Date: 20 March 07
Author: Per Kartvedt
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It sounds like some kind of fairy tale and to a certain extent it is, but since this is about architecture there are buildings involved -although these two can disappear.
Let´s start with the Tubaloon
In plain terms: a roofed stage, designed by Snohetta for the Kongsberg Jazzfestival last summer and you have never seen the like of it. And what does it look like? Well, maybe a bird, mabe a plane, maybe a tuba and it is a balloon of a kind.
According to the architects the thing is inspired by "wind instruments and the geometries of the inner ear". Well, whatever. This is now a Tubaloon and it looks as if it has just landed or about to take off. This despite the fact that it weighs three tons and it takes three days to get it up or down.
Technically it is an nflatable tension membrane structure. Architects Snohetta, Structural Engineers Andrea Pedretti, Producer Canobbio. And if you think this sounds like an Italian circus troupe, don´t be surprised to find out that Canobbio have made circus tents for donkeys years.
In practical terms it is the main stage for the Jazz festival and it´s instant icon. Kongsberg itself is a pretty little town, famous in these parts for its silver mines and ski jumpers. All now gone, but past glories lingers on in the historical center of the town, a large kind of square surronded by pretty timber buildings from the 18th and 19th century and dominated by a rather impressive church from 1761.
Except for a few weeks in July when the Tubaloon raises from its winter hibernation, spreads its tail and struts its stuff. Cool music on a hot summer day - You bet.
And for those of you not interested in jazz.
"Nothing like this has ever been made before, made possible only by modern datatechnology", says the architects.
They may be right, it is a hybrid after all but something like this and then some, have been thought of and dreamt about by many. There is the first patented pneumatic roof from 1917 (Lancaster), the Bubble house from 1941, innumerable projects from the US military, Buckminster Fuller, Frei Otto, - the list is long and illustrious and goes on and on. Inflatable membrane structures is at least 90 this year. And there´s probably one just down the road.
Oslo was, in fact, visited by one in the summer of 05. That time in the disguise of a frog, big frog. It sat on an emty parking lot between two key museum buildings in the center of Oslo. Its main pupose was to serve as a temporary exhibtion hall for a summer of exhibitions and events, called "Kiss the Frog." (It was also called "The Art of Transformation" which seems pedantically pedagogical. If you kiss a frog you know!)
And it was green, had a floor area of 1400 sqm. wrapped around an inner courtyard of some 600 sqm. A walk through the frog was about 200 meters. The maximum height of the tube you´re in is13.5 meters. The skin itself is made of an opaque PVC weave with a fire retardant layer. The inside has a white surface allowing projections of film, photo and digital sources to be displayed. The architects also take delight in telling us that the inside pressure is like being under 6cm of water. (How can you do that? Face down?) And it weighs about 3 tons. Big frog indeed.
Loved and hated and kissed by more than a hundred thousand people, for better or worse, the frog is gone now. It may come back somewhere. Its green colour would go nicely on the red tarmac of George Square, Glasgow. Just contact www.mmw.no for your chance to kiss the Frog.
For the specially interested.
Both the Frog and the Tubaloon belongs to a kind of family tree of the ephemeral, of things that come and go away. In this context, to me, the most interesting branch on the family tree, is the architects you found in a French group which named themself Utopie, from the sixties(1967) of course. A rather disparate group of intellectuals and artists who all were engaged somehow in the events of -68. According to unreliable sources they started out in Henri Lefebvre´s kitchen. How French can you get?
Somewhere in the kitchen were three architecture students, Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann, Antoine Stinco, with a message
"You can´t have an inflatable monument". Well, that depends on, most of them probably are, one way or another. But if you follow
this train of thought, pneumatic architecture must be antimonumental, and further down the track, antiauthoritarian, hence revolutionary. Right! They left the group in 1971, but in the meantime they produced a kind of pneumatic morphology and I think it is here you find the immediate ancestors of the Frog and theTubaloon.
The political engagement is long gone from the architectural discourse, but these things has a poetic ephemeral quality, despite three tons of stuff. And the´re funny. Let´s see more of their kind in the summers to come.
