Richard Clarkson's Cloud is a thunderstorm you can hang from the ceiling. The cumulus-shaped lamp flickers with lightning, rumbles with thunder through a built-in speaker and reacts when someone walks underneath it. Clarkson, a designer of products, lights and furniture who works between New York and New Zealand, first showed it in 2014.
How the Cloud lamp works
Inside the soft, fibre-covered shell sit LED lights, a speaker and motion sensors. When the sensors pick up movement, the Cloud plays a lightning and thunder show that follows the person below. A remote control can trigger the storm too.
The lamp has more than one mood:
- Thunderstorm mode: flashes of light synchronised with thunder sounds.
- Music mode: the speaker streams music from any Bluetooth device and the lights pulse to the sound.
- Night light: a calm glow with adjustable colour and brightness.
Clarkson's video shows the effect best. It is set to Matt Corby's "Music is Brother".
From design project to product
The Cloud is still made today by Richard Clarkson Studio, which calls its flagship Speaker Cloud "the original Cloud lamp". It is built from polyester fibre over a steel frame, measures about 24 by 15 by 14 inches, and comes alongside simpler versions: an interactive model, lampshade clouds for tables, floors and walls, and a brass mobile. The studio also takes on custom clouds in other materials and finishes for larger projects.
The real thing: how thunder and lightning work
A real thunderstorm is powered by a cumulonimbus cloud that can tower 10 km or more into the sky. Inside it, collisions between ice crystals and soft hail separate electric charges until the difference is large enough for a lightning discharge. The bolt heats the air around it to about 30,000 kelvin (roughly 29,700 °C), around five times hotter than the surface of the Sun. The air expands explosively, and that shock wave is the thunder we hear.
Because light arrives almost instantly and sound covers about a kilometre every three seconds, you can estimate the distance of a storm. Count the seconds between flash and thunder and divide by three for kilometres, or by five for miles. When thunder is audible, the storm is close enough to strike: head indoors and wait until the rumbles have stopped for half an hour.
The Cloud keeps the spectacle and leaves the danger outside, which is exactly why it works so well above a sofa.
Related reading
- Eight Cloud Forms: A Gallery of Structure and Light
- Twenty Cloud Photographs: Shapes, Light and Atmospheric Features
- Lenticular Clouds: How a Still Shape Can Contain Moving Air
- The Krystall floating-hotel concept
- Chicago’s former cold-storage warehouse
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