Cloudscapes (2010), Transsolar and Tetsuo Konda Architects

The Venice Architectural Bienale has a long history of showcasing innovative, thought provoking design and the Arsenale is a ideal venue to experience it.  Once the largest industrial complex before the Industrial Revolution, in the 16th century the assembly line system was so efficient that it is said they could complete the manufacture of a ship in one day. (I won’t go into the number of trees required to feed this system throughout the centuries…)

The exhibition space of the Corderie, built in 1303 and then rebuilt between 1576 and 1585, covers a 6400 square meter surface that includes nearly 10 meter high ceilings, a magnitude that allows for a range of installations in the 2010 Bienale themed “People Meet in Architecture”.

Cloudscapes is an aerie (and slightly eerie) example of the possibilities.  

With a fluidly arching walkway, similar to that used in the Tallinn, Estonia installation A Path in the Forest, visitors are invited into the dream like atmosphere of walking through a nephological landscape.  Paths appear and disappear.  Other people are experienced as blurred smudges of color and movement. Made up of droplets of water in the air, the cloud is like a living thing, dynamic, ever changing.  Light and people pass through the water vapor, creating a shifting sense of color.

The piece offers a world view usually reserved for mountaineers, to pierce the cloud cover and emerge into  the rarefied air.  The cloud layer opens and closes around the moving solid bodies, truly creating an atmosphere where people and architectural space coincide.