Urban Cloud is a project that was developed in order to question contemporary digital design techniques and representation. Meshes and NURBS have kept architects bound to the topological architectural project for well over a decade. In order to move the discipline beyond this, we can start to define space by more than just surface and volume. Misuse and abuse of our digital tools can help liberate architecture from its historical dependence on industrial material. Urban Cloud argues for this liberation by being unable and unwilling to exist as analogue. In this sense, the project can confront and accept its own computational tectonics – merely data, bytes, pixels, 1’s and 0’s. It rejects surface and volume by existing somewhere outside of that, as a collection of particles and points. It is able to define and distort space by varying its density, size, and location relative to its surrounding data. The following images were meant to explore and demonstrate these ideas of cloud space.
