Send In The Clouds

The Cloud by Asif Khan - W Hotels Designer of the Future 2011

Beta Tank’s Eyal Burstein guest blogs for Design Miami/ Blog. In this post, Eyal discovers the lighter side of Design with Asif Khan’s The Cloud.

It’s exactly a year since my W Hotels Designer of the Future Award and now that I am an alumni of this wonderful club, I am pleased to see how this year’s winners continue to push the boundaries. That is really what this award celebrates. This year’s winners were asked to create Conversation Pieces for the fair. Meaning their work needed to spark conversation and really engage visitors. I was intrigued to see how they tackled it.

The Cloud by Asif Khan - W Hotels Designer of the Future 2011

Making my way up the steep suicide steps in Hall 5, I noticed from the corner of my eye the bubble bath like foam slowly floating and settling on what on closer inspection is a net made of fishing wire.

The Cloud created by Asif Khan – one of this year’s W Hotels Designers of the Future – is an interesting response to Conversation Pieces. Asif describes the work as “an architectural experiment into what’s the simplest way to create a shaded space where conversations can happen.”

Using simple materials – helium gas, water and soap, Asif has designed a machine that makes clouds that sail up in the air to produce a cloud canopy.

Eyal Burstein and Asif Khan Play With The Cloud

His project induces the opposite response to most of the pieces in the Design Miami/ Hall, which can be quite serious.

At Asif’s booth, he tries to block excited children rushing in to catch the clouds while the oblivious parents look on mesmerized. The space farcically deteriorates into a collection of smiles and laughs. It’s such a pleasure to see this kind of response from a design installation. I hope it’s cloudy again tomorrow in Basel.