The inflatable elements of the building would sit on top of thin, lightweight towers

A giant “digital cloud” that would “float” above London’s skyline has been outlined by an international team of architects, artists and engineers.

The construction would include 120m- (400ft-) tall mesh towers and a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that can be used to display images and data.

The Cloud, as it is known, would also be used an observation deck and park.

The unconventional structure was originally envisaged as a centre piece of the city’s Olympic village.

The building draws inspiration from the work of Tomas Saraceno

Its designers plan to raise the funds to build it by asking for micro-donations from millions of people.

“It’s really about people coming together to raise the Cloud,” Carlo Ratti, one of the architects behind the design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told BBC News.

“We can build our Cloud with £5m or £50m. The flexibility of the structural system will allow us to tune the size of the Cloud to the level of funding that is reached.”

The size of the structure will evolve depending on the number of contributions, he said.

Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York who has seen the design described it as a “sculptural spectacle” and “a celebration of technology”.

‘Data streams’

The Cloud was shortlisted in a competition set up by London Mayor Boris Johnson.

The mayor has committed to build a tourist attraction in the Olympic Park “with a legacy for the east end [of London]“.

Other finalists are thought to include the former Turner prize winner Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley, the designer of the Angel of the North.

The mayor is still in the “process of deciding” which design will be commissioned, according to a spokesperson.

However, the team, which also includes the writer Umberto Eco and engineers from Arup, has decided to push ahead and publish details of its design.

The structure draws on work by artist Tomas Saraceno, a German-based designer who has previously shown off huge inflatable sculptures.

It is envisaged that the spheres would be made of a plastic known as Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE), the material used to build the Beijing Aquatic Centre.

The different spheres would act as structural elements, habitable spaces, decoration and LCD screens on which data could be projected.

“We could provide a custom feed of… searches made by Londoners during the Olympics to give a real time ‘barometer’ of the city’s interests and mood,” said Google, one of the supporters of the project, which has also offered to provide the information feeds.

The team also envisage projecting weather information, spectator numbers, race results or even images of the Olympic Torch on to the building.

Ramps, stairs and lifts would carry people to the top of the structure to look out over the city.

‘Zero power’

The inflatable elements of the building would sit on top of slender, lightweight towers, stabilised by a net of metal cables.

Damping technology, similar to that used in Japanese skyscrapers to resist earthquakes, would prevent the towers being buffeted by the wind.

The Killesberg Tower in Germany is built using similar principles

“Many tall towers have preceded this, but our achievement is the high degree of transparency, the minimal use of material and the vast volume created by the spheres,” said professor Joerg Schleich, the structural engineer behind the towers.

Professor Schleich was responsible for the Olympic Stadium in Munich as well as numerous lightweight towers built to the same design as the Cloud.

The structure would also be used to harvest all the energy it produces according to Professor Ratti.

“It would be a zero power cloud,” he said.

As well as solar cells on the ground and inside some of the spheres, the lifts would use regenerative braking, similar to that in some hybrid cars.

That way, the designers say, potential energy from visitors to the top of the tower can be harnessed into useful electricity.

The team have launched a fundraising website called raisethecloud.org and are now looking for a site for the tower.

Google has already offered to provide free advertising for the so-called “cloud-raising” effort.

The firm has offered a sponsored link at the top of the page advertising a “£1 for 1 pixel” concept to people who search for terms relevant to London 2012.

“It will be a monument to crowd-sourcing,” said Professor Ratti.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8338092.stm

Is Tehran coming to the end of its days as a capital city?

Iran’s rulers are considering plans to relocate the country’s capital. They say Tehran is in danger of being struck by a major earthquake. So how easy is it to move a capital out of a city, and where might Iran’s go? Penny Spiller reports.

Tehran is a sprawling metropolis at the foot of the Alborz mountain range. It is home to some 12 million people, and is the largest city in the Middle East.

Not only is it the political and economic heart of the country, the city has a cosmopolitan air with its museums, art galleries, parks and universities. It has been Iran’s capital since 1795.

But now a powerful state body, the expediency council, has approved plans by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to end Tehran’s days as a capital.

These plans are not new. They are part of a long-term strategy to see the capital moved by 2025, and will need approval from many more government bodies before any relocation begins.

The government is said to be reacting to calls from Iranian seismologists, who have long warned that Tehran lies on at least 100 known fault lines, and would not survive a major quake intact.

The devastating earthquake that killed some 40,000 people in the south-eastern city of Bam in 2003 has certainly concentrated minds on the issue.

But the timing of this decision – coming as it does months after some of the worst anti-government riots Tehran has ever seen – is interesting, says Dominic Dudley, deputy editor of the London-based Middle East Economic Digest.

Tehran is very much a liberal enclave in Iran, he says – and it was many of those liberals who took to the streets complaining of fraud when conservative incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared winner of June’s presidential election.

“It is tempting to view anything going on in Iran these days through the lens of that dispute,” Mr Dudley told the BBC. “It certainly wouldn’t hurt the government to move away from the big centre of liberal protests and opposition.”

But where would it move to?

Iranian seismologist Professor Bahram Akasheh told the Guardian newspaper that a new capital should be built between the holy city of Qom and Delijan, in Markazi province.

This is an area, he said, that has not seen an earthquake in 2,000 years.

However, Qom is the spiritual home of Iran’s conservative Islamic establishment. Moving the capital nearer to Qom could be seen as a sign of the conservatives stamping their authority, says Mr Dudley.

Distorted market

Wherever the capital moves to, and for whatever reasons, the government will have some other important considerations to take into account if creating a capital from scratch, says Andrew Jones of the engineering, planning and architectural design firm AECOM.

One of the things about a new capital is that it tends to insulate the government from the pressures and influences of the big city Claudio de Magalhaes University College London

It is all very well moving government buildings and staff, but the new city will flounder if it has no cultural life and its economy is solely driven by the government.

“Generally, our capital cities are economic powerhouses as well as seats of government. That takes a long time to bed in,” he told the BBC.

“A new city generally takes 10 to 20 years to build, it takes a century or more to mature into something that is an attractive and self-sustaining place.”

Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, might be an interesting example for the Iranian authorities to study.

It was built because the coastal location of the old seat of power, Rio de Janeiro, was deemed too far from large swathes of the country.

So the new capital was unveiled in a remote part of central Brazil in 1961.

Claudio de Magalhaes, senior lecturer in planning and urban regeneration at University College London, said this location suited the military government that came to power three years later.

CAPITAL MOVES Brazil: Brasilia, 1961 Tanzania: Dodoma, 1973 Ivory Coast: Yamoussoukro, 1983 Nigeria: Abuja, 1991 Kazakhstan: Astana, 1997 Burma: Naypyidaw, 2005

“One of the things about a new capital is that it tends to insulate the government from the pressures and influences of the big city,” he said.

“The military government found it very convenient to have the political class away from the city. You don’t have any demonstrations on your doorstep. It’s very easy to close the airport and access to the city whenever you see fit, which happened in the early days of the government.”

In the beginning, Brasilia was inhabited mostly by people whose livelihoods depended on the government.

But over the years it grew, and grew, and grew – confounding the planners’ expectations.

“What no-one had predicted was the growth in the satellite areas around the city. These were places peopled by construction workers, cleaners for government buildings, mechanics for employees’ cars,” Mr Magalhaes told the BBC.

In the early days, land in the centre of Brasilia – known as the pilot plan and now a Unesco heritage site – was compulsorily purchased and given to government ministries who were then able to offer homes to staff.

But as these assets were sold off, they reaped huge profits for the buyers as increasing numbers of people moving to the city sought to live in that area, Mr Magalhaes said.

“It distorted the market. And you had this strange situation whereby large houses with swimming pools outside Brasilia were much cheaper than a small flat in the centre,” he said.

‘Remake itself’

The total cost of moving Brazil’s capital from Rio to Brasilia is so huge it has never really all been accounted for, Mr Magalhaes believes.

Even 20 years after Brasilia was created, the government was still having to pay premiums to get people to move there, he adds.

Losing its capital status also had a huge effect on Rio, which had already seen its economy suffer as businesses migrated to Sao Paulo.

“Local politics became very low level and was dominated by its relationship with the drug lords,” Mr Magalhaes said.

Andrew Jones of AECOM believes Tehran will also have a tough period of adjustment if it goes the same way as Rio.

“Although the underlying character of the city will stay, it will lose the added extras that come with being home to the seat of government. It will start to lose cultural institutions and some other components that make it a powerful place,” he said.

“But I think Tehran will survive. It has been a major city for thousands of years, so it will recover and remake itself.”