Whiteout

the Blur Building, built and demolished in 2002, on Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland The Blur Building, designed by New York architectural firm DS+R is a cloud on Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland. The building, structurally consisting of a 300-foot wide platform with thousands of water-vapor-spraying nozzles, is essentially, as architect Liz Diller puts it, "an architecture of atmosphere." She elaborates: "entering Blur is like entering a habitable medium." Her use of the word "medium" recalls artistic forms such as poetry and painting -- these mediums have the ability to "delight and disturb the senses," and influence a viewer or inhabitant's inner state. Along these lines, Yi-Fu Tuan writes that place is "an object in which one can dwell," but unlike any other place, Blur gives the impression of a "formless, featureless, depthless, scaleless, massless, surfaceless, and dimensionless" space. By acting as a sensorial white-out, the building erases all the references that its inabitants are used to depending on for spatial orientation, other than the body's left and right, an gravity's up and down. Blur consumes the skin with water vapor, vision with a sea of white, and hearing with the gentle white-noise-like hiss of the spray nozzles. In its unvarying sameness, Blur diminishes its inhabitants' ability to depend on their experience in detecting changes in smell, touch, sight, and hearing to aid in their navigation of the space. Much like entering Tuan's "warm pale bath," Blur conveys to its inhabitants a "massive feeling." Diller says that, when in the building, "the world is put out of focus while our visual dependence is put into focus." Only when we cannot use our senses do we realize how we depend on them. The scale of the Blur Building also speaks of the influence it has over its occupants. In being the size of a football field, Blur allows its occupants enough space to not feel crowded, in order to facilitate the optimal white-out affect. The effect that the scale and sameness of the space has on its occupants may be perceptually and emotionally overwhelming, but any individual's reaction is dependent on his or her past experience. The Eskimos, who, for example, as described by Tuan, are used to a monotone environment, may have a very different reaction to the Blur Building than a European person. Here is a video of Liz Diller talking about the Blur Building and some other work: 

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