Created by a team of leading architects and engineers, a lightweight, transparent tower constructed of a “cloud” of inflatable, light-emitting spheres will honor London’s role as host of the 2012 Olympics. This landmark structure will create a spatial, three-dimensional display that will be seen from all over London and fed by real-time information from all over the world. As an updated, high-tech version of the traditional observation deck, the Cloud engages visitors to participate in its creation with a vast collective energy-harvesting effort and invites everyone around the world to contribute to the Cloud by sponsoring an LED that will transmit messages.

The design team behind this revolutionary structure includes project leader and head of the MIT SENSEable Cities Laboratory Carlo Ratti; artist Tomas Saraceno; digital designer Alex Haw; lightweight-structures expert Joerg Schleich; the companies Arup, Agence Ter, and Google; and team advisers writer Umberto Eco and artist Antoni Muntadas.

Ratti calls this project “a new form of collective expression and experience and an updated symbol of our dawning age: code rather than carbon.” A true exercise in sustainability, this project is intended to reach carbon neutrality. Alex Haw explains that the Cloud will be a huge collective energy-harvesting effort. “People can choose to ascend the Cloud on foot or bicycle; the energy that it would take to descend the Cloud is converted, on the way down, into electricity through elevators with regenerative braking, similar to those that are present in hybrid cars,” he says. “The people's energy, coupled with solar energy collected through on-site and off-site photovoltaic cells and various energy saving strategies will allow us to reach carbon neutrality, whereby the Cloud produces all the energy it uses.”

Joerg Schleich adds, “Our achievement is the high degree of transparency, the minimal use of material, and the vast volume created by the sphere—all on exceedingly slender columns, stabilized by a cable net.”

Ratti further clarifies his team’s efforts. “Our main idea is to apply to architecture some of the distributed processes that are currently revolutionizing the digital world,” he says. “For instance, we would like the Cloud to become a symbol of global ownership built through a bottom up fundraising effort.”

The size of the Cloud will evolve based on the level of contributions received; social networking outlets, such as Facebook and Twitter, will help support the global “cloud raising” effort, and Google will provide advertising on YouTube and in search results. The team states that no public funding will be required. “We can build our Cloud with 5 million pounds or 50 million,” says MIT team member Walter Nicolino. “The flexibility of the structural system will allow us to tune the size of the Cloud to the level of funding that is reached.”

For more information, visitwww.raisethecloud.org.