Blur Building

The Blur Building was a temporary media pavilion built for the 2002 Swiss Expo in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. Rising out of Lake Neuchatel, a system of rectilinear struts and diagonal rods cantilevered over the water. The rods were fitted with over 30,000 fog nozzles shooting a fine mist pulled from the lake and controlled with a complex weather system. This fog created a man-made cloud that encompassed the metal framework to create the illusion of a vaporous building measuring 300 ft. wide and 65 ft. high.

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Before walking the 400 ft. ramp that led to the center of the “building”, visitors were given a personality test and “braincoats”, a raincoat that stored all of the personal data collected by the test to create a profile for the wearer. This profile could be identified by the cloud’s computer network, which was able to locate each participant and identify them. As visitors arrived on the structure, when they passed each other, the braincoats analyzed the profiles, and changed colors depending on compatibility with the person next to them. Once inside, visitors could challenge their senses immersed in white noise and white-out visual conditions, or head upstairs through the mist to the Angel Bar, where they were served a sampling of waters from all over the world.

This perception-altering exhibition, the creation of architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, was unfortunately not built to be a permanent structure, and no longer exists.