Pneuhaus has installed Compound Camera no.3 at Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis: an inflatable pavilion built from 221 camera obscura cells, each projecting its own live image of the surroundings onto the structure’s translucent inner skin.
Stand inside and you are surrounded by hundreds of simultaneous views of the world outside, formed entirely by light passing through glass. There is no sensor, no projector and no screen anywhere in the piece.
How one cell works
Each of the 221 cells contains a glass double-convex lens, set into the outer membrane, with its proportions and focal length determined by optical calculation rather than chosen off a shelf. Light entering the lens crosses the cell and lands on the translucent inner surface, where it forms an image — inverted, soft, and live.
This is a camera obscura in the strict sense: an aperture, a dark volume, and a surface at the focal distance. What Pneuhaus has done is multiply it and make the geometry do the work of composition.
How 221 of them become an eye
The cells are not aimed in parallel. The pavilion combines concave and convex surfaces so that views are directed both outward and inward, a deliberate reference to the arrangement of a dragonfly’s ommatidia — the thousands of individual facets of a compound eye, each oriented to sample a different part of the surroundings.
That is the conceptual core, and it is unusually well matched to its medium. A dragonfly does not see one high-resolution picture; it sees a mosaic of many low-resolution ones, assembled into motion sensitivity rather than detail. A pavilion of 221 lenses, each showing a slightly different slice of Minneapolis, puts a human inside that arrangement instead of describing it.
The studio is explicit about what it is arguing against. “Today, most imagery reaches people through flat, backlit screens,” Pneuhaus’s design team told designboom. “Compound Camera no.3 offers a quieter, more physical counterpoint: vision one can walk into, touch, and adjust by hand; a reminder that seeing can still be soft and playful rather than solely high-tech and mediated.”
The construction is the interaction
The materials list is three items: urethane-coated nylon, glass lenses, and air. There is no rigid frame — the structure holds its shape by internal pressure alone.
Between the inner and outer membranes sits a baffle layer that separates and aligns them, which is the piece of engineering that makes the whole thing possible. Each cell needs its lens and its projection surface held at a consistent distance, or the images go out of focus. In a rigid structure you would machine that spacing. Here it has to be maintained by a pressurised soft assembly across 221 cells at once.
And then the best decision in the project: because the membrane is soft, visitors press individual cells with their hands to change the focus of the projected image.
That is a genuinely unusual interaction. It is not sensed, computed or triggered — pushing the wall physically moves the lens relative to its projection surface, and the image sharpens or softens in direct proportion. The feedback loop is optical. Nothing can crash, lag, or need rebooting before the gallery opens, which is a failure mode anyone who has maintained a sensor-driven installation has lived through.
The practical numbers
For anyone who builds temporary work, these are the figures that matter:
- Covers more than 700 square feet
- Installs in a few hours
- Withstands winds up to 40 mph
- Curved entrance leading into a larger atrium, so the interior volume expands and contracts as visitors move
Those are production specifications, not art-world ones, and they are why this kind of work can tour. A 700-square-foot structure that two or three people can erect in an afternoon and leave outdoors is a fundamentally different proposition from one that needs riggers and a weather plan.
The third version of an old idea
Compound Camera no.3 builds on Pneuhaus’s original Compound Camera, made nearly a decade ago with 109 cells, all projecting views from a single point. The move from 109 to 221 is not the interesting part. The move from a dome gathering views at one point to a distributed, insect-like form that samples in many directions is.
Pneuhaus has been doing this since 2014, when founders Matthew Muller and Augie Lehrecke — then furniture-design seniors at the Rhode Island School of Design — were asked to make inflatable sculptures for commencement and spent senior week stitching blue tubes in the upholstery studio. They were joined by co-founder Levi Bedall, and have spent the decade since making inflatable work that combines light, sound and movement.
The siting is apt. Peavey Plaza is M. Paul Friedberg’s 1975 modernist “park-plaza”, built as a gathering space alongside Nicollet Mall, fought over for years and now on the National Register of Historic Places — a hard-edged concrete landscape receiving a structure held up by nothing but air.
Images of the installation are by Lachlan Turczan, with the aerial view by Stefan Stefanizyn.
Sources
- Inflatable pavilion by Pneuhaus mimics dragonfly’s vision through 221 camera obscuras — designboom
- Compound Camera no.3 by Pneuhaus — Pneuhaus on YouTube
- Air Crafting with Pneuhaus — Rhode Island Monthly
- Peavey Plaza — The Cultural Landscape Foundation