Abstract/Summary

This paper is a part of the collection of writings accompanying the first retrospective and monographic exhibition of the Spanish architect José Miguel de Prada Poole curated by Antonio Cobo and coproduced by the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC) and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC) under the title ‘José Miguel de Prada Poole and the Perishable Architecture of Soap Bubbles’. The paper discusses methods and creative processes that define Prada Poole’s work in the context of the wide range of ideas and motivations that triggered new conceptions, perceptions, and experiences of space in the 1960s and 1970s, reflecting on their technical, societal, and ecological implications. It also traces new and, at times, unexpected relationships between works written, built or imagined by Prada Poole in the past and the contemporary theories of atmosphere; particularly between Peter Sloterdijk’s notion of the foam city devised in 2004 in the third volume of his Spheres trilogy and the ideas promoted by Prada Poole in 1974 in his text ‘The Perishable Architecture of Soap Bubbles’. To illustrate these relationships, the paper explores a series of pneumatic structures developed by Prada Poole, ultimately drawing attention to the issues that are at the heart of our contemporary debates about the life of buildings, waste and climate change.