Pliable Architectures

☀️ As we approach peak thermal expansion at summer solstice – materials, bodies, air pressure all responding to heat – we're releasing texts from the Anarchive that themselves breathe and expand. Part of the silver reader, this cluster on pliable architectures reaches out to the methods it explores, through publishing formats that flex and flow between words, images, and embedded encounters.

Reaching and responding flow both ways. Your movements set breathing walls in motion while the structure's rhythms reshape how you breathe. Tilted surfaces gently disrupt your balance, teaching you to reach beyond familiar orientations, revealing the rhythm of natural forces and the seasons.

Both approaches create partnerships between bodies and spaces – architecture that responds to your presence while teaching you to respond to forces larger than yourself.

• Close Encounters with UMAA by Cocky Eek
• Leia's Commonplace: Hymn for the Relational by Renske Maria van Dam

Decades of inflatable experiments discover what happens when architecture learns to converse. From paper cones creating intimate acoustic chambers around a single head, to vast pavilions held up by flying stones. 🪨 These structures launch when wind conditions align, anchor against their own buoyancy, teaching you to walk on surfaces where floor becomes wall.

• Inflatable Ancestors by Cocky Eek
• The Sonic Space Headmask by Cocky Eek and Theun Karelse

🧼 A soap bubble finds its perfect curve by feeling pressure from all sides, stretching until forces balance. That same sensing shapes galaxy clusters across cosmic distance 🌌 – membranes responding to invisible pressures, finding optimal form by negotiating with what surrounds them.

Controlled atmospheres work the same way: fumigation fills ship holds with pressurised gas, HVAC systems create breathable bubbles within buildings, inflatable shelters separate inside and outside through air pressure alone. Each boundary learning to hold just enough tension.

• Worlds within Worlds by Paul Prudence
• Hygienically Sealed by Justin Pickard

Carried on a cooling breeze, sounds from an ephemeral garden echo through algorithmic architecture, where robots print cloud patterns reshaped by shadows. Your foot finds uncertain ground as overhead structures catch light no algorithm could have predicted.

• A Cloud Pergola by Maja Kuzmanović and Nik Gaffney, featuring Alisa Andrašek