Inflatable Architecture TAO Group
When air becomes a structure

Tomás Saraceno's "K21 in orbit"

Suspended high above the museum's piazza, the installation combines a vast three-dimensional net structure with monumental air-filled spheres, creating an environment in which visitors themselves become part of a constantly changing spatial system.

What if an exhibition could change our physical relationship with space?

Suspended more than 25 metres above the ground, in orbit transformed the interior of K21 into an extraordinary three-dimensional environment of tensioned nets, movement and vast air-filled spheres — an installation visitors could enter and experience with their entire bodies.

Structural engineering expertise for this remarkable project included contributions from Prof. Rosemarie Wagner, a long-standing specialist partner (and architect) within our TAO network and working with TAO in several projects. The principles behind structures of this scale — membrane behavior, lightweight construction, pressure, structural interaction and complex geometries — are at the heart of the engineering expertise we bring together today.

For museums, artists and cultural institutions, projects like in orbit demonstrate what becomes possible when art and engineering are developed together: the exhibition is no longer something you look at — it becomes a world you enter.