Blur: The Making of Nothing

Blur: The Making of Nothing by Diller, Elizabeth. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780810921238.

Part scrapbook, part anthology of short stories, Blur: the making of nothing traces the creation, from conception to realization, of a media pavilion for the Swiss Expo.02 whose primary materials are steel and fog. The document exposes this process as a complex orchestration of theorists, engineers, meteorologists, contractors, competing fog manufacturers, and government officials within the context of turbulent politics and conflicting concepts of national identity. The book is organized chronologically as a collection of artifacts, including sketches, correspondence, construction drawings, and photographs; narratives can be discovered weaving through one another across the four-year period. The publication is not only the permanent manifestation of a temporary structure; it also documents schemes and ideas abandoned in the course of developing the pavilion.