What is it with architects that they feel the need to glom onto the latest buzzwords to justify their projects? A group from M.I.T.’s Senseable City Lab is looking for funding for an ambitious observation deck designed for the 2012 London Olympics. They are calling it the Cloud. It is a “lightweight transparent tower, composed of a ‘cloud’ of inflatable, light-emitting spheres . . . fed by real time information from all over the world.”

The structure is an architectural interpretation of the realtime cloud. Videos of the Olympic events, Twitter and Facebook streams, and other realtime data such as energy usage, Internet traffic, and mobile phone activity will be projected onto LED displays in the Cloud so that people in the Cloud can observe the events from high above London.

M.I.T. credits Google and the engineering firm Arup as part of the design team. Fiction author Umberto Eco is an adviser. In other words, it’s never going to be built. Not by 2012. They don’t even have building permits yet.

The drawings are nice though. Except I’m not sure what that person is doing inside one of those spheres in the bottom image. Is that some sort of realtime cage?  He looks like he needs saving.