Catalogue de l’exposition structures gonflables, mars 1968 : précédé d’un Essai sur technique et société, de Considérations inactuelles sur le gonflable et de Particularité des structures gonflables.

The catalogue Structures gonflables accompanied the March 1968 exhibition of inflatable objects and pneumatic architecture at the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art, which was organized by members of Utopie, a group of architects, urbanists, and sociologists founded in 1967 in Paris.  The exhibition presented a broad selection of inflatable structures, ranging from industrial products to experimental architectural design. In the catalogue, the Utopie architects Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann, and Antoine Stinco establish an inventory of diverse objects through a combination of photographs and technical object descriptions. These include terrestrial, marine, and space vehicles, balloons, scientific tools, inflatable vests and clothing,  event and temporary structures, shelters, furniture, beach toys, advertising products, as well as works of art and architectural projects.  The exhibition presents a radical intervention in French institutional exhibition practice in that, as the museum’s curator Pierre Gaudibert wrote in his introduction to the catalogue, the “’aesthetics of everyday life’ penetrate the universe of museums that have hitherto constituted its negation through its conservation of unique, rare, used objects, torn from the fabric of everyday life.” [1] Furthermore, the catalogue features three designs by the Utopie architects: Un hall itinerant d’exposition d’objets de la vie quotidienne by Antoine Stinco, designed for traveling exhibitions of everyday objects, Un podium itinerant pour 5 000 spectateurs, a large-capacity inflatable dome to be used for sport, music, and entertainment events, as well as Jean-Paul Jungmann’s Dyodon, a prototype of experimental pneumatic housing that was meant to be fully inflatable, including its external and internal structure, equipment, and furniture.[2]  While Jean Aubert offers a more technical characterization of what constitutes the “inflatable” in his text “Particularité des structures gonflables”, the exhibition catalogue also features essays by other Utopie members, which add a more theoretical and philosophical dimension to the publication. The ‘Essai sur technique et société’ by the landscape architect Isabelle Auricoste and the sociologist and urban planner Hubert Tonka provides a critical investigation of the relationship between society and techniques/technology and the way in which they are informed by ideology and the social imaginary. In their contribution, Claude and Leon Gaignebet present a history of ideas and semantic and symbolic concepts related to the development of inflatable structures.The catalogue thus demonstrates Utopie’s fascination with the potential of pneumatics and inflatable structures as alternative models for architectural theory and practice, with an emphasis on ephemerality, malleability, and mobility.

[1] Pierre Gaudibert, “Présentation,” in Catalogue de l’exposition structures gonflables (Paris: Animation, Recherche, Confrontation, Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1968): 5 (translated by Barbora Bartunkova).

[2] Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann, and Antoine Stinco, “Structures gonflables, nomenclature des objets exposés, in Catalogue de l’exposition structures gonflables (Paris: Animation, Recherche, Confrontation, Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1968): 76-77.