Blur Building

The Blur Building is an exhibition pavilion built for Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchatel in the town of Yverdon-les-Bains. It is an architecture of atmosphere. Its lightweight tensegrity structure measures 300 feet wide by 200 feet deep by 75 feet high. It is a total of 80,000 square feet. The primary building material is indigenous to the site, water. Water is pumped from the lake, filtered, and shot as a fine mist through a dense array of high-pressure mist nozzles. The resulting fog mass produced is a dynamic interplay of natural and man-made forces. A smart weather system reads the shifting climactic conditions of temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, and processes the data in a central computer that regulates water pressure to an array of 31,500 nozzles.  

Four hundred visitors can occupy the building at any time. Upon entering the fog mass, visual and acoustic references are erased, leaving only an optical “white-out” and the “white-noise” of pulsing nozzles. Blur is an anti-spectacle. Contrary to immersive environments that strive for high-definition visual fidelity with ever-greater technical virtuosity, Blur is decidedly low-definition: there is nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself. 



Unlike entering a building, Blur is a habitable medium - one that is spaceless, formless, featureless, depthless, scaleless, massless, surfaceless, and dimensionless. On the platform, movement is unregulated and the public is free to wander in an immersive acoustic environment by Christian Marclay. From the platform, the public can ascend a stair to the Angel Deck at the summit. Emerging through the fog is like piercing a cloud layer while in flight to the blue sky. Submerged one-half level below the deck is the Water Bar which offers a broad selection of bottled waters from around the world.

Principals: Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio
Project Leader: Dirk Hebel
Project Team: Charles Renfro, Eric Bunge   

Structural Engineers: Passera & Pedretti
Sound installation by artist: Christian Marclay

Media: Diller + Scofidio and Ben Rubin, EAR Studio
Media Associate: Mark Wasiuta

Blur is part of the Arteplage Yverdon-les-Bains for Swiss EXPO 02. In a project collaboration, several architects and artists founded the group “extasia”, which won the competiton for the site in Yverdon.

Photo Credit: Beat Widmer