In the spring of 2002, a curious building took shape just off the shore of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland. It looked like a bare industrial platform surrounded by a mesh of tubes and scaffolding. But the structure had an “on” switch, and when it was flipped, the open-air decks were transformed. Water from the lake was pumped at high pressure through 35,000 nozzles, aerosolized into a fine mist that became a cloud of vapor engulfing the whole thing. Visitors to the Swiss Expo, for which the building was designed, could enter the cloud, move around in it, ascend just above it and experience the curious effect of having the world blurred away and dissolved in artificial fog.
The Blur Building, created by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, was one of the iconic architectural events of the new millennium. It was a temporary structure that served no purpose other than to delight and perhaps provoke its visitors, to offer them an experience apart from ordinary cares and concerns. But that experience also made tangible dreams that have animated architects for a century at least — to create spaces in which the interior and the exterior flow into one another, to dematerialize buildings from stone and steel to something more fluid, dynamic, and permeable.
“The public can drink the building,” the designers wrote. The project also created space without enclosure, in which people were invited to move with no set patterns of circulation, no hallways or corridors or walls to guide or contain them. It was, seemingly, an architecture of total freedom.
Imagine if that building were being proposed today, in the middle of a pandemic, when the first association of the word “aerosolize” isn’t fog, mist or clouds, but the product of a cough or sneeze, laden with a dangerous virus, a vector for death. Now that everyone on the planet must carefully weigh the benefits and dangers of crossing the threshold between private and public space, between indoors and outdoors, can we salvage anything of the old fantasy of erasing these boundaries? When the best hope for slowing and containing the coronavirus is the careful regulation of movement and strict observance of social distancing, what happens to our desire for buildings that celebrate wandering, promiscuous exploration and spontaneous social interaction?