The world has failed to understand the seriousness of inflatables. When we encounter the bouncy house periodically and point — “that’s just a bouncy house” —it never is just a bouncy house. These intense and chaotic structures are constructed to disrupt and alter any space by any means, and forcefully make the only program be a space of jumping up and down repeatedly. The constraints and control inflatables have over us as we act upon them are overshadowed by their oftentimes ridiculous colors or themed appearances. But inflatables are much more serious than we think. When erected, the playful structures are often designed to be temporal works, and become installations designed to contrast the redundant sensorial feelings we often encounter on a day to day basis such as the heaviness of columns and walls, or the muted colors of buildings. Inflatables challenge the conventional approach to architecture where structures and objects must always be fixed and permanent, and must conform to rigid codes of standardization. There is nothing careless about the way in which inflatables operate.
How far they can blow up, is always a testing of their materiality limits.
How resilient they are to natural forces, is a reflection of their stability.
How much fun someone acquires, is the sole purpose of their existence. The inflatables deflate at the sight of sadness.
The organic nature of inflatables allows for them to revolt against the normality of architecture, and take on fluid forms that can adapt, expand, or deflate according to its users needs. Monumental inflatable revolutions such as the Red Ball Project by Kurt Perschke or World’s Largest Rubber Duck are international sensations that have changed the narrative for inflatables. People have an urge to interact with them, by any means necessary. The urban intervention that often occurs with these structures go beyond the typical bouncy house site activation. The Red Ball Project, this traveling public art installation, was created to invite people from all across the globe to connect through this giant red ball that is often wedged between buildings or hanging overhead. For the World’s Largest Rubber Duck tour, it became a site attraction of its own. People feel the urge to circle and surround the duck, trying to understand its scale and purpose. Inflatables have gone beyond the goofy connotations it often has attached to itself, becoming more than just big red balls or bouncy houses. (Although those are always necessary interventions.) Inflatables have become sites of learning, gathering, recreation, and even protest, taking on serious programmatic use that can influence the attitudes of urban environments and how people should interact with the structure. Projects such as the Inflato Dumpster in New York City that turned a recycled dumpster into a mobile learning center and Second Dome in London that is a multi-room creative workshop space both contribute to this idea of meaningful urban intervention. In doing so, these projects activate sites such as streets and parks that are meant for public
engagement, becoming serious places of learning and play.
Though many remarkable inflatable works have been executed and curated through books such as Bubbletecture, it is also important to look at the simplicity of bouncy houses as a continued precedent for this argument. The seriousness of bouncy houses should not be discredited for their often multi-colored, patchedworked design, or their programmatic use for small children to jump inside. Rather, the bouncy house should be approached as a way to incorporate inflatables into urban contexts that feel too constrained and suffocating. The seriousness of inflatables must unravel these urban spaces into more unserious ones.
Inflatocookbook by Ant Farm is one text I often referred to when curating this argument, and continues to be a relevant example of how inflatables have become elevated structures determined to be regarded as serious architecture projects. This book serves as a guide to make your own inflatable from scratch, utilizing easy to find plastic materials to create different types of inflatables. There are detailed guides that are as niche as creating your own inflatable plumbing and joinery, to larger scale guides depicting the various dome shaped inflatables one could create such as the turbodome, hexapillow, or spare tire. This guide not only served the purpose of making inflatable architecture something accessible to anyone, but it was one of the first few publications solely focused on this type of architecture, making a stance on its importance in the discipline. Both Bubbletecture and Inflatocookbook are publications that continue to rewrite the narrative about inflatables, and encourage aspiring architects to consider other methods of space. What draws me to continue pursuing this interest in inflatable architecture is how much of an impact these notorious silly spaces can really have on us. Apart from being fun spaces to socialize and interact with, there’s also the aspect of inflatables where they fundamentally alter our emotional relationship to the built environment. They ask to be leaned on, pushed against, fallen into. In doing so, they dissolve the invisible barriers that conventional architecture often reinforces between people and their surroundings. Though most of the world won’t be dominated by inflatables any time soon, ordinary bouncy houses prevail as that complex object is not good enough for Bubbletecture but more than enough for its purpose and users. They fall right in the middle, being sophisticated in their own goofy way.
