The breathing zone

© Bellastock photo © Felicie Botton [taken from Popupcity web page]

Bellastock mixes recycled plastics with wind power and human breath to build a temporary city. The desertic landscape inhabited by one geodesic structure and bubble-like shelters bridges the gap between the utopian appropriation of new territories at Drop city, the pop-up installations of Raumlabor - spacebuster - and the experiments of Buckminster Fuller. 


© Bellastock photo © Guy Vacheret

The project which sounds light and simple also involves the complex logistics of living from scratch (mobile kitchen, sheltered dormitory spaces, waste recycling and agency of hundreds of architects and artists).


© Hans walter Muller

Bellastock cites the pioneer of inflatable architecture Hans walter Muller as influence : his work embraces the idea of nomadic, moving, walking architecture for a transient man; like Gilles Clement's idea of a moving, walking garden in landscape design.


© Bellastock / photo © Guy Vacheret

Bellastock's bubble city has a TAZ quality : a fleeting, poetic redefining of the social contours of space informed by working and breathing; the re-invention of the spatial environment as a place in between, a meeting point between blurred domestic and social dimensions.

An area of outstanding unnatural beauty

Making do and getting by © Richard Wentworth

The narratives of Making do and getting by record hypothetic urban gestures, scenarios made out of "nothing", in a state of deambulation, of non-directed action. But also an intuitive sense of timing and spatial direction. As Francis Alÿs puts it : sometimes to make something is really to make nothing; and paradoxically, sometimes to make nothing is to make something.


An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty © Artangel © Richard Wentworth


Playful hazards led Wentworth through his project An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty : it took time to understand what to do as Artangel gave him too much freedom. At the time King Cross' hectic crossroads carried the perfumes of a red light district, the Eurostar tunnel was still being raised and the area was mostly industrial, derelict, not an obvious place for art but a place he was found of. 


© Container city @ Trinity Buoy Wharf

After visiting the original Container City at Trinity Buoy wharf, where stacked shipping containers are recycled into living modules, Wentworth thought of using a viewing platform. The idea informed the choice of a site, a General Plumbing Supplies store overlooking King Cross station with ceilings high enough to build a staircase and install a periscope above the roofs.
To use the space seen from the top of the staircase down into the store, Wentworth needed to create a kind of action.
This explains the idea of a ping-pong tournament and tables imprinted with A to Z map, turning the local warehouse into a meeting place, a geographical site for observation.
The viewers who entered the space didn't always know what to make of it but it gave them a right to their city, a right for leisure and play. Above all, it created a place out of time, need and purpose.