“I’m basically a child,” Hans-Walter Müller explains.
The artist is sitting inside the cafe of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire Geneva. Behind him is PlasMAH:TonUtopie, his most recent inflatable structure: a colossal and brightly-coloured collision of epochs and sensibilities that brings contemporary levity to the museum’s historical monumentality, like a toddler breathing life into a senior citizen.
From the museum’s exterior, this 1910 Beaux-Arts landmark, designed by Marc Camoletti — all classical columns, allegorical figures, and solemn friezes — might suggest a buttoned-up collection of objects quietly awaiting repatriation, and perhaps not much more. The building’s very pedigree only amplifies the surprise that awaits inside, its perfectly square footprint wrapping around a central courtyard (a space that usually hosts Mediterranean antiquities and archaeological remnants) now cradling what looks to be an abstracted, inflatable pig.
From the moment visitors enter, the installation commands the sightline: primary colours pop through the muted tones of the building’s medieval stained-glass windows. Gloriously and unapologetically conspicuous, it becomes a buoyant spectacle of whimsy amid marble staircases, soaring ceilings, and the museum’s long-worn aura of order and permanence.
The bubble encases La Passerelle, Vincent Lamouroux’s suspended wooden footbridge. Lamouroux’s timber structure, anchored and steadfast, provides a counterpoint to Müller’s air-filled membrane, generating a gentle but persistent tension between permanence and impermanence, gravity and levity, mass and suspension. Together, they create a dialogue between grounded solidity and ephemeral buoyancy, where the ephemeral seems to hover over the enduring.
Visitors are invited to navigate the courtyard, with entry points both from below and via the bridge, experiencing the structure from multiple vantage points. Because the structure relies on internal air pressure to maintain its form, the entry points are designed so air cannot pass freely. Entering the space feels almost like being born in reverse: visitors squeeze through a narrow opening, which immediately springs back behind them, enclosing them in a buoyant, self-contained world. Once inside, the soft sound of running water from a ground-level fountain echoes across the space.
Müller, now in his eighties, remains one of Europe’s most quietly radical architectural thinkers. Dapper and sweet, with a childlike glint in his eyes, he radiates the same curiosity, joy, and inventive energy that his inflatable structures so vividly embody. Decades of experimenting with air-filled environments — he famously lives in one — have honed a practice that is simultaneously rigorous and playful.
For Müller, air is a proposition: an argument for weightless architecture that dismisses fixity and the grandiosity so often expected of built structures and institutional installations. Yet for something so seemingly ephemeral, it is also materially substantial. The outer PVC‑reinforced envelope weighs about 1.2 tonnes when deflated and assembled, before air is pumped in. Two ventilators inflate it in roughly half an hour, eventually containing up to 3,500 m³ of air once fully pressurised.
The structure balances precision, risk, and delight like a finely tuned circus act. As visitors circulate, ascend the footbridge, and peer through the membrane, they become spectators as well as performers — participants in a choreographed encounter with architecture, air, and light.
This playful intervention mirrors MAH’s broader curatorial ambitions. Under director Marc-Olivier Wahler, the museum has adopted a “multi-frequency” model: an institution that seeks to create unique experiences and resonances across disciplines, temporalities, and modes of attention. Wahler’s approach challenges classical hierarchies, inviting permeability, surprise, and transience. Ephemeral, participatory, and buoyant, Müller’s inflatable embodies these principles — a temporary architecture that encourages exploration, reflection, and delight, while honouring the gravity of the collections it frames.
The MAH’s ongoing renovation, “UMWELT,” further positions the installation within a forward-looking architectural framework. Led by Cabinet Fanny Noël Diogo Lopes Architectes, Atelier Plum, and AFRY Suisse SA, the project transforms the museum into a porous, accessible cultural hub, linking interior and exterior through new circulation routes, exhibition spaces, and a living roof terrace.
Much like Müller’s inflatable, which negotiates temporary form and spatial porosity, the renovation emphasises urban connectivity, visual and physical transparency, and engagement with the city beyond. Together, the bubble and the expansion signal that the MAH is as much about experience and movement as it is about preservation.
Müller’s inflatable, quietly pulsating in the Alpine light, represents a rare convergence of architecture, performance, and philosophy: a monumental, self-assured bubble that compels us to look, move, reflect, and — above all — marvel.
TonUtopie: Hans-Walter Müller: on view though 31 August, 2026
MAH Geneva
Rue Charles-Galland 2
1206 Geneva
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