London invited the world to build them an addition to their skyline, in time for the Olympics in 2012. Their request has been answered by researchers from MIT. Here are some details of their brave response:
The structure, dubbed “the Cloud”, would consist of two 400-foot towers and a number of interconnected, LED-filled bubbles, including an observation deck and a series of digital displays relaying statistical information from the Olympics.
A clean-powered entity, solar panels would provide much of the power needed. It is proposed that other running costs would be covered by its visitors – invited to ‘sponsor’ an LED.
A quote from their website offers some insight into their mission statement:
The Cloud addresses our twin attention spans of the short-term desire for information and stimulation, and our growing longer-term consciousness about our impact on the future, and our productive role within a larger harmonious ecology. It provides two resources – energy and data – harvesting both the natural ecosystem and humanity’s complementary cyber-sphere, fusing the two.
Further technical details below, for those interested: