Maybe it’s the kids in us, but there’s something about inflatable architecture that’s just plain fascinating. It’s hard to deny the fun factor in blowing something up bigger and bigger and bigger until it’s the size of a building. Temporary and amorphous, it flouts many of the qualities we expect from architecture yet it can create comfortable and beautiful temperature-controlled spaces within minutes in virtually any location. If you love blow-up buildings too, you’ll want to check out a new book offering “a fun guide to everything inflatable.”

Debuting on March 15th and published by Phaidon, “Bubbletecture” is the work of architect Sharon Francis, and features more than 200 examples of inflatable architecture and design dating back to the 1960s.

“Although inflatable objects have been around for more than 200 years, architects, artists, and designers keep rediscovering this deceptively simple – often playful, and occasionally bizarre – technology. Bubbletecture brings together inflatables in every conceivable size, shape, and hue across the realms of architecture, design, art, and fashion. From inflatable dresses and hats to buildings employing cutting-edge technologies, from ingenious chairs, lights, bowls, and even egg cups to children’s toys and provocative art installations, Bubbletecture demonstrates that inflatable design is simply irresistible.”

For those who aren’t familiar, inflatable architecture goes far beyond the bouncy castles you might be picturing, and they’re often less fragile than they sound. Examples include “bubble tent” hotels, minimalist pavilions, sculptural creations for festivals and other events, floating playgrounds and many more inhabitable, interactive works of portable architecture.

Who can resist a gigantic bubble that’s big enough to climb into? Inflatables aren’t just practical, packing down to surprisingly small packages and then popping right back up into sizable structures, they’re also just plain fun, whether they act as portable temporary architecture, offer bouncing surfaces, react to movement with light and sound or just casually perch on top of buildings like it’s no big deal.

Stage for Oerol Festival by Plastique Fantastique

An entire island is used as a stage for events during the Oerol Festival in the Netherlands, and this year, Plastique Fantastique has crafted a special way to enclose some of that space without cutting it off from its surroundings or erecting a permanent structure. This inflatable creation is a transparent orb pierced by a single tree trunk, its skin reflecting the performers as they move

#FreeTheFeed Inflatable Breast Sculpture

A campaign by Mother London to normalize breastfeeding in public, called #freethefeed, placed a gigantic inflatable breast on top of a brick building in the east London district of Shoreditch during Mother’s Day in the UK. For anyone who might be scandalized at such a sight, nearby flyers explained the project’s educational motives. “It’s hard to believe that in 2017, UK mothers still feel watlched and judged when feeding in public, by bottle or breast. This was our Mother’s Day project. A celebration of every woman’s right to decide how and where they feed their children without feeling guilty or embarrassed about their parenting choices.”

Inflatable Infinity Space

Crinkled metallic fabric creates an inflatable silver sphere in which the cosmos seem to be contained. ‘Osmo’ was created by London-based studio loop.ph for the Light Night Canning Town 2014, placed beneath London’s high-traffic A13 flyover to recreate a stretch of star-filled sky that has been lost to development.

SiloSilo by Plastique Fantastique

Creating a series of conference spaces and acting as a backdrop for video projection, a bunch of giant inflated cylinders bring awareness to the use of recycled materials as part of the traveling project SiloSilo. For example, a donut-shaped inflatable called ‘MEDUSA,’ which packs down small enough to transport in a box, represents the amount of plastic garbage produced by the city of Pilsen, Czech Republic in just three days.

Inflatable Floating Playground in Dubai

Partiers bounce, jump and dive off a series of inflatable structures spelling out ‘DUBAI’ in the water at Jumeirah Beach residence. The ‘dubaiTAG’ installation by Wibit Sports is made from nearly 100 modular components to create an inflatable waterpark.

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Deliberately dark and pipe-like to recreate the feel of being in a secret subterranean space, this inflatable nightclub and bar by Bureau A comes complete with blow-up benches, tables and a DJ booth. Constructed entirely from black PVC membrane, ‘Shelter’ was commissioned as a party venue for the Federation of Swiss Architects (better known as Bund Schweizer Architekten) and installed inside the cold, concrete Pavillon Sicli in Geneva.

“The underground fascinates and completes the hygienic and pan optical work of the over-ground,” say the architects. “For one night, the black hole of a neat and well-organized society is revealed as a potential for distortion, a potential of let-go and provoke, with a slight smile, the unsaid and the sweat. The mysterious black vessel lands in the modern space of a highly engendered concrete vault; a great spatial condition to explore the corners of what is hidden.”

The space inside is clearly quite limited and dark, so it would have been interesting to see what it looks like with people inside. The concept of inflatables for temporary spaces certainly isn’t new, but it’s still pretty cool to see these structures show up in unusual shapes and configurations, standing tall within mere moments of arrival on-site and then disappearing so quickly, it’s as if they were never there.

Would the satisfaction that comes with popping bubble wrap scale up as the bubbles get larger and larger, until they’re big enough to cover entire buildings? These blobby bubble-shaped buildings tempt us to find out. Inflatable translucent structures offer space for gardens, bathrooms, museum extensions and even entire parks enclosed to keep out air pollution in a literal representation of the term ‘living in a bubble.’

SKUM Pavilion by Bjarke Ingels Group / BIG

Named ‘SKUM,’ the Danish word for ‘foam,’ this blob-shaped structure is an inflatable balloon pavilion illuminated with colored LED lights by Bjarke Ingels Group / BIG for the CHART Art Fair in Copenhagen. “The idea of using a bouncy castle as material came about because one can create any kind of structure with the material. It is inflatable and easy to pack down and inflate again, but it has been much harder to produce than we thought. The manufacturer almost gave up, and we were under a massive time pressure, but the result is the most beautiful you can imagine.”

Real Bubble Building by DUS Architects

Now here’s a structure that isn’t just bubble-shaped – it’s actually made out of real soap bubbles. Dutch firm DUS created the pavilion in a Rotterdam square using metal frames in five-sided steel pools to create massive geometric bubbles you can stand inside, calling it “the world’s most temporary pavilion.”

Bubble Extension for the Hirschhorn Museum

The firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro was all set to add a wild looking inflatable enhancement to the Smithsonian’s Hirshchorn Museum, creating a venue for two months of special programming, but the design was suspended due to costs. You might imagine that a large translucent fabric ‘bubble’ swelling up out of the museum’s internal courtyard would be less expensive than temporarily roofing it and adding additional covered space along the exterior, but the design was pretty complicated, and the museum board was concerned that costly additional issues with its installation would come up.

Transparent Mobile Bathroom

Would you want to take a bath in a totally transparent bubble with a panoramic vista? This inflatable bathroom pod is intended to be placed in the woods or in rooftops as the ‘ultimate bathroom experience,’ designed after polling groups of people about their dream bathroom. The inflatable structure includes a tub, chair, dresser and basin.

Garden Bubbles for Paris in Winter

This pop-up art installation in Paris by Amaury Gallon inserted lush greenery back into the city in the middle of winter, providing passersby with 15 minutes of relaxation, beauty and fresh air. Four bubble gardens were placed on city sidewalks, each filled with a different type of plants, including a ‘jungle’ and hundreds of orchids.

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Inflatables are good for more than just pool toys and camping beds – they also come in the form of giant tentacles springing from open windows, the world’s largest rubber duck and (literally) gigantic piles of crap. Blow-up buildings can have a practical purpose as mobile architecture, but sometimes, oversized inflatables are just for fun, transforming both interior and exterior environments and bringing shock value to art festivals around the world.

Giant Poo, Pig & Stonehenge

A group of artists came together in the West Kowloon Cultural District of Hong Kong to install oversized inflatable works, including ‘Complex Pile’ by Paul McCarthy, ‘House of Treasures’ by Cao Fei and ‘Sacrilege’ by Jeremy Deller, for an art festival.

Plastic Bubble Environments Transform Interiors

All that’s left of an interior space once these inflatable plastic environments by Penique Productions are put into place is the basic shape and structure of it, all details obscured to create a surreal new environment. The Barcelona-based group inflates massive colorful balloons inside buildings to transform them for special events.

Tentacles, Eyeballs & More by Filthy Luker

French street artist Filthy Luker makes it seem as if gigantic octopi are trying to escape from buildings around the world, and anthropomorphizes trees with inflatable eyeballs.

Inflatable Snow Chalet in Miami Beach

The unlikely sight of a snow-topped ski chalet bobs up and down in the bay beside the now-abandoned Miami Marine Stadium for Art Basel 2013. Entitled ‘Curiosity,’ the giant inflatable structure by Paris-based Galerie Perrotin and French artist duo Kolkoz plays on contrasts. “‘Curiosity’ was the name that was given to the last Mars exploration rover. We have taken this idea of an invader exploring a foreign land and applied it to the snow covered chalet that has set off on a journey and arrived in the middle of a maritime stadium in the hot Florida sun.”

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