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What Micro Structure Needs Furniture When it's Got a Cloud?

By Amy Schellenbaum

Apparently manufacturing clouds inside interiors is now becoming a thing. Besides the work of Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde, who engineers puffs of cloud inside Beaux Arts buildings and abandoned castles-turned-military-hospitals, there is Japanese studio Tetsuo Kondo Architects, which recently teamed up with the engineers at Transsolar to create a cloud inside a glass box over at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. This cloud, more a foggy marine layer type than the cottony cumulonimbus variety Smilde creates, is made by pumping three types of air into the box. On the bottom: cold, dry air; the middle: hot, wet air; and the top: hot, dry air. The layers create a cloud that bisects the box, and a single set of stairs allows visitors to climb through it.

From the architect:

When you climb beyond the clouds to reach the top, the museum,?the surrounding buildings, and the sky stretch out above the clouds. The edges of the clouds are sharp yet soft, and always in motion. Their color, density and brightness are constantly changing in tune with the weather and time of day. The temperature and humidity inside the container are controlled to keep the clouds at their designed height.

· Cloudscapes at MOT by Tetsuo Kondo Architects and Transsolar [Dezeen]
· Genius Artist-Inventor Puts Actual Clouds Inside Great Halls [Curbed National]

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