London to Get 'Digital Cloud' Skyline

An international collaboration of architects, engineers and artists has recently released its plans for the new “digital cloud” that will adorn London's skyline pretty soon. The giant, inflatable structures would essentially float on its support pillars, and would be used primarily for displaying multimedia messages, and for sound transmissions. The structure will also be endowed with a park that will allow it to support people visiting it on a regular basis.

According to the preliminary report, the mesh towers that will support the structure will be about 120 meters (some 400 feet) tall, and will be connected to each other using plastic bubbles, on whose surfaces data and images will be displayed. An observation deck and a park will also be constructed on the structure, which is known simply as The Cloud. It was originally scheduled to be constructed as the main attraction of the Olympic village, but, since then, plans got more serious, so its construction deadline has been pushed back a bit.

“It's really about people coming together to raise the Cloud. We can build our Cloud with £5 million or £ 50 million. The flexibility of the structural system will allow us to tune the size of the Cloud to the level of funding that is reached,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) architect Carlo Ratti, who was also involved in the design stage of the new structures, told the BBC News. The Cloud was also called a “sculptural spectacle” and “a celebration of technology” by the Museum of Modern Art in New York Senior Curator of Architecture and Design, Paola Antonelli.

“Many tall towers have preceded this, but our achievement is the high degree of transparency, the minimal use of material and the vast volume created by the spheres,” the structural engineer behind the towers, Professor Joerg Schleich, explains. All of the energy the cloud will produce will be harvested, and then reused, its designers say. “It would be a zero power cloud,” Professor Ratti adds.