Sunday, November 23, 2003

Wired 8.02: Making It Morph: "After thinking through various structures - some buoyant, some partially submerged - Diller Scofidio hit on fog, which was not only a local phenomenon but a dynamic one. To test the possibility, the architects rented a barge on Lake Neuchâtel and held a fog-off to test the nozzles of three companies. According to Scofidio, they chose the one that produced 'the densest, richest fog.' By last fall, they'd finished the structural engineering. The cloud building is an open-air system of glass-and-steel walkways enveloped in a thick haze created by 12,500 high-pressure jets. A built-in weather station controls the fog system: Measuring wind speed and direction, temperature, and humidity, it then sends the appropriate fog-demand signals to the 13 output zones."