| Clouds may have silver linings, but
even the sunniest of us seldom glimpse them on foot. The marvelous Blur Building
that hovers above the lake of Yverdon les Bains in Switzerland provides such an
opportunity. It gives anyone who has ever wanted to step into the clouds they
watch from the airplane window a chance to realize their dream. Visitors wear
waterproof ponchos before setting off along a walkway above the lake that takes
them into the foggy atmosphere of the cloud. The experience of physical forms
blurring before your eyes as you enter the cloud is both disorientating and
liberating. However firmly your feet are planted on the floor, it is hard to
escape the sensation of floating. On the upper deck of this spaceship-shaped
structure, the Angel Bar, a translucent counter lit in tones of aqueous blue,
beckons with a dozen different kinds of mineral water. To enter this sublime building situated in the landscape of the Swiss Alps feels like walking into a poem—it is part of nature but removed from reality, Its architects, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio of New York, designed it as a pavilion for the Swiss Expo 2002 in the Three Lakes region of Switzerland, an hour's train ride from Geneva, which features a series of exhibits on the lakes. The Blur Building is easily the most successful. Indeed, you can skip the rest of the Expo—a Swiss kitsch version of Britain's Millennium Dome—and head straight for the cloud, which is there until the end of October. The architects asked themselves what was the ideal material for building on a lake and decided on water itself.' the element of the lake, the snow. the rivers and the mist above it. They wanted to play on and lay bare the notion of a world's fair pavilion by creating an ethereal ghost of one in which there is nothing to see. The result is a refuge from the surveillance cameras and high-definition images of our everyday world—a particular tease in Switzerland, where clarity and precision are so prized. (Anti- architecture or not, the Blur Building cost a cool $7.5 million.) Out-of-the-box thinking is a trademark of Diller+Scofidio. a husband-and-wife team of architecture professors who became the first architects to win a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 1999. Although they have built very little, they are interested in the social experience of architecture, in challenging people's ideas about buildings. They treat architecture as an analytical art form that combines other disciplines, such as visual art and photography, dance and theatre. To realize its Utopian poetry, the Blur Building has to be technologically state-of-the-art. Water from the lake is pumped through 32.000 fog nozzles positioned throughout the skeleton-like stainless steel structure; so the building does not just look like a cloud on the outside, it feels like a cloud on the inside. And while the 300-foot-wide platform can accommodate up to 400 people, visitors vanish from each other in the mist at about five paces, so you really can wander lonely as a cloud. Wordsworth must be smiling. |