Olympic & Expo structures – with their mute mass, their ponderous monumentality, and their conspicuous expenditure on immovable objects – are outmoded. Our proposal is as light as air itself – a tribute to a digital age of bits and atoms beyond the antiquity of steel and glass – a structure which reveals the connected networks of a common humanity fueling the Olympics, their 2012 host city, and the world itself.
The Cloud proposes a new form of monument – a new form of collective expression and experience, an updated symbol of our dawning age and a new form of observation deck, high above the Olympics – one from which one can not only see the whole of London, but the whole of the world, immersed in the euphoric gusts of weather and world data.
It offers London’s highest park and an immersion within both our great clouded skies and the cosmos of our dataworlds – as well as a live information system transmitting data and imagery from around the city and the world. It presents the perfect Olympic symbol – a million unbounded particles contributing briefly towards a vast, beautiful, constantly-fluctuating whole, London, with its diversity, internationalism and tolerance, unites countries; the Cloud unites all people.