“Skyplace” is a 27-metre-long and 5,5-metre-high, walk-in bamboo structure in the shape of an airship, created in 2002 over a flooded rice field in Ubud on Bali. Its reflection in the water creates the impression of a floating zeppelin. Skyplace was the first of many building and art projects by Markus Heinsdorff using bamboo, and at the same time marked the beginning of an intensive engagement with open spaces and building with natural materials. Inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s honeycomb and dome structures, the installation was later presented as part of exhibitions and projects by the Goethe-Institut in several countries across Asia.

Skyplace – The Dream of Floating on Air

A zeppelin made of bamboo, erected on a body of water in Bali and built by local craftsmen – with this art form, which serves no practical purpose, Skyplace – The Dream of Floating on Air allowed Markus Heinsdorff to create a piece of utopia that works on several levels. It is precisely the incompatibility of form and function, the evident contradiction between European and Asian associations and ideas, that makes the installation “Skyplace” a poetic, pictorial monument to an emerging global understanding of the world.

The airships built in Germany in the first third of the 20th century were regarded as peaceful, ponderous giants of air travel. The myth of the flying cigars has lost almost none of its fascination to this day. Indeed, the abrupt end of the zeppelin era, following the terrible disaster at Lakehurst, could not still the longing for these elephants of the sky.

With his stationary airship, Markus Heinsdorff does indeed evoke the memory of these light-metal bodies, but he does so using the material provided by nature, bamboo, and the ancient craft methods of the Asian region developed for this building material.

The aerodynamic form of the airship grows out of the material in an almost natural way.

In his first plans for the building material bamboo, Heinsdorff designed a large, walk-in sphere. He wanted to show that the most perfect stereometric form could be realised almost playfully with naturally grown building materials; in doing so, he would have realised a typically Western ideal using the freely improvised craft techniques of Asia.

“Skyplace”, the 27-metre-long and 5,50-metre-high airship, is a modification of this dream. With its elongated aerodynamic form and its 18 slender supports, which resemble the legs of a centipede, Heinsdorff brings the element of movement into the otherwise static ideal construction. The hexagons made of bamboo tubes no longer function as the honeycomb of an outer skin; instead, their diameter itself forms the hollow body, standing upright in a row, one behind the other, forming a perspectival tunnel that is completed into a loose cylindrical form by the connecting longitudinal tubes. This filigree tubular structure, which narrows at both ends and finally closes like an apse, is held aloft by eighteen supports standing slightly at an angle in the water, which pierce the body and combine on the inside into nine steeply pyramid-shaped constructions; the visitor walkway is suspended within these tapering triangles. All connections between the individual construction elements were made using traditional craft methods.

The construction, transparent on all sides, permeable to air and suspended on slender supports, thus becomes a naturally ideal embodiment of the word “airship”. Of course, every viewer sees that this propped-up object cannot and does not really want to fly; yet one senses that it would be effortless to lift this filigree structure into the air or wheel it away. The fact that the airship can be dismantled within a few hours and rebuilt elsewhere also belongs to the virtual mobility of this flying object.

Thus, like Count Zeppelin’s original drawn vision of a rigid airship at the dawn of the mobilisation of the skies, the artwork “Skyplace” becomes a pictorial symbol of the dream of rising above the earth and moving through it without violent effort. In its technicist version, this dream came to such a dramatic end in 1937 that it took many decades before the old utopia could be filled with new content. In the craft-based realisation of this symbol, which Markus Heinsdorff initiated using materials given by nature, something of the old, ethereal, Icarian dream becomes physically tangible once again.

Anyone who steps into this almost purely graphic tube over the water, defined by slender rods, senses – when looking out through the wide openings between the rods into the surroundings, up into the sky and down onto the water, which once again mirrors the sky and doubles the bamboo construction – an intense form of freedom, indeed of being exposed to uncertainty, something one might describe as a feeling of flight, even a hint of vertigo and fear of heights. The breathtaking sense of floating that passengers on the great luxury zeppelins felt when they looked straight down onto the earth or the sea through the slanted panoramic windows – visitors to “Skyplace” get a sensory intimation of this.

Heinsdorff’s floating bamboo framework over the flooded rice field is thus far more than merely a European artist’s homage to the great cultural traditions of Asia; it is the pictorial assimilation of an ancient human dream by means of Asian craft techniques. It thus spans the arc back through Count Zeppelin to Daedalus and Icarus, building a bridge not only between eras but also between continents.

Yet regardless of all the associations that can be linked to the cigar shape, “Skyplace”, with its elegant body permeable to water and wind, with the pull of its geometric interior perspective, with its sequence of triangles and hexagons, the illusionistic narrowing at each end and the small rings serving as vanishing points, is an image of great suggestive power: a realised airlock, a walk-in, three-dimensional construction sketch at a scale of 1:1, a piece of transparent architecture that conveys a physical sense of the uncertainties of open space.

Gottfried Knapp