steel Era

2008 A.D. / Beijing Olympic Stadium

2012 A.D. / The Cloud / Lifting Humanity

2012 A.D. / The Cloud / Lifting Humanity

Site Plan

Cloud Ecology People. People are the Cloud - its principal particulate. Seen from afar, their silhouettes animate its transparency. They help its construction through a global, innovative fundraising process (or ‘cloudraising’). Their gravitational potential energy, accumulated while they rise up to the Cloud, is then collected and transformed into electric energy by three regenerative lifts. This will amount to an estimated total of 20 MWh over the course of the year, covering a substantial fraction of the Cloud’s energy needs. People are also rewarded with the opportunity to influence the Cloud - to contribute to its output and participate in this giant collective self-protrait.

Hot air inflated sphere

Photovoltaic sphere Regenerative lift, converts Regen energy of people who climb energ to the cloud into electricity

Tension rings every 30 Tensio meters help stabilize meter mast the central ce

Inhabitable sphere Walking membrane

Central mast, as in a Centr tensegrity structure, takes tense compression forces all co

Inflatables. Each inflatable has its own air pump that controls air pressure level. All pumps are networked, thus forming a distributed, self-regulating system. Each pump will generate energy by letting air in and out during the daily heating and cooling cycles due to solar radiation. Inflatables on the periphery of the cloud are insulated with nanogel and kept hotter through internal resistors - so that they can float freely in air. Sun. The remaining energy for the Cloud will be produced by thin film photovoltaics printed on inflatable membranes, doubling as solar shading in the summer in order to preserve maximum internal thermal comfort inside. It is expected that this will collect 200 MWh per year, making the Cloud not only zero emission but effectively ‘below-zero emission’ (the Cloud will be a net producer of energy to the East London community). Wind. Wind will play with the cloud and the freely floating inflatables at its periphery. The tower shaft will utilize heat generated and wind pressure differential to develop airflow - like Jörg Schlaich’s solar tower turbines in Spain and Australia. The wind will naturally ventilate the inhabited spaces inside the Cloud during the summer, while they’ll be sealed to maintain internal heat generated by the occupants and the sun during the winter.

Devices

Water. Water is used to generate energy through a series of micro turbines, placed in both the rainwater and black water risers. Rainwater is collected locally - mid-air - by the lattice of cloud spheres, saving on energy requirements for pumping water up from ground level, and serving as a battery for thermal energy storage. Waste water flushed and rainwater drained from the cloud will generate energy as they flow down the risers).

Screens Sounds LEDs Air

Living

Structure

In Tension Element Up Compression Element 1 In-between Compression Element 2

Energy

Photovoltaic Piezometric Membrane >

Cable net, providing tension to horizontal rings tensio ramps and supporting s

10

Sizes

5

15

A

Relations >

Double spiral winding Doub ramp, offering an ramp unprecedented experience unpre and cyclists for people pe rising to the Cloud

B

Overall structural system

Forces Tension

Compression

Structural sphere

PV cells Pneumatic structure with cables Compression element

Shear Force

Air pump

>

C D

Incremental Aggregation

The Cloud: an open source, interactive system Like all tell-tale signs of brooding weather, the Cloud is a display system. It is both screen and barometer, archive and sensor, past and future. The patterns of its animated skins offer a civic-scale smart meter for the Olympic Park and for London as a whole, sign-posting particular events, transport patterns, weather forecasts, timetables and footage which can be real-time or decades old. Its movements can reveal the movement of people below, or even within its structure, detected by hidden sensors a space alive to the touch, an aerial ecology. The Cloud implements a radically new non-cartesian method of spatial display (a suspended field of distributed LED signage) that enables it to be seen from all directions, including from within. It destroys the antique divide between audience and spectacle; the people become the project & projection, watching and learning from themselves, transmuted into light.

The Cloud as a real-time world medal collection board

The Cloud as a real-time London breath