The Blur Building: A Contrived Landscape

by - Nick Tafel

A battle that many architects face for their entire careers is how their building ties into and works well with the landscape it is placed in.  It can be quite difficult to tastefully join a building to a landscape so that it plays off the landscape and vice versa.  Many times the success of a building as an unobtrusive piece of architecture lies solely in the relation of the building to the landscape.  There is no one simple solution to making a building join with the landscape in a symbiotic manner.  It is a choice of many different variables like form, placement and materiality that determines the overall success of a building in a landscape. To examine the success of this relationship I think the Blur project by Diller and Scofidio is an innovative example of how to compliment the existing landscape.

            Blur by Diller and Scofidio was built as a temporary structure in 2002 for the sixth Swiss National Exhibition.  The main attraction of the building was the fact that it was surrounded at all times by a perpetual cloud generated by the building itself.  The building had an innovative system of perforated steel panels which were pumped with water to create artificial clouds.  These artificial clouds enclosed the building completely in a cloud that shrouded it from view and enclosed those visiting the building.  On the lake where it was situated, Water, land and clouds are the only other things out there.  With this innovative use of water to create clouds, the building complimented the landscape and became a successful, artificial addition to nature.  The form of the building lends itself to looking like a cloud.  The light structure allows it to float unassumingly and playfully above the water similar to a real low-lying cloud.  It is shaped such that if there were an outer skin, it would be a round, elliptical shape, reminiscent of a cloud.  When the cloud was generated, it hugged the shore and the water, tying the structure into the landscape even more.  This structure was made so light by the cloud that it seemed even like the whole building was suspended inside of the cloud which made for an enhancement of the natural landscape.  Overall this structure was successful in tying into the landscape and becoming a part of the nature.

            Having artificial things act as naturally as this structure did is very difficult.  As I discussed the MOMA roof garden before, there is a point where nature become too contrived and does not mimic nature but takes the wonder, the connection and the discovery out of nature.   This structure brings something otherwise unattainable, a cloud, to ground level and allows you walk through it and experience a piece of nature that may never be experienced in the same way.  Diller and Scofidio very successfully captured a cloud and allowed humans the ability to walk through it and allowed true discovery to happen.  When the bounds of design are pushed too far concerning nature, the idea of nature is lost in the complex language of the design and truest form of experience and discovery is lost.  This, in my opinion, is what happened at the MOMA roof garden.  The landscape was much too contrived and overdesigned.  Here the design was tastefully adequate for what they wanted to accomplish and the true discovery of nature was persistently present.

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