Uncertain Memory: A Pavilion That Rewires Itself Around the People Inside It

A rectangular box should be the least interesting thing at a carnival. But when its translucent corrugated panels shift from amber to turquoise to deep pink in response to the bodies moving through it, the box stops being a box. It becomes something closer to a nervous system, one that reads the crowd and answers in color. "Uncertain Memory" is an installation that collapses the distance between architecture and emotion, treating light not as an afterthought but as the primary material of spatial experience.

Designed by Hao Li and presented at the B.I.G. Carnival (Banana IP Galaxy Carnival), the pavilion was submitted to the Architecture on the Clock competition on uni.xyz. The brief asked entrants to engage with the concept of ephemeral and interactive structures, questioning how transient experiences shape our relationship with built space. Li's response is a direct provocation: architecture does not need permanence to be powerful. It needs presence.

Chambers of Color: Walking Through a Shifting Interior

From the inside, the installation reads as a series of translucent panel chambers that visitors walk through freely. Filament lighting embedded within the structure responds to human movement, cycling through a spectrum of vibrant hues. The result is that no two moments inside the pavilion look the same. A visitor pausing at one threshold triggers a warm amber wash; a child running past the exterior, as captured in the nighttime shot, pulls the whole volume into glowing pink and orange. The architecture is static in form and radically unstable in atmosphere.

At night, the pavilion becomes a beacon. The translucent panels act as diffuse screens, projecting the interior light show outward to the carnival grounds. What is private sensation from the inside becomes public spectacle from the outside, and that dual reading gives the project a generosity that purely inward-looking installations often lack.

Translucent Skin: Corrugated Panels as Light Modulators

The close-up view of the corrugated translucent panels reveals the material logic at work. These are not flat surfaces; their ribbed texture fragments and scatters the colored light, creating soft gradients rather than hard-edged washes. A blurred figure standing behind the surface becomes an abstraction, stripped of detail and reduced to silhouette. The panel system effectively anonymizes occupants while broadcasting their presence, a paradox that sits at the heart of the project's name.

The axonometric drawing clarifies the organizational strategy. Color-coded zones within the rectangular plan correspond to different lighting conditions, with a single figure included for scale. The simplicity of the overall volume, just a box, is the point. It puts all the architectural energy into the material behavior of the envelope rather than formal complexity.

Threshold and Frame: Entering Through Warm Light

The head-on entrance view shows vertical translucent panels in warm amber and green tones framing the threshold. There is no door, no gate, just a gap between panels that draws visitors in through color alone. The transition from carnival noise to this luminous corridor is immediate and total, a shift in register that architecture achieves here without any of the usual spatial tricks of compression and release.

Looking up from the interior, the structural steel frame becomes visible, suspended within turquoise and blue translucent panel walls. The steel is honest and exposed, doing its job without pretension. The contrast between the industrial skeleton and the soft, shifting color field around it gives the space a tension that prevents it from tipping into pure spectacle. There is real construction here, real weight, holding up an experience that feels weightless.

Structure and Surprise: Timber Trusses and Suspended Bicycles

The second axonometric drawing reveals the structural frame in more detail: timber roof trusses span the rectangular plan, and colored circulation ramps guide visitors through the interior sequence. The hybrid structure of steel and timber keeps the construction lightweight and demountable, appropriate for a carnival installation designed to be temporary.

Then there are the pink bicycle frames suspended behind polycarbonate panels, illuminated by colored light. This is the moment where the project reveals its playfulness. The bicycles are carnival artifacts turned into art objects, frozen behind the translucent skin like specimens in a luminous vitrine. They introduce a layer of found-object narrative that enriches the purely sensory experience of the light and color.

Overhead: The Ceiling as Fifth Elevation

Looking straight up at the steel truss ceiling, purple and pink lighting washes through ribbed panels to create an overhead canopy of color. The ceiling is treated as a fifth elevation, not a leftover surface but an active participant in the immersive environment. Every direction a visitor looks offers a different chromatic composition, reinforcing the idea that the pavilion has no dead zones, only varying intensities of experience.

Why This Project Matters

"Uncertain Memory" challenges a persistent bias in architecture: that seriousness requires permanence. Li's pavilion is temporary, playful, and built for a carnival, yet it engages fundamental questions about how space affects emotion. The interactive light control system is not a gimmick layered onto a structure; it is the structure's reason for being. Without the visitors who trigger its color shifts, the box is inert. With them, it becomes a collective instrument played by the crowd.

For the Architecture on the Clock brief, this is a precise answer. Ephemeral architecture succeeds not by trying to outlast time but by making the present moment so vivid that it imprints on memory. The title says it all: the memory is uncertain because it was never fixed, never static. It was a color you saw once, in a box at a carnival, that somehow stayed with you.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Hao Li

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: Uncertain Memory by Hao Li Architecture on the Clock (uni.xyz).