Gordon Matta-Clark’s imagined cities

They are not cities rooted in the ground, but air-filled balloons attached to buildings with the intention of creating vital aerial space to avoid real estate speculation. Begun in 1978 and titled Sky Hooks (Study for a Balloon Building), this series was Gordon Matta-Clark’s final project. The standard bearer of what he called ‘anarchitecture’, it brought together science fiction and the need to find alternatives to the pressure on urban land: an essay on a possible world now that those of us in large cities are forced to rethink our life-styles.