Arcazaar and its brethren - perhaps one should say sisters - might appear to be the opposite of po-faced modernist architecture. They are gaudy, they are soft, they are temporary. Yet there is an enduring strand of now mainstream architectural thought that has always liked exactly such attributes. Inflatable architecture, designed by architects rather than artists, was a big thing of the 1960s. The immensely influential progressive architects’ think-tank of the decade, Archigram, had a lot to do with the mechanistic aspects of high-tech, but also just loved inflatables, loved the idea of buildings that could spring up overnight, change their shapes, and disappear again, to pop up somewhere else. Archigram invented plug-in cities, walking cities, instant cities, pneumatic buildings of various types - the “Inflatable Suit-Home” of 1968 was a good one. They built, or made, almost none of them. But the desire remained.

Today, the architectural emphasis has shifted towards buildings with chameleon attributes made possible by electronics. The “indeterminate façade”, long a Holy Grail for some architects, is within a whisker of being achieved. Press a button and - hey! New building! And as for visually soft, squidgy forms, well, ever since Frank Gehry entered the architectural fray, especially with the melting shapes of his Bilbao Guggenheim, we have seen hard-edged rectilinear architecture in retreat.

Arcazaar, like all Parkinson’s luminaria, is entered through an airlock. You’ll find a central chamber, around which are arranged three linked domes - red, blue, and green - and two columns - red and blue. It’s all rather more complex than that: there are oblique “horns” to deliver daylight into the interior, for instance, and the whole thing is so convoluted that the ground plan of the structure looks rather like a giant raspberry, or alternatively a slice through the human brain.

A related luminarium, “Levity”, is to be found in Bristol on the weekend of August 4 and 5. More straightforwardly symmetrical, that one deploys more abstract shapes - unlike Arcazaar, which revels in its Middle-Eastern feel.

And no, in the end it is not architecture, despite that “Architects of Air” moniker. Just as well. Were this a purely architectural experiment, one suspects it would all be a great deal more earnest and more conventionally tasteful. But taste is not really something that applies to Arcazaar, any more than you’d worry about the awnings of the stalls in a market place. The luminaria are very successful, precisely because they do have that “Le Grand Mealnes” quality of utterly transforming a place, making a magical event, and then quietly disappearing before anybody has any time to ask any questions.

Website: www.architects-of-air.com - sophisticated website with colour-saturated pictures and touring details.