Cloud Nautilus | 云螺
This modern concrete incense holder (or incense burner) is part of a series where we try to imagine the essential elements of architecture buried in our collective unconsciousness, comprised of stairs, platforms and towers that recall a place familiar but distant at the same time. This is an architectural folly in miniature, a monument to some forgotten event.
Third in the Cloud series of incense burners, the Cloud Nautilus consists of a spiral staircase that draws smaller and deeper into a central well. Instead of spreading the backflow incense plume outwards, the plume meanders along the steps before gathering in the center to create a mysterious pool of fog with an indecipherable depth.
Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument.
-Adolf Loos, 1910 Architecture
