Archello Awards 2026 · Enter your projects before 30 September 2026
Archello Awards 2026 · Enter your projects before 30 September 2026

Cloud city

Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov again received an invitation from the organizing committee of the Interni exhibition to take part in the biggest world design festival FuoriSalone 2014. This year exhibition motto became the following phrase: «Feeding «New Ideas for the City». They presented an art object «U_cloud», made by Velko 2000, that immediately became a biggie of all photos and video reports of the exhibition. Sergei Tchoban said, “Sergey Kuznetsov proposed a very interesting concept that connected both architectural and notional components in an effective and unique form”. In the basis of the idea there is a peculiarity of the venue itself. Courtyard of the Milan University is a symmetrical and almost square space, surrounded by two-tier Renaissance colonnade. If to put an object in the center with a mirror lower part, it may come to an illusion of this object floating in the air. But there is a question – what can float in the center of courtyard and be embodiment of new ideas for the city? And here one more image appeared that refers to a popular nowadays cloud service of storing information i-cloud. “We developed this idea by embodying an abstract image of information cloud into the volume collected of LED billboards that translate a certain visual line. We created a kind of floating nominal cloud (U-cloud) containing an insight of alternative approach to understanding future of the City and ways of its further development. Traditional understanding of the City as an especially utilitarian category we replaced by something beyond the borders of stereotypes. City in our installation is a combination of number of factors, such natural phenomenon as clouds and leaves, for example, that naturally joining and creating something new in a qualitative, ideological and structural way and not chained to the earth at the same time”, Sergei Tchoban comments the image of U-cloud. Historically cities always were places of cultural, educational and economical potential, centers for acquisition and exchange of information. The onrush of new technologies and virtual services of data filing in geometrical progression increases the number of invisible connections running through the city, and moves it out of its physical borders. A steadily enlarging U_cloud floats over the endless city, reflecting an intricate pattern set of multi-scale objects, isometric empty spaces, private stories and unpredictable circumstances. The three-dimensional profile of the cloud is composed of a metal structure covered with LED screens that show videos and images; it rests on a base clad in mirrors to create the effect of suspension. Technically the idea was performed in an extremely clever way. On a metallic frame were placed LED billboards displaying images that changes each other: in the beginning, they form a picture of a real cloud that transforms into crown of a tree, then into structure of city quarters, and approaching one can see separate buildings with its windows reflecting clouds in the sky. Bottom of the construction is faced with mirror panels, in which reflection of surrounding space dematerializes the whole construction, so the visitor of the exhibition makes out only a big cloud floating in the middle of the Milan University courtyard.

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