Gilles Ebersolt, the architect who designed La Ballule, defines it as an all-terrain, playful, locomotion machine for all ages. Also called l’Ultraballe –Ultraball- La Ballule is a large-scale toy, an object designed for play. On another level, it is also a personal vehicle propelled by gravity, a transparent membrane capable of engaging the landscape, and this way of defining it underlines its objectual value beyond its ludic capabilities. Ebersolt developed his first concepts of a vehicle for downhill travel in the mid 70s. He refined it in the mid 80s to an inflated 4-meter sphere with a smaller inner sphere 2 meters in diameter, where the passenger travels. Connecting both chambers, a tube provides access to the inner sphere which is concentric with the larger sphere and suspended from it by tension cables, a sort of three-dimensional version of the spokes in a bicycle wheel. This system allows the object to sustain drops of more than 10 m. (32 ft) with the passenger cushioned safely inside. A version with a diameter of 6 m. (19.7 ft) was built in 1985 to descend Mount Fujiyama. As a pneumatic object, La Ballule has certain sophistication beyond the youthful idealism of the initial structures gonflables –inflatable structures- that utopian European architects adopted as the perfect mediators of the new social and cultural order back in the late 60s. Its spherical shape is functional, efficient and iconic: it suggests motion, inhabitation and inhabitation in motion.
