The experience just described is based on the original project proposal for Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio's Blur Building, a project developed for the Swiss Expo 2001 in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland.i An architectural project for a building made of water, Blur Building is intended to undermine our ordinary sensory interface with the environment and with architecture by putting vision more or less out of play. The result, as you have just experienced, is a compelling attempt to engage other, less used sensory modalities—proprioception, tactility, hearing—in the task of navigating bodily through space.
The infrastructure of the Blur Building is an edifice 100 m wide by 65 m deep by 25 m high that is cantilevered up from the lake below and that forms the base out of which the mist cloud is projected as well as support for the Angel Deck observation platform. The mist cloud is produced by an artificial fog-making system that filters lake water into a dense array of high-pressure water nozzles regulated by computer and adjusted to actual weather conditions in the surrounding environment. The resulting fog mass is, as the architects put it, “a dynamic form that combines natural and artificial weather forces."⁵ Into this dynamic mass is integrated a media environment whose function, again according to the architects, is to interweave architecture and electronic technologies, exchanging the properties of each for the other. Through the use of sophisticated technologies that “would be entirely invisible, leaving only their effects, ... architecture would dematerialize and electronic media, normally ephemeral, would become palpable in space” (Blur, 44).
WEARABLE SPACE
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