At this year's Venice Architecture Biennale Tetsou Kondo collaborated with Transsolar's climate engineers to create Cloudscape, an exhibition that filled Venice's Coderie with clouds. "The clouds are created inside the huge 319 meter long space by pumping in three different layers of air - cool and dry at the bottom, warm and humid air in the middle to create the cloud itself and hot and dry at the top to keep the cloud correctly positioned. To enable the viewers to literally touch the clouds, a 4.3 meter high helical ramp has been installed in the centre. The atmospheres above and below the cloud have different qualities of light, temperature, and humidity, separating the spaces by a filter effect. The cloud can be touched, and it can be felt as different microclimatic conditions coincide."All I have to say is everyone else at the Biennale must feel like a%$holes because who can top real clouds!? It's like having super powers. If I could make clouds, I'd put one in my apartment. But in all seriousness, I love the poetic nature of the work-- to bring outside inside on the most literal level to the point where it could be nothing but purely surreal is pretty amazing. It really goes beyond words.
The Venice Architecture Biennale runs until 21 November, 2010.
