Utopia’s Bubbles: Pneumatic Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s as a Vehicle for Urban Exhibitionism

Abstract

This paper investigates the “exhibitionist” nature of pneumatic architecture of the 1960s and 1970s and its relationship to the political utopianism of that time. In exploring the causes of its emergence and sudden demise during an era marked by deep political tensions, the paper looks at some of the contradictory characteristics of the inhabitable pneumatic sphere: it is tense but playful, hermetic but transparent, self-contained but dependent. The capacity of captured air to reveal “other airs” is pursued by making use of Peter Sloterdijk’s notion of explication, in an exploration that argues ultimately for a renewed attitude towards air: one that creates “other airs” not by sealing them off from the one in which we live, but by bringing them temporarily into existence within it.

Keywords:

• air
• atmosphere
• pneumatic architecture
• Peter Sloterdijk
• explication

Notes

¹ Documenta 4’s committee had twenty-four members.

² “Befragung der Realität – Bildwelten heute.”

³ “Büro der Organization für direkte Demokratie durch Volkabstimmung.”

⁴ Interview with Haus-Rucker-Co. member Zamp Kelp, 2008. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JkgSWgqQqM (accessed January 2015).

⁵ Another pneumatic project exhibited at D5 was Belgian artist Panamarenko’s gigantic AeroModeller. In the form of a zeppelin, the work hinted at sunken dreams of transcending the burden of ordinary life.

⁶ Banham, Reyner, “Monumental Windbags,” New Society 11, no. 290 (1968): 569–70, 569.

⁷ Jean Baudrillard, Utopia Deferred: Writings from Utopie (1967–1978) (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e) and Los Angeles: MIT Press, 2006), 34.

⁸ Marc Dessauce, The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in ’68 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 13.

⁹ Baudrillard, Utopia Deferred, 13.

¹⁰ Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e) and Los Angeles: MIT Press, (2004) 2009), 47, 9, 107. The German title is Luftbeben, or “Air Quake.”

¹¹ The discussion here is concerned mainly with visual characteristics of More’s Utopia and Haus-Rucker-Co.’s Oasis, not with the huge differences in the cultural, political and social background against which these representations came into existence.

¹² Thomas More, Utopia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, (1516) 1999), 49.

¹³ “We exist on the bottom of an ocean composed of the element air; beyond doubt that air does possess weight.” Torricelli is writing to a friend in 1644; John Barrow, The Book of Nothing (London: Vintage, 2001), 99.

¹⁴ Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 156. Fried is borrowing the term “vengeance” from Clement Greenberg.

¹⁵ More, Utopia, 49.

¹⁶ Only if you rupture it does it die.

¹⁷ Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham, Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 219.

¹⁸ Paul Carter, “Pressure: The Political Economy of Air,” Journal of Architecture 19, no. 2 (2014): 180.

¹⁹ Ibid., 174.

²⁰ Ibid., 168.

²¹ Bruno Latour, “Air,” in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 107.

²² More, Utopia, 49.

²³ During a visit to the 2010 exhibition “Climate Capsules: Means of Surviving Disaster” at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, Germany, where a replica of the Haus-Rucker-Co. bubble was displayed, I experienced the choreography of access. When I finally entered the bubble, I was acutely aware of being on display. Part of the art object, I watched city life passing by. The visual quality of the plastic membrane was almost as good as that of glass; the aural and olfactory experience was muted and skewed.

²⁴ A similar umbilical cord once connected Utopia with the mainland. “Howbeit, as they say and as the fashion of the place itself doth partly show, it was not ever compassed about with the sea […] King Utopus […] caused fifteen miles space of uplandish ground, where the sea had no passage, to be cut and digged up. And so brought the sea round about the land”; More, Utopia, 50. So the peninsula of Utopia became an island when Utopus cut the life support. A relationship of hierarchical dependency became one of equal trading partners.

²⁵ Latour, “Air,” 105.

²⁶ Ibid., 107.

²⁷ Dessauce, Inflatable Moment, 13.

²⁸ Baudrillard, Utopia Deferred, 13.

²⁹ Dessauce, Inflatable Moment, 37. Lefebvre’s explorations of urban theory appear throughout his work, and were familiar from his lectures at the new University of Nanterre, which he joined in 1965. Le droit à la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968), La révolution urbaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) and La production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos, 1974) between them indicate the tenor of his thoughts.

³⁰ Baudrillard, Utopia Deferred, 13, 14.

³¹ Clyde Thogmartin, The National Daily Press of France (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1998), 206.

³² One of Baudrillard’s contributions for Utopie is titled “Play and the Police”; Baudrillard Utopia Deferred, 36.

³³ Dessauce, Inflatable Moment, 13.

³⁴ Baudrillard, Utopia Deferred, 13.

³⁵ Thomas Herzog, Pneumatic Structures: A Handbook of Inflatable Architecture (London: Crosby Lockwood Staples, 1976), 103.

³⁶ Dessauce, Inflatable Moment, 64.

³⁷ Herzog, Pneumatic Structures, 103.

³⁸ Baudrillard, Utopia Deferred, 17.

³⁹ Ibid., 35.

⁴⁰ Carter, “Pressure,” 168.

⁴¹ With the introduction of ETFE foil, air cushions have become a favorite façade option for prestigious projects such as the National Aquatic Center in Beijing, Herzog & de Meuron’s Allianz arena in Munich, or Cloud 9’s MediaTic building in Barcelona.

⁴² Latour, “Air,” 107.

⁴³ Barrow, Book of Nothing, 99. See note 13, above.

⁴⁴ Carter, “Pressure,” 180. The architect’s task, according to Carter, is to be the dramaturge of turbulences; ibid, 168.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wiltrud Simbürger

Wiltrud Simbürger is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program for Architectural Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College of London, and works as a research associate in Landscape Architecture at HafenCity University in Hamburg. She holds an M.Arch. degree and an M.Sc. in Design Research from the University of Michigan. She also has a master’s degree in Physics from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany.