German architect Hans-Walter Müller has been living in an inflatable house for over 50 years, where a constantly humming motor maintains the air pressure that keeps his unique home standing. Born in 1935 in Worms, Germany, Müller has dedicated his career to exploring the possibilities of pneumatic architecture, creating transparent plastic igloos and experimenting with forms that shift and float through the power of air.

Müller's groundbreaking work is now being celebrated at the Luftmuseum in Amberg through the exhibition "Monsieur Luftarchitektur," running until September 14, 2025. This marks the first solo exhibition and retrospective of the visionary air architect in Germany, offering visitors a unique look into his work that emphasizes impermanence and imagination over traditional building methods.

After studying architecture and engineering in Darmstadt, Müller continued his education at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. From the beginning of his career, he challenged conventional static architecture, envisioning structures defined by air, movement, and temporary existence rather than weight and rigidity. Known in Germany as the "Architekt der Lüfte" (architect of air), Müller describes his creations as "architecture of movement," rejecting fixed forms in favor of dynamic and ever-changing structures.

Müller constructs his innovative buildings using high-frequency welding machines to join cut plastic patterns into large-scale rooms and interconnected spaces. These lightweight constructions use colored, opaque, or transparent materials and can be easily moved from one location to another. Over the decades, he has developed sophisticated fastening systems and solutions for air exchange and pressure management at entry points.

Throughout his career, Müller's single-walled air-supported structures have served various purposes, including theaters, exhibition spaces, mobile studios, temporary shopping venues, and emergency shelters in humanitarian situations. His domes, roofs, and inflatable rooms are scattered across the globe, creating atmospheric and temporary spatial experiences that challenge traditional notions of architecture.

Müller's collaborations span art, architecture, and performance sectors. In 1970, he created an airborne stage featuring set design by renowned artist Andy Warhol. A year later, he developed an inflatable studio for French artist Jean Dubuffet. He also worked alongside Frei Otto, the architect famous for the tensile roof of the Munich Olympic Stadium. However, his most iconic project remains his inflatable house, built in 1971 and still his residence outside Paris, serving as both a personal manifesto and architectural prototype.

While Müller played a defining role in popularizing inflatable architecture, he wasn't alone in reimagining how air and plastic could transform the built environment. The roots of pneumatic design trace back to 1948, when American engineer Walter Bird developed the first inflatable dome to protect military radar systems from weather conditions. These early innovations laid the foundation for a new architectural vocabulary that favored adaptability over traditional solid construction.

This architectural movement gained significant momentum in the 1960s and reached a symbolic peak at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, which became a landmark event for experimental architecture. Among the most remarkable structures was the Fuji Group Pavilion by Yutaka Murata, featuring a circular design with a 50-meter diameter that made it the world's largest air-inflated structure at the time. The pavilion consisted of sixteen identical air-filled arches with a geometric twist, where central arches followed semicircular profiles while those positioned toward the ends narrowed at the base, causing their peaks to rise higher.

Two years later, the Austrian collective Haus-Rucker-Co pushed pneumatic design into radical art and institutional critique territory. Their project "Oase No. 7," created for Documenta 5 in 1972, temporarily transformed the neoclassical facade of the Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany. The installation featured a transparent PVC sphere eight meters in diameter, mounted on a steel ring structure that extended outward from a museum window. Visitors accessed the inflated orb through a walkway piercing the building's wall, discovering a surreal micro-environment complete with plastic palm trees, a hammock, and a red flag.

In contemporary practice, pneumatic architecture continues evolving as a relevant design strategy addressing today's environmental and social challenges. For Switzerland's contribution to Expo 2025 in Osaka, Manuel Herz Architects, collaborating with researchers from the Kyoto Institute of Technology, have developed a pavilion composed largely of pressurized, air-inflated spheres made from recyclable ETFE. These elements form a lightweight construction of hollow double-shell membranes supported by curved steel beams, with air pressure generated only within the outer shell to avoid the need for airlocks at entrances.

Pneumatic architecture represents a field that trades mass for volume and weight for lightness, offering a provocative alternative to conventional building practices. As architects increasingly return to light, mobile, and reversible forms in response to environmental and social urgencies, Müller's pioneering work continues to influence contemporary design. His vision of adaptable, mobile, and expressive structures challenges fundamental assumptions about materiality and permanence, demonstrating how air-filled designs can shape both present and future architectural possibilities.