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Born in Argentina but raised primarily in Italy—where his father, suspected of being a communist, moved the family in exile—artist Tomás Saraceno never felt quite at home as a child. And so as a form of escape, he dreamed of cities in the sky, finding inspiration in balloons. “I was fascinated by how things could fly up and stay in the air, making a new territory,” says Saraceno, who went on to study architecture.

For the past 15 years, the Berlin-based talent has been realizing his childhood fantasies, devising large-scale installations that evoke everything from spiderwebs to soap bubbles to the utopian visions of R. Buckminster Fuller.

For part of 2012 the rooftop garden at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was taken over by Saraceno’s futuristic structure of mirrored polyhedrons that gave visitors a slightly disorienting feeling of floating above Central Park. Shortly thereafter, he filled the Milan exhibition hall HangarBicocca with load-bearing transparent plastic membranes that allowed people to walk some 80 feet above the ground, appearing as shadowy silhouettes to spectators below.

“It creates a type of togetherness,” Saraceno says of his work. “I love the idea that people enter my installations and communicate with one another in a very different way, reacting to the space.”

For his most elaborate piece yet, the artist spent three years developing a 27,000-square-foot trilevel network of steel netting and inflated plastic spheres that is now suspended six stories above the atrium lobby at the K21 Ständehaus in Düsseldorf, Germany. (It will be up until late 2014.) Though summer heat threatened the ethereal structure’s integrity, requiring temporary closures, the artist sees such interruptions as educational.

In fact, he’s studying ways to harness natural forces for an ongoing project, using winds off the North Sea to launch giant tetrahedral kites, or “flying plazas,” intended to hold people. Made of carbon-fiber tubing and solar panels, an early model was exhibited in August at the Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The finished piece may take years to complete. Saraceno, however, remains optimistic and ambitious. “I would love to invent not only planets but universes,” he says. “How far am I from that? I don’t know.” tomassaracenoom

Click here to see a slide show of Tomás Saraceno's tactile installations.