In the 1960s, in reaction to the Modern Movement rigidity, architecture underwent a period of radical experimentation, amid infinitely expandable housing capsules (Japanese Metabolism), pneumatic cities (Archigram) and geodesic domes (Buckminster Fuller). Some of that visionary enthusiasm has survived to the present day, re-emerging on the real estate market: In fact, one of the Bulles designed by Jean-Benjamin Maneval, “landed” in a collector’s garden, is currently for sale in France.
With around three hundred units produced between 1964 and 1968 within the research on plastic materials (including the first “maison tout en plastique” by Ionel Schein and René-André Coulon, presented in 1956 at the Salon des Arts Ménagers in Paris), the Bulle is a manifesto of the technical and figurative potential of this material and transposes the idea of “nomadic”, light and economical living into a compact house (approximately 36 square metres).