This summer, visitors to Milwaukee’s McKinley Beach were greeted by an unexpected sight: a massive, colorful inflatable sculpture rising against the skyline. The installation, first conceived by UWM architecture students as HydroBloom, was further developed by FuzzPop Workshop into a final piece titled Threshold.
The work debuted as part of ArtBlaze, a series of art and music festivals coordinated by Joy Engine that activated the lakefront throughout the summer.
The project emerged from ARCH 601/801: AIR, a design seminar led by Associate Professor Whitney Moon, which asked students to explore inflatable architecture and its role in public art. In collaboration with FuzzPop Workshop, students researched, sketched, and modeled concepts before presenting proposals for potential fabrication.
“Daniel Murray of FuzzPop reached out to me about a year ago after hearing about my architectural research with inflatables, and we discussed potential ways to collaborate,” said Moon, who was slated to teach a seminar in Spring 2025 about the history of pneumatic architecture. Meanwhile, FuzzPop was invited to participate in ArtBlaze again in summer 2025.
the beach with FuzzPop founder and creative director
Daniel Murray, Kirsten Josefchuk and Fuzz Pop creative
director John Kowalczyk. (UWM Photo/Troye Fox)
“We decided to pivot the focus of the course towards operating as a collaborative think tank around designing with air,” Moon recalled. “This was a great chance for architecture students to literally think outside the box and to generate design proposals that could directly contribute to the community.”
Ultimately, one design was selected for further development. Created by students Kiera Jensen, Isabel Domyslawski, Reagan Courtright and Haley Grube, the proposal for HydroBloom captured the jury’s imagination with its organic form and playful presence.
From proposal to reality
For the winning team, seeing their design evolve into Threshold was a transformative experience.
“Our vision for HydroBloom was to create an ethereal presence that blurred the boundary between land and water, reality and dream — inspiring a deeper relationship between water and people,” Grube said. “Seeing a school project come to life doesn’t happen too often, so we really wanted to design something interactive and engaging that would spark curiosity and connect with the community.”
As a historian and architect, Moon is an advocate for collaboration between academia and practice because it exposes all participants to new skill sets and more expansive ways of thinking. She reflected on the impact of the collaboration itself.
“FuzzPop was able to engage the students in a hands-on way that was simultaneously conceptual and technical — and also fun,” she said. “I think the resulting design is an exciting departure for Fuzz Pop because it is abstract and spatial, and for the architectural community it is a reminder that we need to allow for more playfulness and performance in the built environment.”
Building connections
The collaboration also led to professional opportunities for students. Kirsten Josefchuk, who participated in the AIR seminar, was hired by FuzzPop Workshop for a summer internship.
“Working with Fuzzpop Workshop reminded me a lot of being in studio, except this time I was working with real large-scale designs with a very real budget and timeline,” Josefchuk said. “I learned a lot as a designer about what it takes to see a project come to life.”
Josefchuk served as FuzzPop’s representative at its Summerfest installation.
“Communicating the project’s goals and creative vision to a diverse audience was a new unique and exciting experience,” she said.
For Fuzz Pop Workshop, the collaboration was just as meaningful.
“At FuzzPop Workshop, each project is a new experiment, and we were thrilled at how game the students were to dive in, developing concepts and designs that were both highly original and professional,” said FuzzPop founder and creative director Daniel Murray.
“I hope the experience was an opportunity for students to tap into their creative potential while pushing on the boundaries of architecture in exciting new ways.”
Written by Oliver Johnson, UW-Milwaukee
Link to original story: https://uwm.edu/news/architecture-seminar-brings-a-pop-of-big-art-to-milwaukee-lakefront/