Exploring the Design and Fabrication of Inflatables

The building materials that help designers or architects achieve their goal of defining and enclosing space are usually concrete, steel, glass or wood. For these materials designers have both empirical data gained from experience and at times complex calculation methods enabling them to use them in their designs in a tangible, reckonable and, consequently, almost risk-free manner. It seems obvious that creating a design with well-known building materials will lead to more or less predictable outcomes. This is a good reason for investigating a design process dealing with air-filled building-elements. Architectural structures look completely different when one employs a “building material” which has not been subjected to either detailed investigations or sophisticated calculations. The “Smart_Air” Design Studio was devised to take a closer look at the unusual building material “air,” which we have only just begun to explore, and to make it the centre of a focused design exercise. The objective was to use “air” or, rather, pneumatic technologies, to arrive at structurally sound solutions for enclosing space, which could be considered a “roof ” in the widest sense of the term.