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A cloud of inflatable plastic bubbles could float above London's skyline as part of a new Olympic monument.
The “digital cloud” displaying images and data such as race results would be secured by metal cables to a group of 120-metre towers in the Olympic Park in Stratford.
Ramps, stairs and lifts would take visitors into the main inflatable bubble from which they could view the city.
It has not been determined how many towers would be built but, according to preliminary designs, visitors would be able to walk around several of the bubbles and onto a “walking membrane” between spheres.
After the Olympics, transport information, weather forecasts and details of events would be displayed.
The bubbles are one of the entries in a design competition run by Boris Johnson to build a £15 million lasting monument to the 2012 Games.
City Hall refused to confirm that the project was on the shortlist of finalists but said the number of contenders remaining “could be counted on one hand”. The shortlist is thought to include former Turner Prize winner Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley, the designer of the Angel of the North.
The bubbles were designed by architects from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The spheres would be made from an extra strong plastic, known as ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) which was used in the Beijing Aquatic Centre. Technology used in Japanese skyscrapers to resist earthquakes would prevent the towers being moved by the wind.
A presentation on the bubbles has been seen by the Mayor and his team. The MIT architects said: “It proposes an entirely 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.”
Although the £15 million funding for the Art in the Park project is thought to be coming from steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal — Britain's richest man — those behind the cloud project are also in talks with Google.
A design for an iron construction that would have been six times taller than the Angel of the North has not made the shortlist of finalists.
The proposed monument featured a translucent structure with viewing decks above the Olympic Park.
It was nicknamed the “piffle tower” after Mr Johnson's “inverted pyramid of piffle” comments made when the Mayor denied an extra-marital affair in 2004.
Reader views (2)
I thought this ws the 'green' olympics? Why are they even considering things made of plastic?
- Helen, norwich, 20/11/2009 14:38
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Instead of spending £15m on some giant trinket or yet another viewing tower for sights we really don't need to see, how about giving up to 1m people the chance to see at all? 16m people in poorer countries suffer from blindness caused by cataracts, which are easily treatable. Sightsavers International can restore a blind person's sight for as little as £15.
The world is no longer awash with money and what now remains should be redirected toward things that will show lasting benefits to people and the planet. London is the world's most cosmopolitan city as well as one of the richest, and is extraordinarily well placed to make a groundbreaking gesture for the greater good in a world where we are all increasingly 'in this together'.
The last thing we need is any more monuments to an era which will be seen by future generations as having lost all sense of value.
- Nigel Tuersley, Tisbury, UK, 13/11/2009 09:50
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