Smiljan Radic, Installation for Céline, Paris, 2017

From Domus 1020, an excerpt of the article about Chilean architect Smiljan Radic. The January 2018 issue also features a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist and the Hidden House project in Perù.

Radic writes: “In Paris, an inflated bubble, sewn and built from nylon parachute cloth was the solution used to construct the Céline Pavilion for the Paris Fashion Show 2017. The show was to last 12 minutes and was to take place on a set of tennis courts on the outskirts of Paris. A hostile interior that, as I saw it, had to be rendered invisible during the catwalk show.”

“We decided to inflate a kind of simple flat bag, something geometrically banal which would fit to the available space as is grew to its full size, letting the structure of the existing buildings mould its shape, for better or worse. Sometimes it’s not about working with available technology, but the exact opposite.”