In 1962, the architect Buckminster Fuller envisioned a floating city that would free humanity from its dependence on the Earth. The speculative project consisted of enormous geodesic spheres that would naturally levitate in air warmed by the sun and be anchored to mountaintops. Designed to house thousands of people, Fuller’s Cloud Nine aimed to ease land ownership pressures, address housing shortages, and contribute to environmental preservation.
More than half a century later, we remain far from realizing Fuller’s vision. Creating a truly floating structure on the Earth’s surface is still, for now, an unattainable ideal. While supports continue to be necessary, we manipulate their position, intensity, and number, developing structural “acrobatics” to at least approach the idea of overcoming gravity — a desire that has long fascinated humanity.
The myth of Icarus and Daedalus, flying carpets, and castles in the air are just a few examples of dreams that express this fascination, permeating many aspects of human existence. In practical terms, however, gravity has been challenged in different ways. In painting, Kazimir Malevich — a declared inspiration for Zaha Hadid — depicted weightless compositions, with geometric figures floating over white backgrounds. He even exhibited his works in ways that made them appear to hover on the wall.
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In design, Marcel Breuer, in 1926, used curved tubular steel to create a chair in which the user is suspended in space, rather than firmly supported by four legs. In cinema, Alfred Hitchcock, in Vertigo (1958), addresses — albeit from a different perspective — the idea of gravity and the persistent fear of falling through time and space. It is in architecture, however, that the pursuit of defying gravity becomes most explicit.
Since the completion of the Pyramids, architecture has become progressively lighter, and in the twentieth century this process accelerated even further. — Bernard Tschumi
This lightness emerges from multiple dimensions, beginning with utilitarian concerns. Some researchers argue that stilt houses — built over water or unstable ground — are among the oldest construction methods in the world, and perhaps the first to pursue lightness. Dating back to the Neolithic and Bronze Age, they persist today, especially in riverine, coastal, and floodplain regions. These structures were essential to the emergence and survival of the idea of floating constructions, initially developed for practical reasons of safety.
From utility to spiritual expression, Gothic cathedrals also sought to overcome gravity — this time not in the name of physical comfort, but of the spiritual. Their pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and remarkable manipulation of light — through stained glass or strategic openings, as seen in the dome of Florence Cathedral by Filippo Brunelleschi — created the impression of structures reaching toward the heavens.
In their lightness, achieved through structural and technical boldness, these spaces were designed to elevate spiritual experience, guiding the gaze — and the soul — upward. This subtlety can be interpreted as an attempt to transcend the weight of the body, almost as a denial of human finitude.
Such grandeur, while enabling spiritual ascent, also evokes a sense of oppression — of insignificance in the face of monumental scale. Opposing yet complementary feelings converge toward a shared effect of submission. This same sensation reappears in a very different context: the manipulation of architectural lightness in modernism.
Civic structures of Soviet modernism, for example, used advances in steel and concrete construction to create vast spans that seemed to float. Here, lightness could represent power and technical mastery — the near conquest of gravity. Although concepts such as pilotis and the free plan emerged from the desire to liberate the ground for landscape continuity or urban flow, these structural systems allowed for diverse interpretations, as seen in projects like the Druzhba Sanatorium in Crimea.
Illustrating how a single technique can produce different meanings, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater House stands out for its dramatic composition of volumes projecting into nature. Its significance lies not in the imposition of a political ideology, but in its apparent symbiosis with the landscape. Yet, by placing the house directly over the waterfall — rather than beside or around it — does it not also suggest a form of dominance over nature?
In such precise technical achievements, which verge on the impossible, the untrained eye perceives a structural illusion that appears simple, yet relies on careful calculations of anchorage, counterbalance, and extension. It is precisely within this apparent simplicity that admiration resides.
Over time, this simplicity has been increasingly challenged, making the pursuit of lightness ever more present — and more extreme. Contemporary architecture, freed from rigid stylistic canons, has created conditions for independent creative expression. The Blur Building, by the American duo Diller + Scofidio for Expo 2002 in Switzerland, exemplifies this.
Its architectural performance is realized through the projection of a cloud of water vapor, released through nozzles distributed across the structure. Here, architectural lightness is explored to its fullest potential, as the materiality — liquid, almost immaterial — exists only for a few seconds before dissipating and reforming again.
At this moment, the Blur Building challenges one of architecture’s fundamental pillars: permanence. Vitruvius’ classical principles — firmitas, utilitas, venustas — are called into question, as the pavilion asserts itself almost independently of them. The very definition of architectural space is reconsidered, as the work is experienced less as a material enclosure and more as an event — an immersive, poetic condition. Similar sensations can be found in the Zaishui Art Museum by junya ishigami + associates, albeit in a more materially grounded form.
While it is impossible to exhaust all the ways in which lightness manifests in architecture — and the sensations it produces — this text traces a kind of historical trajectory to explore, above all, the enduring fascination with overcoming gravity that runs through architectural history.
The initial question — why do we want to float? — may have many answers: to survive, to demonstrate power, for sheer delight, to challenge existing architectural canons, as in the Blur Building, or to imagine what architecture could become, as in Fuller’s Cloud Nine.
Yet regardless of the answer, the pursuit of lightness seems intrinsic to the human desire to challenge limits — to achieve the impossible, to dissolve tons of matter with a simple gesture. It is architecture pushing against its own boundaries in this tension — not always beautiful, sometimes strange or unsettling — revealing, as Marshall Berman famously put it, that “all that is solid melts into air.”
This article is part of the ArchDaily Topic: Light, Lighter, Lightest: Redefining How Architecture Touches the Earth, proudly presented by Vitrocsa, the original minimalist windows since 1992.
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