Ant Farm’s inflatable pods
Architecture + Agitprop + Installation
It was the early 1970’s and, from a Sausalito warehouse in California, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schreier, and a number of other friends decided to come up with an act of defiance towards the totalitarian mega-narratives of the Modern Movement with a new kind of architecture based on a then-novel material: inflatable polyethylene.
Its lightness, plasticity, affordability, and ease of use promised to jumble together a number of promising aesthetic, environmental and political qualities: flexible, nomadic, temporary, communal, participatory.
Without strict building codes or techniques of representation, Ant Farm’s inflatables presented themselves as a provocative, womb-like, DIY approach for an alternative anti-consumerist world.
Their ideas carried an obvious influence from Frederick Kiesler’s Endless House, David Greene’s Living Pod, and especially Reiner Banham’s environmental technology theories and François Dallegret’s Environment Bubble.
To help spread the meme, they created the Inflatocookbook, an attempt to gather the “information and skills learned in the process and present it in an easily accessible format”. In it, one finds everything needed to become an inflatable expert. Chapters survey: Materials, Air Supply, Anchoring, Plumbing, and, basic Pneumatics.
Still not sure about it? Ant Farm has got you covered.
“In case you hadn’t figured out a reason or excuse, why to build inflatables becomes obvious as soon as you get people inside. The freedom and instability of an environment where the walls are constantly becoming the ceilings and the ceiling the floor and the door is rolling around the ceiling somewhere, releases a lot of energy that is usually confined by the xyz planes of the normal box-room. The new-dimensional space becomes more or less whatever people decide it is — a temple, a funhouse, a suffocation torture device, a pleasure dome. A conference, party, wedding, meeting, regular Saturday afternoon becomes a festival.”
Interested in creating your very own pod? Start cooking now: http://inflatocookbook.kadist.org/
