Urban Confluence Silicon Valley and the San Jose Light Tower Corporation introduces this competition to build the next hotspot in San Jose. The competition demands to design a landmark that embraces Silicon Valley. The competition seeks a transformative design complete with a zero net energy approach and a physical presence that would be a powerful and enduring symbol of how Silicon Valley operates as a bridge from past to present and even the future.
This project “Cloud of Steel” is based on the idea of information made visible. The Cloud is a meta-physical entity we use for the storage of data. The Cloud is a romanticized idea of storage or information, but in actuality, it is a data center somewhere, rather than nowhere, in the desert of Nevada.
Similarly, this project physically represents an intricate digital network that is the essence of Silicon Valley. Network mapping is a common term used in software engineering and hence it perfectly fits into the technological ecology of silicon valley. It captures the technology world in a single sculpture. This cube is made of a dense network of stainless steel pipes welded together to hold up against each other. The cube has no straight edges and hence makes it look like a blurb when seen from the freeway. This cube blurs your view of the city from inside and out. This makes you focus on the present, your immediate surroundings. It adds to the cityscape of San Jose as an intriguing object that one must definitely visit, making it memorable.
