Photograph of the ‘floating inflatable in situ
During a three-month internship with the architect and engineer Hans-Walter Müller, I assisted him in designing a floating inflatable for the temporary exhibition Le Cyclop hors les murs – revenir pour voir après (The Cyclop outside the walls - coming back to see afterwards), open from the 12th of June to the 12th of September 2021.
The floating inflatable and its ephemeral reflections
The challenge Müller set was not only to design a structure that simply requires air to hold itself up but for that inflatable to also be able to float, in order to fit the chosen site and scenery.
Inspired by biomimicry, air architecture “is governed by the laws of fluids, working with energy. The heart would be the ventilator blowing the air into the volume at 10 to 30 millibars, and the veins would be the plastic skin that is held up by the overpressure of fluids, in this case, the blood in our veins.”
From designing a floating base and measuring its buoyancy to designing a pattern for the plastic cone and understanding how to split the material to optimize its welding, I understood how architecture can be light, organic and souple.