EVOLUTION

The history of Olympics and Expos is one of heaviness - of mass and monumentality and conspicuous expenditure on immovable objects. Our most extraordinary contemporary feats of engineering are more stealthy, more extensive and more invisible than these traditions of glass and brick and steel: Code rather than Carbon.

FORM

The structure is comprised of a filigree central array of columns - serving as circulation systems dropping from the sky.

PEOPLE

People can choose to ascend to the Cloud by foot or bicycle - gaining the status of everyday Olympians, each individual footstep contributing to a vast collective energy-harvesting effort.

FUNDING

Everyone from around the world will be able to contribute to the Cloud - whether through the admission charges and bodily presence of their visit, or by their contributions towards a particular sphere and their ownership of a single LED, helping to keep the lamp of London aflame.

ENVIRONMENT

The Cloud addresses our twin attention spans of the short-term desire for information and stimulation, and our growing longer-term consciousness about our impact on the future, and our productive role within a larger harmonious ecology. It provides two resources - energy and data - harvesting both the natural ecosystem and humanity's complementary cyber-sphere, fusing the two.

INFORMATION

Like all tell-tale signs of brooding weather, the Cloud is a display system. It is both screen and barometer, archive and sensor, past and future. The patterns of its animated skins offer a civic-scale smart-meter for London as a whole, sign-posting particular events, transport patterns, weather forecasts, timetables, and footage either real-time or decades old. Its movements can reveal the movement of both the crowds below and those within its structure - a space alive to the touch, an aerial ecology.