Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas The Cloud

MASSIMILIANO AND DORIANA FUKSAS THE CLOUD New Rome-Eur Convention Centre

1

JOSEPH GIOVANNINI

THE CLOUD

Like their Gothic colleagues long ago, contemporary architects are itinerant, and for wellknown architects today that means living on jets as they pursue projects across oceans and continents.

With commissions in Asia, the Middle East and America as well as Europe, Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas has been fated to the jet for decades, but in Fuksas’s case, he made the most of his tickets, choosing the window seat, where he became a connoisseur of clouds. They are, he says, mountainous and flat, sculpted and wispy, serene and terrifying, vertiginous and level, and the wind constantly changes them, calming them or causing Vesuvian eruptions. For a curious and imaginative architect looking out a portal, the cloudscape is an endlessly fascinating, challenging and inspiring landscape – but of course impossible to build. Still, says the Roman, “I always wanted to build something like a cloud.”

Since the time the Gods lived on Olympus, clouds have been mysterious for mortals confined to the flatland of earth. Only in the last century were clouds seen from above, from airplanes, and only in the last half century have high-speed computers revealed their fractal patterns: Euclid’s triangle was no match for an instrument with the power of the telescope to peer into the mysteries of non-linear phenomena. From the 1960s, armed with computers, scientists started to understand what they had never been able to fathom, that there was order hidden in phenomena that appeared to be chaotic, order within the apparent disorder.

Fuksas, a student of clouds, became a student of chaos when he started reading about chaos science, and his two private passions joined a third when, entering a competition for the New Rome-EUR Convention Center and Hotel, he joined the issues, furiously scribbling in acrylic paint an agitated red cloud with faint lines suggesting a surrounding right-angled cage.

It was 1998. Fuksas was responding to the brief of the open competition, and he was bringing the cloud down from the sky to settle into the rationalism of a city that Marcello Piacentini had planned in the 1930s in the spirit of Rome’s cardo decumanus.

125

B

D

C B1

4,13

4,13

B2

B3

B4

33,00 8,25

8,25

8,25

4,13

C3

C2

C1 4,13

0,61 1,65

1,65

1,65

1,65

1,65

0,73

3,96

A 41

8,25

2,34

0,61 1,22

2,79

3,30 8,95

4,13

4,13

2,86

2,77

0,35

3,90

19,88

0,61 1,65

1,65

1,65

1,65

0,73

3,96

1,65

2,34

2,49

+45.66 0,61 1,22

2,79

14,29

3,85

9,10

1,65

0,29

3,16

171,54°

11,14

177,27°

18,47

4,40

6,59

3,34

10,29 3,64

+45.66

1,42

1,82

0,75

2,82

+45.66

TECHNICAL DRAWINGS

1,00

+19.30

1,82

1,50

2,91

R2,95

1,82

1,50

1,50 0,56 1,50

8,37

0,81

+45.66

1,50

R1,91

1,50

1,50

R5,54

18,05

1,50

+45.66

7,07

1,40

1,50

R2,45

4,26

10,27

1,50

1,50

1,82

18,14

6,80

+32.15

+45.66

18,29

+45.66

7,92

+19.30

34,52 4,98 0,20

0.80 3,00

1,86

+43.41 1,22

3,60 8,95

2,68

2,68

3,45 8,95

2,97

3,96 0,61

3,90

0,18

+45.66

1,10 1,10 1,10

1,86

2,82

0,18

3,90

0,18

+45.66

0,74

+47.76

1,86

+43.41

2,68

6,50

+45.66

1,86

1,65

D1

C4 I

33,00 8,25

8,25

3,64

A4

2,34 0,73

0,61

1,90

3,60 7,41

1,90

146 I

A 41

0.20

0,12

F

E D2

D3

D4

33,00 8,25

8,25

3,30 8,95

8,25

3,60 9,10

2.70

2.15

2.70

E1 4,13

3,30 8,95

4,13

3.50

E3

8,78

3,30

F1

E4

33,00 8,25

8,25

3.50

+45.66

8,25

4,13

4,13

F2

3 8

8,25

2.15

+45.66

+45.66

+47.76

E2

2,33

+45.66

169,88°

1,82

4,39

2,19

1,78

T4a 3,98

5,71

10,31

1,87

Plan - Level +45.66 (N3) - Detail

8,64

0,12

2,49

2,93

0,35

+47.76

T5

11,9

2,13

2,65

0,89

+45.66

1,3

4

6

4,39

4,4

5 3,0

0

+45.66 +45.66

+45.66

+43.91 +45.66

+41.46

+39.91

+40.96

+45.66

+45.66 +43.91

+45.66 4,76

7,94

+45.66

9,35

+45.66

2,31

1,86

2,60 3,00

0,62

1,86 1,86

2,82

+45.66 3,96

+47.76

3,90

+47.76

1,86

1,82

4,25

0,75

1,82

0,35

38,89

2,82

3,30 8,95

2,83

2,83

3,30 8,95

2,82

147

162 TECHNICAL DRAWINGS

Longitudinal section

0

5

15 m

163

176 TECHNICAL DRAWINGS

177

Cloud-Theca connection detail

HULL POSITION ON PEG SUPPORT 2B.1 LINE D

300

2050

3125

TECHNICAL DRAWINGS

500

3765

1328

688

438 250

3246

3175

837,5

3175

1200 362,5

2062,5

188

1700

1200

1700

1700

1200

340

3765

250 640

1328

438

Connection of The Cloud hull structure to supercolumns

340

3125

1010

200 3125

189