Today’s Architects Are Obsessed With Inflatable DesignHere’s Why – Co.Design (blog)

By Diana Budds 05.02.17 | 9:00 am

Utopian architects tend to be irrationally confident that their work will make the world a better place; even if their designs never quite deliver in the real world, theyre damn convincing as images. Inflatable design, in particular, has been inextricable from architectural constructs of utopia for decadesthough its never fully taken off.The New Inflatable Moment, a new exhibition at BSA Space, home of the Boston Society of Architects, dives into why.

Inflatables are big, cheap, easy to make, and transform life into this magic bubble, Mary E. Hale, co-curator of the exhibition, with Katarzyna Balug, says. And now, theyre experiencing a renaissance, driven by cultural, political, and economic forces.

The inflatable experiments of the 1960s and 70s are seared into my memory as the embodiment of utopian architecture. Take Ant Farm, an experimental art collective active in the 1960s and 70s. Its enormous pillows, as it called its inflatable spaces, were made from tape and polyethylene (the most common type of plastic), and inflated by normal fans. They were the definition of counterculture architecture: Anyone could make them, they were inexpensive, and they could be constructed virtually anywhere. Their shifting, organic shapes were the opposite of Modernisms dictatorial emphasis on perfect forms and proportions. Naked hippies loved them. Rebellious architects, too.

You walk inside and its a complete subversion of Modernism, Hale says. Modern architecture is regimented and regular; its right-angles heaviness. Here youre in a bubble, these translucent environments where theres no structure. Its a membrane held aloft by a fan. Its so simple and subverts everything about Modernism.

But Hale and Balug trace designs fascination with blow-ups all the way back to 1783when Jean-Franois Piltre de Rozier and Franois Laurent dArlandes piloted the first manned, untethered hot air balloon flight over Paris.

The domain of the sky wasnt just for gods, it was also for man who could achieve flight through science, Balug says. Traditionally a utopia is an island that you go to through boats, sails, and wind. The idea of inflatables as utopia is that its a vehicle, its this hot air balloon taking you to there. In the 20th century, the bubble becomes a space enclosed from the world. You go in the bubble and escape.

Haus Rucker Co, Yellow-Heart/Gelbes Hertz. 1967-8. [Photo: courtesy of Gnter Zamp Kelp]Like Ant Farm, other utopian architects have used inflatables to create intense, transformative environments. In 1967, Haus Rucker, an experimental group from Vienna that eventually moved to New York, created Yellow Heart, an inflatable space that people experienced while wearing helmets that obscured their vision and produced pulsing sounds. Youre transformed telepathically to another realm, Balug describes. This mind-altering environment was recreating what Timothy Leary wanted to do with LSD.

In 1974, the British artist Graham Stevens began developing Desert Cloud, a pneumatic structure that functioned as a self-sufficient environment in the desert. Created at the peak of the OPEC oil crisis, the mylar structure was a passive system that naturally heated up air, causing it to levitate, while its shape created shade and collected condensed moisture. Stevens was a pioneer in studying how inflatables can make the world a better place by experimenting with physical principals, Hale says. Its this perfect architectural system that shows what would be possible if we use creativity to harness energy on the earth and free ourselves from fossil fuels.

Graham Stevens, Desert Cloud, 1972-2004. [Photo: courtesy of Graham Stevens and William McLean]So why havent any of these ambitious ideas taken off in the real world?

We mostly focus on the positive aspects of the bubble, Hale says. It seems that any actual utopian experiment thats been deployed has not been successful. The bubble, just like a balloon, it pops or loses gas. Its not meant to last. The medium comes and goes in artistic use and inflates and deflates the way a utopian ideal can.

Hale and Balug used Googles Ngram searchwhich chartsthe usage of keywords and phrases over timeto see how often inflatable architecture appeared in experimental-architecture writing over the last few decades. They discovered that an uptick began around 2005 and 2006. It madesense, since some of the social and political themes from the aughtseconomic inequality, war, resource scarcitymirrored those from the late 60s and 70s. The same forces that fostered the golden age of inflatables fueled its recent renaissance.

Were thinking it has to do with the political and ecological climate weve had since the great recession, Balug says. The systems were grappling with and are being underminedlike the financial system and environmentalismtheres nowhere to go without completely reimagining them. Theres a spirit of abandon, that nothing we know is working so were revisiting inflatables in a new way.

UtopieJean-Paul Jungmann, DyodonHabitation Pneumatique Exprimentale, 1967, Paris. [Photo: courtesy of Smiljan Radic, New York]Today, contemporary architects are channeling the visual culture associated with inflatables and appropriating its message, but the technology, and the expectation of what inflatables can achieve, is more nuanced. Its not just about escapism and abandoning cruel reality for an idyllic space. While some architects are still trying to propose a sweeping vision of utopia, many are attempting to have measurable impact. Maybe were searching for ideals in projects from the 60s, but were dealing with contemporary building technology and budgets, Hale says.

At the Hirshhorn museum, in Washington, D.C., Diller Scofidio + Renfro built an inflatable bubble to enclose the brutalist structures courtyard for special events. Toms Saraceno, an architect from Argentina, is experimenting with the idea ofself-sufficient pneumatic structures that levitate and create their own cities without being hemmed in by the construct of nationality. Plastique Fantastique, a Berlin-based studio, is using pneumatic structures to create pop-up community spaces.

Counterculture may have driven the inflatables of the 70s, but over the past decade, inflatable architecture has grown up, cut its hair, and moved from an artistic pie-in-the sky pursuit to something more practical and applied. For Foster + Partners, blow-up architecture serves a highly technical and specific purposeas a potential material for buildings on Mars. In Cornwall, U.K., Grimshaw used inflatables to construct biomes for the Eden Project, a permanent botanical garden.

That gets into another aspect of how were thinking about the future, Balug says. Were forecasting; were no longer imaging this perfect society. We run tests and analyses that predict, rather than imagine, the future.

Foster + Partners and European Space Agency, Lunar Base, 2012. [Photo: courtesy of Foster + Partners]Hale and Balug hope their exhibition rekindles architects experimental sideespecially for general practitioners who engage with these subjects in architecture school but dont in practiceand gets non-architects excited about this type of forward-thinking design.

I hope people come though the show with an altered perspective on whats possible in the world, Hale says. [Sometimes] its hard to remember what the essence of what we do is, which is create thoughtful, inspiring spaces for human habitation and life. Thats exemplified in these projects.

Diana Budds is a New Yorkbased writer covering design and the built environment.

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Today's Architects Are Obsessed With Inflatable DesignHere's Why - Co.Design (blog)