The following proposal is a high-level concept for a book detailing 100 Years of the Macy’s Day Parade, which we are tentatively calling: Cloudy With a Chance of Balloons.

The Macy’s Day Parade has long held captive a significant portion of memory for the majority of us. Long Sundays in front of the TV screen, watching these larger-than-life symbols, slowly meandering through a concrete jungle, held by thin-looking cables by teams of people marching through the streets. Long before PlayLab started in 2004, the parade was a powerful visual of art on display for a greater public, and it was inspiring.

Once we arrived at architecture school and were met with stacks upon stacks of books, we discovered the long lineage of inflatables in contemporary art and architecture—with the work of Ant Farm being at the top of that list. Together, with the baked-in memory of the parade throughout our youth, it became clear that we wanted to, one day , use inflatables as a medium in our work.

What started with a commission by Avenue of the Americas in 2017, led to a commission on a lake, the Queens Botanical Garden, exhibitions in Shanghai, a bouncy castle for Louis Vuitton c/o Virgil Abloh, a giant Kim Kardashian, a Marc Jacobs tote bag, and an alien for Nike. Our interest in inflatables has never waned, and we would be lying if we haven’t had the constant dream to have a PlayLab inflatable in the Macy’s Day Parade.

This led us to think, a book can be just as powerful as a large, public, artful gesture, and we’ve made many of those. As students, and reverent appreciators of all the work that goes into something at the scale of the parade, there hasn’t quite been an archival book that covers the historic lineage of the parade in a way that would be beneficial to the studio’s research process, so we would like to make one.

The proposal includes a package we sent to Macy’s and an initial exploration of the book’s design.