Tomas Saraceno and His Etherial World : Cloud City at the Metropolitan Museum

Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno creates a constellation of large, interconnected modules constructed with transparent and reflective materials for the Metropolitan Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. Visitors may enter and walk through these habitat-like, modular structures grouped in a nonlinear configuration. Over the past decade, Saraceno has established a practice of constructing habitable networks based upon complex geometries and interconnectivity that merge art, architecture, and science. The interdisciplinary project “Cloud Cities/Air Port City” is rooted in the artist’s investigation of expanding the ways in which we inhabit and experience our environment.

Tomás Saraceno looks to the sky and sees possibilities for rethinking how we live in relation to one another—for reshaping notions about nationality and property, and revising our ideas about the fixity of the built environment and the organization of cities. He envisions networks of habitable platforms that float in the air. The freedom of their airborne location allows for sections of living space to join together like clouds, creating aerial cities in constant physical transformation. As he explains, “Like continental drift at the beginning of the world, the new cities will search for their positions in the air in order to find their place in the universe . . . [this structure is] capable of imagining more elastic and dynamic border rules (political, geographical, etc.) for a new space/cyberspace.”