The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in '68 by Marc Dessauce
To a group of architecture students at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the turbulent year 1968, the idea of the inflatable held a promise of mobility, movement, energy and escape. With this in mind, the Utopie group (as they called themselves) designed a series of pneumatic buildings, furniture, and environments, all heavily influenced by American military structures and comic books as well as by the work of Buckminster Fuller, Henri Lefebvre, and Jean Baudrillard. This book documents this intersection of architectural, social, and political history, as it presents a complete annotated catalogue of the designs of the Utopie architects alongside similar structures from the period.