Nomad Architecture: Manned Cloud
Travel without a trace
Words Damaris Colhoun
Jean-Marie Massaud conceives a flying hotel
www.massaud.com
SB: It’s exciting to see a return to a time when designers did more than just style the products they were asked to, but also imagined visionary utopian scenarios that have the ability to change the way we think about our future. Despite it’s oddly aquatic form, Massaud’s Manned Cloud engages the imagination in a way not seen since Archigram’s Walking City.
SB: It’s exciting to see a return to a time when designers did more than just style the products they were asked to, but also imagined visionary utopian scenarios that have the ability to change the way we think about our future. Despite it’s oddly aquatic form, Massaud’s Manned Cloud engages the imagination in a way not seen since Archigram’s Walking City.
Whenever he travels to far-flung lands, Jean-Marie Massaud always ends up making the same observation: “Men tend to destroy everything they covet.” Not long ago, flying over Mexico, the French designer was so dismayed by the way hotel development was marring the coast that he decided he would find a way to “rediscover the world without leaving a trace.”
As a designer Massaud believes it is his responsibility to propose products and services that “take into account the stakes of the world.” And so, as a solution to overdevelopment and archaic airport infrastructures, he has conceived an airship hotel that can fly almost anywhere without polluting the land or sky. This is not some fantasy. Massaud has developed the concept in partnership with ONERA, the French aerospace lab. Cruising at a remarkable 174 miles per hour, the Manned Cloud, as he calls it, will enable passengers to journey around the world in three days. Its innovative “bi-body” structure will accommodate 40 guest suites, a restaurant, a library, a spa and a fitness suite, in addition to a sun deck at the top level of the vessel. Passengers, says Massaud, will “rediscover the pleasure of travel: silence, no jet lag, contemplation and permanent surprise.” Manned Cloud promises to dispense with all the annoyances of modern air travel save one: the long wait to board. Takeoff for the first public flight isn’t until 2020.
elegant natural design.
are larger scale renderings of the plans available for viewing?
A modern Jonah and the Whale story? Looks like a whale, louvers look like baleen and it takes three days to circunavigate the globe.
Love it! I had the urge to go whale watching, and I did and I got to see a Blue Whale! :)))) More of the interiors need to be shown to give an idea of what the interior of the hotel accomodations are like.