Inflatable Imagination Encounter with Jean-Paul Jungmann
When this issue is published, the doors of the Centre Pompidou-Metz will (hopefully!) be open to the public again. With a certain delight, it will therefore be possible to stroll through the exhibition Aerodream: Architecture, Design and Inflatable Structures, 1950-2020 (until August 23, 2021). In order to put the story into perspective, we spoke to one of the pioneers of the inflatable in France, the architect Jean-Paul Jungmann, co-founder of AJS Aérolande and activist of the group UTOPIE.
In the minds of many students in art, design and architecture schools, inflatables and pneumatics have always been seen as technical means at the service of anti-systemic forms, without foundations, therefore ephemeral and nomadic, colourful and often dedicated to festive activities. According to the press release of the Aerodream exhibition, the curators Valentina Moimas and Frédéric Migayrou would like to give an account of “the human dimension of the ‘pneumatic’”. In France, this trend emerged at the end of the 1960s. The context was one of reconstruction, austere, economical prefabrication of hundreds of dwellings—obviously demanded by the post-war period.
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During our meeting, Jean-Paul Jungmann reminded us how much he wanted to break with this monotonous standardisation of reconstruction. Fascinated by American counter-culture, especially its graphic arts (Robert Crumb, Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Richard Corben, etc.), he tried to instil this spirit in his classmates at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris (ENSBA) in the architecture section. But as our comic book lover recalls, it wasn’t easy to place this graphic culture in the hands of the fine arts architects, in fact Jungmann calls them “dunces”. In the end, he tells us, “the technological and cultural atmosphere during our years of study, from 1954 to 1967, made reference to geometries and the work of engineers such as Frei Otto, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Robert Le Ricolais, Konrad Wachsmann, David Georges Emmerich and their publications in the periodicals and fanzines of those years, as well as Wenzel Jamnitzer’s engravings of geometrical bodies, Perspectiva Corporum Regularium (1568), and also the numerous plates by Ernst Haeckel in the 50 volumes of the Challenger mission (1872-76, the first world oceanographic expedition on board the British ship HMS Challenger), representations of the marine wildlife world, in particular radiolaria, those tiny spherical skeletons of plankton that are quite astonishing. In West Berlin, Frei Otto had the opportunity to set up an agency, the Entwicklungszentrum für Leichte Flächentragwerke (Development Centre for Light Load-bearing Surfaces) in 1964, a research and publication organisation financed by the Stromeyer company, which specialised in tensioned structures. It organised the first international symposium on pneumatic structures in May 1967.” Nevertheless, Jean-Paul Jungmann and his associates—Jean Aubert and Antoine Stinco—continued to look across the Channel, in particular the Archigram fanzines and the magazine Architectural Design (AD). But they were students in “archi” then, and had to meet the requirements of a state architect’s diploma.
DIPLOMA AS MANIFESTO
“Our preoccupation with the inflatable began in 1966 when we were looking for a diploma project in architecture. We weren’t at all in the frame of mind of artistic events. Our research was that of student architects, so we were looking for a project with constructional requirements far removed from the events of UFO, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Haus-Rucker-Co, etc.” Our architect with an Alsatian accent adds, “With Aubert and Stinco, we decided to undertake a joint diploma—‘Pneumatic architectures: Three Theoretical Studies from Three Architecture Programmes’—presented in June 1967 at the ENSBA. “Aubert designed A Travelling Stage for 5,000 Spectators; Stinco, A Travelling Exhibition Hall for Everyday Objects and Jungmann, Dyodon: Experimental Pneumatic Housing.
“These projects were published in the press as early as July 1967. François Mathey and François Barré, the founders of the future CCI (1), got wind of our research and put us in contact with inflatable advertising manufacturers in order to develop a series of
pieces of furniture for October 1967, on the occasion of a new department created at the department store Galeries Lafayette, an exhibition designed by Marc Berthier, to design L’Univers des Jeunes [The Universe of the Young].” Activity accelerated, the three young graduates thought they had done the hardest part. The history of the inflatable was partly written.
PNEUMATICS IN CONSTRUCTION When we raise the question of the relative failure of the inflatable and pneumatic in architecture, particularly in France, this is JeanPaul Jungmann’s answer: “Two enlightening events were the erection of the radome (2) at Pleumeur-Bodou, in Brittany, in 1962, and the failure of the French Pavilion for Expo’70 in Osaka. Both provide an insight into the problems that a large inflatable structure could encounter in the 1960s and 1970s.” And then, with a mixture of regret and happiness, he recounts how “for a satellite link with Telstar between Andover’s radome in the United States and Europe, France built the Pleumeur-Bodou complex, and commissioned Birdair to build the radome for 1962. It was an exemplary building site. A first temporary translucent bubble had been installed to allow the assembly of the antenna sheltered from bad weather, but the bubble tore, was repaired and ripped again. Another temporary dome was brought in from the USA, and it held. Once the antenna was installed, the final inflatable dome had to be built, much thicker, weighing 30 tons and transported in a single crate”.This inflatable architecture made a lasting impression on the three members of AJS Aérolande. So much so that, with the group UTOPIE (Jean Aubert, Isabelle Auricoste, Jean Baudrillard, Catherine Cot, Jean-Paul Jungmann, René Loureau, Antoine Stinco and HubertTonka), they used a photograph of the assembly of the inflated sphere from Pleumeur-Bodou as the visual for the poster of their manifesto exhibition Structures Gonflables [Inflatable Structures] (at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, ARC section, in March 1968, at the invitation of Pierre Gaudibert).This exhibition left a lasting impression on the imagination of the artists and art lovers who were lucky enough to visit it. Imagine, you pay for a ticket to see the museum’s collections and find yourself wandering among a zeppelin suspended in the air, tents, a huge kayak, Hans-Walter Müller's module M, to end up sitting on Aerlande furniture in Quasar Khanh’s cylindrical pneumatic house. This exhibition was the culmination of research into technical advances in the field of inflatables. It gave a glimpse of a possible future for pneumatics in architecture, as many industrialists were open to the question. May 68 came and everything was halted.
UTOPIE continued their critical analysis of urban planning, and AJS Aérolande became a commercial company with a catalogue offering a wide range of modular, easily dismantled shelters. The peak, and the end, of the pioneering period of inflatable structures worldwide was undeniably Expo’ 70. Jungmann talks with relish of the setbacks of the French concerning the eternal gap between the idea and its implementation. “As far as the French Pavilion was concerned, the team of architects Denis Sloan and Jean Le Couteur won the competition for this pavilion in 1968, a large inflatable structure with three domes in one piece, but of unequal heights, and another separate one. But faced with uncertainty and delays in the study and the difficulty of developing a special new fabric to be designed to withstand the stresses of domes with large radii of curvature (a thick fabric with a minimum radius of curvature of 2.5 m, therefore transportable only by boat on rolls of at least 5 m in diameter), the French government terminated their contract and subsequently had the same geometry of bubbles in a metal structure built by a Japanese architect and company, and the pavilion was completed in time for the opening of the event. At the same time and for the same exhibition, Walter Bird and his company Birdair, with much more experience, designed and built the American Pavilion using a different inflatable technique, using existing wire ropes and fabrics with much smaller radius of curvature, covering a surface area of 10,000 m2 (l: 83.50 m, L: 142 m).”
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At the end of our discussion, Jean-Paul Jungmann insisted on the consistent use of pneumatics and inflatables in contemporary art. He cites, pell-mell, Choi Jeong Hwa, Takashi Murakami, Paul McCarthy, and insists on the one who, in his eyes, is the finest in the use of stretched fabrics, namely Klaus Pinter, the former member of Haus-Rucker
Co. He is thinking of Rebonds (2002), his installation in the Panthéon. And tells us that architecture has remained on the doorstep of the inflatable. Looking at the list of contemporary architects invited to Metz (Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Nicolas Grimshaw, Arata Isozaki, Herzog & de Meuron, Achim Menges, etc.), there is hope.The architect Didier Faustino seems to support us in this idea. In his project for the Foundation for Contemporary Art in Mexico City (2018), he was confronted with local urban planning regulations concerning scale. He decided to circumvent the constraint by setting up a pneumatic structure. Thus, it will only be inflated for ephemeral events (conferences, performances, etc.). Alas, this architectural work isn’t part of the Aerodream exhibition. To be continued...
(1) The Centre de Création Industrielle (CCI) was founded by François Mathey in 1969 within the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs (UCAD). The CCI joined the Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges-Pompidou in 1972. (2) Contraction of “radar” and “dome”, a radome is a plastic dome protecting a telecommunication antenna from bad weather and onlookers.
Interview conducted by Skype and based on notes written by Jean-Paul Jungmann, for which we thank him warmly.
The exhibition Aerodream will then be presented at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, in Paris, from October 6th, 2021 to February 14th, 2022.
Christophe Le Gac is an architecture graduate (dplg), art and architecture critic and curator. He writes regularly in artpress and L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. Since 2019 he has written a column on the avant-garde in Chroniques d’Architectures.