The Fun Palace Installation by Studio Ossidiana: An Immersive Art Installation in Paris

A Nomadic Cultural Embassy Within the Grand Palais

As the Centre Pompidou prepared to close for renovation, Studio Ossidiana was invited to imagine a new temporary identity for this beloved Parisian institution. Their response is The Fun Palace, an evocative and immersive art installation in Paris—a soft, nomadic embassy for culture, creativity, and community. Housed within the Salon d’Honneur of the Grand Palais, this imaginative installation becomes a stage, a shelter, and a social organism all at once.

The Soft Palace: Architecture as Fabric and Experience

Rather than construct traditional architectural volumes, Studio Ossidiana envisioned the Soft Palace as a vast, undulating textile landscape. This continuous, folded carpet acts like a gigantic garment—soft, mobile, inhabitable. Every crease becomes a pathway, every fold a pocket, every surface a site for rest, play, or performance.

Barefoot movement is encouraged. One can stroll, sit, recline, or disappear into a fold for quiet solitude. Visitors are invited not only to witness events but to become part of them—actors in the collective choreography of daily life. In its fluidity and openness, the installation rejects rigid spatial hierarchies and invites a more intimate, responsive engagement with public space.

A Democratic Space for Cultural Exchange

The Fun Palace challenges conventional ideas of how a museum operates. It offers a model of radical accessibility—a place that hosts exhibitions, performances, games, and conversations while equally supporting private moments of rest, silence, and reflection. In this sense, it channels Cedric Price’s original “Fun Palace” concept: a flexible, user-driven cultural infrastructure designed to evolve with its community.

Within the installation, any place can become a stage. Events don’t just happen in designated zones—they emerge, disperse, and evolve, reflecting the spontaneous, overlapping rhythms of public life.

Artistic Collaboration and Curatorial Depth

This immersive environment is not only architectural but curatorial. The Fun Palace hosts Nightcrawlers, a speculative video game by artist Alice Bucknell, which unfolds amidst the textile terrain. Interspersed throughout the installation is a curated selection of design objects from the Centre Pompidou’s collection, thoughtfully selected by Olivier Zeitoun and Marie-Ange Brayer.

This dialogue between digital and physical, object and environment, is guided by the philosophical insights of Emanuele Coccia and shaped by curators Jean-Max Colard, Joséphine Huppert, and Alice Pialoux. The project was co-produced by the Centre Pompidou and GrandPalaisRmn, with the generous support of the Chanel Culture Fund, making it a truly interdisciplinary and collaborative endeavor.

Architecture as Invitation

The Fun Palace invites all to step into a world without thresholds—no walls, no defined zones, no prescribed roles. It is both stage and shelter, theatre and sanctuary. Visitors are invited to lose themselves and find themselves in the tactile folds of its soft architecture.

This immersive art installation in Paris becomes more than a placeholder for a museum in transition—it is a living, breathing embodiment of what cultural space can be: generous, participatory, inclusive, and delightfully unpredictable.

All photographs are works of Riccardo de Vecchi