Tomas Saraceno will be at theThe Curve 11 May 2006 – 16 July 2006, Barbican Art Gallery, London. His long-term project draws on Physics, Chemistry, Engineering, and artistic disciplines in order to create a floating Utopia that would drift among the clouds to solve the world’s exploding population problem.

A few decades ago, some architects had a similar vision of suspended or moving communities: Superstudio‘s City of the Hemispheres and Archigram‘s moving units, Seaside Bubbles and Yona Friedman‘s spatial cities. Friedman developed his principles shortly after the Second World War, a period in which acute housing shortage and urban rebuilding had to be addressed. The architect proposed huge structures, supported on columns, in which residents could build their own dwellings. He later developed manuals in the form of comic-books that enabled people to take decisions about the design of their own living environment (audio interview of the architect in french.)

Via archinect.
The Telegraph.