These Balloon Rooms Will Bring Out Your Inner Child

Artist Jordi Enrich Jorba creates nomadic, inflatable architecture.

September 8, 2016, 12:40pm

Wind Igloos. All images courtesy of Jordi Enrich Jorba

In every bottle of Perrier, there are countless bubbles. Together, #ExtraordinairePerrier and The Creators Project celebrate "the extraordinary" behind some of the most fascinating artists pushing boundaries through their chosen medium, technique, and perspective. This is an ongoing series exploring those artists.

Barcelona-based artist Jordi Enrich Jorba makes work that gets viewers in touch with their inner child. Using decommissioned hot air balloons, Jorba creates luminous, temporary spaces that recall the pillow forts and blanket tents most of us made as kids. These short term structures—which Jorba calls iglús de vent in Catalan, or, "wind igloos" in English—are intended to provoke introspection while also providing a space for performances.

“The work I have been doing hinges on placing the wind igloo in a city’s symbolic place with the objective of rethinking the places,” Jorba tells The Creators Project. “My work includes design, anthropology, and recycling.”

Exterior of an iglú de vent in Barcelona, Spain

Over the last five years, Jorba’s wind igloos have appeared across the globe in churches, theaters, plazas, and parks in New York, Sweden, Russia and Jorba’s hometown of Igualada, Spain. “I was born in Igualada where Ultramagic company manufactures hot air balloons for all over the world,” Jorba says. “It’s a material that allows me to do a local and a global process at the same time.”

A wind igloo in the Teatre Municpal L’Ateneu in Igualada, Spain

This idea of making the global seem local and vice versa hints at a central tenant of Jorba’s work: transformation. “Creativity is the most powerful tool we have to transform things,” says Jorba. His wind igloos do just that, making public spaces feel private; adults feel like children; and discarded material useful again. “We are recycling, reusing and rethinking the fabric of hot-air balloons that can no longer fly,” says Jorba.

A wind igloo in Matera, Italy

It’s just the kind of rule-breaking space that makes anything seem possible. He takes material that was destined for a landfill and makes it not only useful again, but beautiful. “I’ve noticed that a wind igloo is an inspiring place to imagine the future,” Jorba says. “There is beauty in many things we throw away. We must change the way we relate to the world.”