On March 16, 2013, Christo opened Big Air Package inside the Gasometer Oberhausen, the vast former gas holder in Germany's Ruhr region. The installation, which remained on view until December 30, transformed the industrial monument into a walk-in environment of light, scale, and pressure: a 90-meter-high, 50-meter-wide inflated form made from translucent fabric and rope. It was Christo's second project in the Gasometer after The Wall in 1999 and his first major work conceived after Jeanne-Claude's death. Contemporary accounts and later summaries identify it as temporarily the largest self-supporting sculpture in the world, making it a major late-career statement about enclosure, monumentality, and public access.
The project extended Christo and Jeanne-Claude's legacy of temporary monumental art into a postindustrial exhibition space.
