Nuove Nuvole | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026

Nuove Nuvole investigates how cloud formations emerge from a system: the weather. Systems like these produce emergent patterns out of unintelligible complexity. Turner and Constable both approached the cloud through distance; this project goes further, drawing parallels between cloud science, complex systems, and a method for generating architecture. The project proposes a botanical garden at the Tecnopolo di Bologna, Italy’s supercomputing centre. The infrastructure of meteorological prediction becomes the ground from which a building about weather grows. Waste heat from the computing complex feeds directly into the greenhouse systems. Bologna EPW meteorological inputs drive particle simulations that generate point clouds encoding wind, temperature, humidity, and solar radiation as spatial density. Those density fields become the architectural datum, determining envelope, height, glazing, topography, and water distribution. Under clear rules of dependency, a project arises out of an infinite field of possibilities. The simulation condenses into an architecture whose boundaries between physical and environmental space resist definition, just as the clouds that first inspired it.

Two Dozen Architectural Clouds The chosen layout condenses exists as one infinitely small fraction of the possibilities for this working method. This project condenses to satisfy the architectural design criteria for a new botanical garden for Bologna, envisioning a unique relationship between the climate forecasters at the Tecnopolo, where the project is sited.

Four Point Clouds from a Bologna EPW and Raphael’s Ecstasy of St Cecilia

Learning to Measure Point Clouds

Condensing Architectural Clouds in Plan

Condensing Architectural Clouds

A New Botanical Garden for Bologna