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Five Month Cloud
Fri Feb 28, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton, and this is The Weather Notebook.
If you went to a certain spot in Switzerland last summer, you could have stood inside a very
unusual cloud. It formed in May and didn't dissipate until October. The cloud was part of a
pavilion called Blur at this year's Swiss Expo. The idea was to build a platform over a Swiss
lake and keep it bathed in an artificial cloud, day and night, that you could walk through and
savor.
The Blur Building was designed by a husband-and-wife team of architects from New York:
Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. They centered their exhibit all around a gigantic
outdoor fog machine. More than 30,000 nozzles spit out water droplets so tiny that they
stayed suspended in the air. This created a permanent cloud about a half-block wide and more
than 60 feet deep. The cloud sat about 300 feet off the lake shore. Visitors put on
waterproof ponchos, crossed a bridge made of glass, and strolled through the cloud. You could
even walk upstairs to a deck above the cloud, sit down, and sip a refreshing glass of mineral
water.
Of course, a good cloud doesn't come cheap. This one cost more than seven million US dollars.
But that didn't put a cloud over the project. It was a smash hit. Cirrus-ly.
Bob Henson of Boulder, Colorado, contributed today's story. The Weather Notebook is a
production of The Mount Washington Observatory, with support from Subaru, and the National
Science Foundation. If you have a question or comment for us, you can e-mail us at
questions@weathernotebook.org. Or give us a call -- it's toll free: (888) RAIN-001. Or, you
can visit us online at www.weathernotebook.org for an archive of past shows.
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