Since the beginning of the 20th century, Karl Marx’s famous dictum that "All that is solid melts into air" seems to have its own architectural trajectory associated with emerging ideas of lightness, transparency, and the dematerialization of the building, from Georgii Krutikov’s utopias for a flying city (1927) or Vladimir Tatlin’s Letatlin (1932), to H.G. Wells’s city of the future, governed by the "dictatorship of the air" (1936). "Maximum air - Minimum walls!" was Sigfried Giedion’s demand for transforming the old static sense of structure into renewed combinassions aériennes, and a new system of equilibrium in suspension that, in Konrad Wachsmann’s understanding, would transform the building into a breathing skin.
Fascinated by its immaterial quality, an initial wave of modernist caprice strove to treat air as a constitutive material, transforming this essential element into architectural discourse and a technological problem. In the 1960s, this aerial imagination aligned architecture with the lightness of flight and the dematerialization of structure in Yves Klein’s Architecture of the Air, R. Buckminster Fuller’s Cloud Nine, or Frei Otto’s Suspended City—projects whose influence still resonates in contemporary debates where, however, air acquires new connotations: in atmospheric qualities, pollution, CO2, and global warming, and where wind speed, changes in relative humidity, and temperature translate into disasters that arrive on the air.
