Blurring reality: shrouded by a drifting, mysterious pall of mist, Diller & Scofidio's Blur building explores notions of dematerialization - Critical Essay

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2002 by Catherine Slessor

At the south western end of Lake Neuchatel, the pretty spa town of Yverdon-les-Bains hosts possibly the most radical of the four arteplages. Exhibition structures are dispersed around a gently rolling landscape of artificial hills seductively swathed in lavender, geraniums and shrubs. Walking through a tunnel under the hills brings visitors to the edge of the lake where an immense cloud of vapour hovers and drifts above the surface of the water, occasionally revealing glimpses of an oil-rig-like arrangement of spars, booms, platforms and tensile wires. This is Diller & Scofidio's Blur building, an ingenious exercise in literal and metaphorical dematerialization. The steel structure is based on an experimental design by Buckminster Fuller that could not be constructed until now because the joints were too complex. Vertical elements are supported solely by a network of tensile wires.

The building acts as an extremely sophisticated sprinkler system. Filtered lake water is expelled as a fine mist through a dense array of over 30,000 high-pressure nozzles to generate a huge artificial clout that in its most viscous moments seems to have appeared from nowhere, like those ominous, inexplicable fogs in horror movies. The cloud is a dynamic from that constantly responds to the actual weather; a built-in weather station electronically adjusts the water pressure and temperature over thirteen different zones according to shifting wind direction, speed and humidity.

Having donned the regulation raincoat provided by the organizers, visitors approach the building by a fibreglass catwalk that links it with the shore, looking like a convention of slightly perverse monks in their white plastic hoods and cassocks. As you enter, visual and acoustic references are slowly erased, leaving only a visual white-out and the white noise of the pulsating nozzles. Sensory deprivation stimulates a sensory heightening: the density of air inhaled, the lowered temperature, the soft sound of water spray and the scent of the atomized lake water all begin to overwhelm the senses, inducing feelings of disorientation and isolation.

Blundering around in the mist, you eventually emerge like an aeroplane piercing a cloud layer onto a panoramic terrace and bar at the summit, which offers bemused visitors a variety of mineral waters. At night, subtle lighting enhances the building's mysterious allure and adds to the sense of dematerialization.

Architect

Diller & Scofidio, New York

Associate architects and designers

Morphing Systems: vehover & Jeuslin; Techdata, Emch & Berger

Landscape architect

West B

Photographs

Paul Raftery/VIEW