Life and Death in the Clouds. Design and the Meteorological Obsession = Vita e morte tra le nuvole. Il design e l’ossessione meteorologica

A curious coincidence lies in the fact that Gilles Clément and Junya Ishigami, the landscape designer and architect who have most courageously investigated the limits of their respective disciplines in recent decades, have both become interested in clouds and have placed them at the center of their discourse as fundamental design metaphors. Clément published in 2005 Nuages (Clouds), a logbook of an Atlantic crossing aboard a cargo, Ishigami in 2010 published Another scale of architecture, a book-manifesto for an architecture understood as environment. Clouds indeed embody a duality: on one side, as a kind of meteorological shield, they protect life on earth and maintain a mild temperature that allowed humankind to live in nearly every area of the planet; on the other they recall us how over the course of the Twentieth century we have been led to question the man’s existence as a Being in ‘breathable’ space due first to poisonous gas and then to atomic bombs and radioactive clouds.