Soft Spaces: Towards a New Materiality in Architecture

Abstract

The end of the 1960s signifies a shift regarding the materiality of architecture, facilitated by both the technological advances imported into the architectural scene and the emancipatory atmosphere of the 1960s marked with political and cultural upheavals. This shift represents a move away from the dominant modes of space production to the more flexible alternatives, and it is most visible in the experiments of counter-culture architects. During the late 1960s and the early 1970s, this new generation of architects characterized by their radical ideas had been searching for a new materiality to liberate the architectural space from conventional restrictions. Accordingly, the avant-garde architects of this period had started to explore alternative ways towards a “softer” architecture as a challenge to the hard connotations of modernist space. To materialize the shift from hard to soft definitions in architecture, this paper proposes an inquiry into the inflatable architecture idealized by the avant-gardes as the foremost technique for producing soft spaces. In this regard, this paper traces the origins and earlier practices of soft architecture, and thus it focuses on inflatable spaces that had been produced during this period. Consequently, it aims at conceptualizing the softness of architecture by discussing how the material characteristics of inflatable structures contributed to the “softening” of architectural space in terms of both technical and cultural spheres.