Inflatable Pavilions


Funnel Pavilion
2016, With Lucia Lee, Grant from Cornell Council for the Arts

The Funnel Pavilion is an experiment in creating a large, dynamic interior space from inexpensive mylar and cellophane sheets.

The assembled form is simplistic; situated somewhere between the space age and the organic, yet exuberant thanks to the exchange between the plastics employed.

Visitors experienced a cascade of colors and reflections within the inflated volume, and Funnel seemed to breath as external air pressures shifted and distorted the surface of the ribbed tube.



The resulting inflatable ran over 60 feet long and suspended visitors in a playful miasma of refracted light and undulating surfaces.


FUNnel’s vivid reflections beckoned surprised passersby into a realm

of dancing light and ever shifting topology.





Jello Pavilion
2015, with Lorena del Rio’s Plastics Seminar at Cornell University

The Jello Pavilion is an inflatable structure in the spirit of Ant Farm: the avant- garde group of architects who revolutionized the use of plastics with the ambition of creating flexible, democratic, and fun spaces for people in the 1970s. With a budget around $300 the pavilion is comprised of more than 100 plastic panels of various geometries secured together through a calibrated technique of heating.

This thin plastic shell achieves its volumetric potential with a high-power fan that inflates air in through a tubular appendage in a constant way. A globular shape when fully inflated, the pavilion is easily manipulated into different formal configurations through the fastening of Velcro strips attached throughout the volume.






The Jello Pavilion is included in Phaidon’s “Bubbletecture” book.  [ https://www.phaidon.com/store/architecture/bubbletecture-9780714877778/ ]