Markus Heinsdorff: Mobile Spaces

The façades of the pavilions featured the crystalline forms of cut gems, through the use of fabric materials. This book documents the occasion, also presenting experiments with “environmental membranes.”

Transportable, robust, quick to assemble and dismantle, easy to repair and recycle, and usable in different climatic regions—this is what was required of the pavilions that Markus Heinsdorff designed for the presentation of Germany in India 2011–13 (steel and membrane) and the presentation of Germany in China 2007– 10 (bamboo and membrane). 
The textile buildings were used as mobile exhibition, conference, concert, and event venues and toured through a total of ten megacities. As building objects, they also represented the “construction and urbanization themes” of the events. 
The highly innovative structures of the pavilions, which were mostly developed in cooperation with the structural engineers schlaich, bergermann und partner, and the novel textile materials, as well as their exceptional esthetic qualities, make the multifunctional light buildings pioneering prototypes of a new generation of textile building. 
Using photographs and plans, Mobile Spaces presents the various types of pavilion, as well as further experiments with universities and engineers on the subject of “environmental membranes” and statics in extreme lightweight construction.