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In the late Sixties, inflatable environments and furniture were seen as an antimonumental--and therefore antiestablishment--answer to the desire for emancipation through technology. (Courtesy Architectural League of New York) |
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| The ephemeral structures that anticipated the revolution of 1968
find new life in a traveling exhibition. by Joan Ockman 1967 was the last year that oversize presentation drawings in the grand compositional manner were submitted for diploma projects at the École des Beaux-Arts. One year later the academic bastion of the French architectural establishment was rocked by student strikes, overturning more than a century of stultifying tradition. So it was prophetic that the wash-and-ink renderings three graduating architects hung on the venerable walls that final year were for inflatable structures. The pneumatic designs of Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann, and Antoine Stinco--the architectural contingent of a radical group called Utopie, founded the same year--were both a critique of and a countermetaphor for the bombastic academicism that had inflated an antiquated educational system to the point of explosion. "The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in '68," a traveling exhibition at the Architectural League of New York through August 28, evokes the utopian imagination that inspired those ultimately ephemeral "events of May." The designs of the three architects--who also established a commercial firm called Aerolande in 1967 to manufacture inflatable furniture--offer a vivid image of the countercultural preoccupations, Pop fashions, and techno-enthusiasm of the 1960s avant-garde. Aubert's design was for a traveling theater for 5,000 spectators, transported by a fleet of trucks. The 30-ton movable festival was surmounted by a monumental geodesic dome self-supported by air-inflated tubes. Stinco produced a mobile exhibition hall for the display of everyday objects, a sort of agitprop salon of domestic equipment. Its organic form was derived from German engineer Frei Otto's experiments on the pneumatic properties of soap bubbles, while its program was inspired by the philosophy of everyday life propounded by Henri Lefebvre, the French Marxist who was Utopie's primary mentor. Jungmann's project, closest to science fiction but technically detailed, was a pneumatic dwelling called the Dyodon, after a species of fish that puffs itself up when threatened. A grotesque, multimorphous cluster of cellular spaces joined by a complex geometry of pressurized membranes and air locks, this soft living machine could be adapted to any topography, suspended in the air, or floated on water. Equipped for sybaritic living, it contained everything from play and guest rooms to a conservatory and an indoor swimming pool. Interest in inflatables, in fact, had existed for at least half a century. As early as 1917, a pioneering British engineer, Frederick William Lanchester, took out a patent for a pneumatic roof, and by World War II large-scale inflatable military structures were being produced by American and German manufacturers. California architect Wallace Neff invented one of the first domestic applications of the technology in 1941, using a balloon as a frame for a sprayed-concrete Bubble house. When the 11-foot-high shell dried, another layer of concrete and mesh was added, and the balloon was deflated so it could be reused. After the war, inflatable structures continued to be developed in the United States by the engineer Walter Bird (who founded the company Bird-air in 1956), the architect Victor Lundy (who worked with Bird on a facility for the Atomic Energy Commission), and Buckminster Fuller. Frei Otto published his systematic studies of pneumatics in 1962. In France, Robert Le Ricolais's elegant investigations of structural forms and Jean Prouvé's engineering innovations (although not specifically related to inflatables) stimulated interest in experimental structures.Aesthetic possibilities also began to be imagined. At the Bauhaus, László Moholy-Nagy and others envisioned air walls and air-supported furniture. By the Fifties, even Frank Lloyd Wright got into the act, designing an Air House for the U.S. Rubber Company. But in the mid-Sixties pneumatics became an expression of the zeitgeist. Superseding earlier megastructure fantasies, the blow-up structure was seen as an antimonumental--and therefore antiestablishment--answer to the avant-garde's desire for emancipation through technology. Fluidly indeterminate, user-oriented, sensuous, and mobile, it seemed responsive to a dawning eco-consciousness on the part of consumers who demanded instant gratification and throwaway expendability. Reyner Banham, father figure to the British group Archigram, envisioned an "unhouse" in 1965, a plastic bubble dome inflated by air-conditioning output. Archigram abandoned its imagery of "control" (expressed in mechanistic megastructures) for that of "choice" and seized on the inflated auto-enviornment with projects like David Greene's Living Pod and Michael Webb's Cushicles. Meanwhile, in Vienna, Haus-Rucker-Co and Coop Himmelblau made the poetics of the inflatable palpable, interpreting it as a prosthetic extension, an erotic membrane, a dream world, and a happening. With Archigram's Instant City of 1968--71, the fantasy of transformable and mobile equipment reached a festive apotheosis. A symbol of the mobility and instantaneity of idea transfer in the new global village, the inflatable was now a lifestyle phenomenon from London, Paris, and Vienna to Italy and Japan, manifesting itself not only in furniture but also in film sets and haute couture. (Don't miss the stills in the exhibition from the film version of Boris Vian's L'Écume des Jours or the dress by Courrèges.) What distinguished the French pneumatic utopia, however, was its volatile alliance with radical politics. Besides the three architects in the group, the founding members of Utopie included Jean Baudrillard, Hubert Tonka, Isabelle Auricoste, René Lourau, and Catherine Cot. These young urbanists and sociologists were influenced by Lefebvre as well as by Guy Debord and the Situationists. Their critique of an alienated consumer society was matched by their fierce opposition to the French government's repressive urban policies and bleak postwar housing. The first issue of Utopie's eponymous journal--a mix of urban criticism, utopian theory, satirical cartoons, and "detourned" advertisements--appeared in May 1967. The following March, the three architects organized "Structures Gonflables" at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, an ebullient survey of the inflatable idea from engineering to mass culture to happenings. However, at a time when student protests were escalating--and Utopie was centrally involved in the action--the show revealed the political irrelevance of the inflatable idea. Despite the architects' insistence on the importance of "a social practice of architecture," the relationship between the Pneu world (as it was dubbed by the British magazine A.D.) and revolutionary theory was, at best, vague. During the late Sixties, virtually every form of architectural production, however experimental or ephemeral, was questioned by leftist intellectuals as complicit with the dominant power system. Diagnosed by Manfredo Tafuri in Theories and History of Architecture (1968), this "crisis of the object" was expressed in the dystopian imagery of "paper architects" like Superstudio and Archizoom. Baudrillard, who emerged as Utopie's primary theoretician with the publication of The System of Objects in 1968, arrived at a similarly nihilistic conclusion, condemning architecture's infatuation with technology as a product of late capitalist society. In this context, the marriage between pneumatics and politics, like the revolution of 1968 itself, was destined to be short-lived. The architects formally left the group in 1971, returning (in the case of Aubert and Jungmann) to teach in the reorganized Beaux-Arts school or eventually (in Stinco's case) to conventional office practice. The journal Utopie survived another decade, sans architects. Meanwhile, Baudrillard was led by his own inexorable logic to proclaim the end of a political economy based on material objects and the advent of one based on an endless replication of simulacra. Ironically, while the original group and its ideas have remained obscure until now, Baudrillard has become a superstar theorist. Self-appointed agent provocateur, he continues to issue prophecies about an apocalyptic hyperreality in which all that is solid has melted into air. Joan Ockman, an architectural historian and critic, teaches at Columbia University. |
Keywords:
inflatable, Utopia, Sixties, revolution