Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Is to be human to float among the clouds, or to steer our destiny through the universe? This paper examines the entanglement of two decades in recent centuries when architecture, inspired by aeronautics, confronted this question. First, it makes explicit that the invention of ballooning in 1783 was the condition of possibility for the late-eighteenth century imaginations of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. Studies of the physical atmosphere and reflections on the sublime experience of flight reverberate through several of their visionary projects. Yet, the balloon staunchly refused to be steered — it was more like a cloud than a bird (Hugo, 1868). Empirical science begrudgingly gave up on ballooning. In pursuit of kilometers, later aeronautics prioritized controlled enclosure. Architecture, in parallel, sought a mechanized “well-tempered environment” (Banham, 1969). Between lunar missions and late modernism, both disciplines reached peak velocity in the 1960s. This is the second decade under study. As distance from Earth again shook our sense of place, multiple texts and exhibitions resuscitated Ledoux and Boullée across the West. Architects returned to elemental geometries to ponder the cosmic, this time with inflatable structures. Ideologies of enclosure underwrote techniques for space travel and modern architecture; inflatable ‘bubbles’ were designed to leak. Like the balloon, these breathing, creaturely environments visibly registered human and non-human forces. In the paper, inflatables from the networked practices of Ant Farm, Utopie, Haus-Rucker-Co, and Graham Stevens show that the moon landing renewed our commitment to inhabiting the Earth. Taken together, they articulate a “post-lunar” imaginary.