This is the only building I’ve ever been able to feel from kilometers away. Disassembled only after a short life, the Blur Building by Diller+Scofidio is a project I was fortunate enough to visit in person and one that for me perhaps folded my ’storm chaser’ interests into my design visions.
Constructed for the Swiss Expo 02, the Blur Building was always planned as a temporary structure located on the shores of Lake Neuchatel in the city of Yverdon-les-Bains. Situated amongst a larger expo site, the building was to respond to the overall theme of “The Universe and I” and small pavilions dealing with sensuality and sexuality. The entire site was visualized as a blending of nature and artifice. Another perfectly clear example that I cannot dismiss from this series.
To Diller + Scofido, the building is the Cloud, which is ultimately pure atmosphere. Created from filtered water directly from the lake this mist is a new material for construction. It creates a visible and tactile space, although its definition of beginning and end is completely, and appropriately, a blur. Intersestingly In their compiled and published field note book, Diller + Scofidio named their project “Blur: the Making of Nothing.” It is exactly that idea of making, or planning nothing that struck me as a valuable research for a method of design.
In actuality, one way to look at the results of the vapor, or cloud that was being produced in the building was to truly plan the variables, and observe the results. In this design, an interaction occurs between the variables of the water vapor created through mist nozzles and the actual greater atmospheric conditions of the lake and surrounding areas, be it wind, rainy or humid. With such a dynamic set of interactions, completely predicting or controlling the conditions of the space was unobtainable. However, such variance was expected, noted, and celebrated. All the variables together derive a constant state of flux for the cloud. The system had its own meteorological station that would constantly analyze the weather conditions and regulate the water pressure going to each of 22 zones of nozzles to ensure the creation of evenly dispersed fine water droplets throughout the structure. Once airborne however, all of the other factors of the atmosphere,
for instance the wind, would begin to interact with the mist.
Over time, the effects basic weather changes could be noted, although never fully predicted. For instance, when the water was warmer than the air, a mushroom cloud formed. High winds would create a long trailing edge while calm conditions created a slowly diffusing mass in all directions.
It was certainly one experience to have been on the platform. Walking around ‘a-mist’ that formulated the cloud from the 31,400 spray nozzles collecting a redistributing the lake water. It was another whole experience stay at the hotel further down the shore from the project and watch it throughout the day and night, registering the atmospheric conditions through its behaviors and as it drifted towards you, some how feel as if you were still in that building.
