Building Nothing
When asked to design an exhibition pavilion for the Swiss Expo 2002, the New York studio Diller & Scofidio came with a most unlikely solution: making nothing. So they decided, they would create, on the Neuchatel Lake, a “formless, massless, colorless, weightless, odorless, scaleless, featureless, meaningless” construction. From the early sketch, envisioning a cloudlike mass suspended above the lake surface, the “blur pavilion” materialized as a suspended platform shrouded in a perpetual man-made fog, which can host up to 400 visitors. Accessible from the shore, via a 400 foot long walkway, this football-field sized structure, hovered 75 foot above the water’s surface due to the 4 columns sitting on piles sunk deep beneath the water. The pavilion is actually made of filtered lake water shot as a fine mist, creating an artificial cloud that measures 300 feet wide by 200 feet deep and 65 feet high. A built-in weather station controls the fog output adapting to the shifting climate conditions (temperature, humidity, wind, direction, wind speed).
One of the disappointments of this project was the omission of an integrated media solution: smart raincoats. Prior to entering “the cloud” each visitor would have been asked to respond to a character profile questionnaire. Using tracking and location technologies, each visitor’s position could have been identified and their character profiles compared to any other visitor.
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