Studio Ossidiana’s Soft Palace installation at the Grand Palais in Paris offers an extraordinary convergence of architecture, cultural programming, and experiential design. Conceived as a responsive “nomadic embassy” to host the Centre Pompidou community during its renovation, this immersive installation unfolds like a giant textile garment draped across the Salon d’Honneur, gently folding into pockets for comfort, play, solitude and collective assembly. Its innovative approach to public art and interactive installation brings a new depth to how we experience built space.
Walking into the installation, you are greeted by a soft, sweeping field of layered pink felt. The installation acts as both landscape and stage, offering visitors a place to roam barefoot, lie down, chat, hide or simply watch others. From early morning coffee to evening performances, the Soft Palace supports a fluid program that includes video games, design exhibitions, talks, group gatherings, film screenings, and impromptu meetings. Its allure lies in how it can transform throughout the day—blurring the boundaries between audience and actor, exhibitor and participant.
The design does more than occupy space—it invites a choreography of communal life. Viewers become performers, organizers become participants, and unplanned social interactions define the structure of experience. This is experiential architecture at its most inclusive. As Jean‑Max Colard, Head of Programming at the Pompidou, explains, Fun Palace isn’t just about gathering—it’s about shaping what it means to exist together in public. The installation revives Cedric Price’s utopian vision of Fun Palace, a cultural complex governed by users’ imagined needs rather than architects’ predetermined programs.
Heavily influenced by concepts of flexibility and adaptability, Studio Ossidiana collaborated with philosopher Emanuele Coccia and curators Jean‑Max Colard, Joséphine Huppert, and Alice Pialoux to ensure spatial and conceptual coherence. The result is a work of public art that feels alive, modular, and co-creative. Designed to welcome both gatherings and solitude, it's as much an interactive landscape as a participatory structure.
Embedded in the installation is Nightcrawlers—a two-player game designed by Alice Bucknell—where participants inhabit the mindset of bats and flowers navigating architecture by sonar and pollination in real time. The game mirrors the Soft Palace’s objective: to reveal architecture not only visually but sensorially and experientially. You’re not just in a space; you are with a space, attuned to its rhythms and its inhabitants.
Complementing the softscape, The Assembly of Objects presents a curated selection of design pieces from Pompidou’s permanent collection. These range from FormaFantasma’s timber narrative Cambio to Mash.T’s Zulu-inspired Hlabisa Bench, contributing to an evolving story on ecology, craft, and collective memory. These pieces appear like cultural punctuations embedded within the flowing felt, reinforcing the link between material, memory, and social function.
What sets the Soft Palace apart is its ability to foster connectivity in an era of digital disengagement. Families loll on felt pockets beside strangers engrossed in video games; conference attendees drift into silent repose mid-talk; dancers move freely through folds. It is architecture as social stimulus—and it feels as intimate as it is expansive.
Having wandered slowly through the installation one humid June evening, I found two elderly Parisians lying side by side in a soft recess, quietly sharing memories while ambient light softened their voices. Nearby, young adults whispered across felt ridges, taking turns drawing shapes in the fabric with their hands. That moment felt emblematic of Soft Palace’s success: it’s beautiful and politically resonant, but its most powerful output is human connection.
Studio Ossidiana aren’t newcomers to public experimentation. With experience in Venice Biennale pavilions, urban play landscapes, floating gardens, and land art installations, the firm has built a reputation for merging ecological awareness, material research, and co-created spaces. In the Soft Palace, their signature soft architecture defines a field of possibility—suggesting that architecture can be flexible, porous, soft, and generous.
This installation also reflects shifting trends in cultural design—keywords like interactive installation, immersive installation, user experience, participatory architecture, and cultural programming illustrate how museums and institutions are now embracing architecture as interface rather than background. With financial support from Chanel Culture Fund, the project becomes both a cultural flagship and a model for rethinking public spaces in European capitals.
Even its construction—from felt rolls to soft pockets—captures intentions of sustainability, tactility, and spontaneity. A text installation at the field entrance reads: step softly, lie anywhere, feel texture, choose quiet. And the materiality echoes Coccia’s philosophy: the object becomes host and the visitor a guest—for once, architecture isn’t imposing but caring.
As the Centre Pompidou prepares for its reopening, Fun Palace becomes a symbolic experiment—a soft pavilion operating in the in-between times of museums and public life. It’s a reminder that cultural moments don’t always unfold on stone pedestals but can thrive on undulating blankets of felt that host conversations, quiet dwellers, and performative gestures.
In a world where space is often commodified, Soft Palace reclaims publicness. It disrupts how we gather, how we live together, and how we feel belonging beyond ticketed halls. The Fun Palace installation isn’t a finite exhibition—it’s a blueprint for future urban collectivity, a public prototype that speaks louder than formal architecture ever could.