Spacebuster: Instant Inflatable Architecture

Spacebuster is portable, inflatable pavilion that is used to transform public spaces into areas for the community to gather. A bubble-like dome inflates out of the back of a standard delivery truck and organically adjusts to it’s surroundings, creating a unique structure that changes with different environments. The Spacebuster was created by German design group Raumlabor.

Storefront for Art and Architecture talks about Spacebuster’s recent New York City tour:

From within a hard shell swells the soft bubble, a billowing urban room hatched in the back of a delivery van. This genie in a lamp makes for instant theater, and shows how wind in a bag can make instant architecture. But this is no ordinary pop-up circus tent. Rather than being consumed as entertainment, like a circus act or the dead matter of architecture, Spacebuster consumes its viewers, and they in turn transform it. Touch it, see and be seen through it, drink and debate inside it.

New York is full of invisible walls. The spaces that Spacebuster busts are penned by intangible limits. Space busting is about uncompressing the void, sprouting between the cracks, squeezing the vacuum, enveloping the moment. Ambiguity no longer equates to amnesia. The strange yet banal spectacle of inflation, the making of walls and boundaries, turns out to be an overture to cross those boundaries and infiltrate the volume. Spacebuster mobilizes us to mobilize space.

Enter Spacebuster, the amorphous enigma: A certified building by the Department of Buildings. A licensed vehicle by the Department of Motor Vehicles. A certified street event by the Department of Transportation. An experimental realm-laboratory by Raumlaborberlin. Inhaling inert space, it holds its breath until the space reawakens, if only for a moment. Will the memory last? How will we convert this experience of agile placemaking into everyday practices of urban space busting?

Also check out A Daily Dose of Architecture’s great review of inflatable architecture past and present.

Spacebuster

[via Eyebeam]