Nick Crosbie

In 2011, Inflate Founder Nick Crosbie, developed a structure for the sports brand Puma, to tour with the Volvo Ocean races. The project was a culmination of years of developing high performance, temporary event solutions and firmly established Crosbie as one of the most creative and pioneering designers of his time. Prior to this, Crosbie had a vision to challenge how the events industry was serviced, with a new system to replace standard, drab and in some cases, low quality marquees. A subsequent series of one-off projects under the working title of ‘AirClad’, ranged from restaurant terraces to car show rooms.

With Puma, Nick Crosbie’s work on AirClad came to fruition and went beyond existing realms of temporary event systems to be more like ‘Event Architecture’. With form following function, AirClad simultaneously delivered on Crosbie’s aim as an innovator and designer, to create engaging and inspiring spaces.

The AirClad range has subsequently grown in scope and visibility, with global brand collaborations and iterations ranging from small pop-up sleeping pods, to multi-storey event retail spaces for Twitter, Lush, BMW, and many more. A full interior shop fit system sees work with Vitra’s shop fit brand Visplay and for CES 2022, the largest AirClad structure to date at 30m x 20m for Forvia, sat alongside giants such as Google at the Las Vegas annual show for tech innovation.

Ongoing refinement for agility, engineering, and design, sees core structures remain visually unchanged but with technical refinements and enhancements leading to stronger, easier, safer, and faster build times. Crosbie calls this #FastArchitecture. A mission to minimise on environmental impact, places re-use and circularity at the heart of the overall concept; Crosbie and his team are currently developing the global AirClad franchise network which focuses on rentals and leasing, servicing, re-use, and reintroducing structures into the system, rather than making more.

Nick Crosbie is underway with the development of a semi-permanent version of AirClad, the vision here to challenge bricks and mortar. This system is being engineered and designed for medium to long term needs, for office, schools, medical and other commercial buildings; The journey is to realise an AirClad system fully compliant to building codes yet offering 100% reusability with inspiring aesthetics.