With their winning competition entry for Hungary's Sziget festival, one of Europe's leading music festivals, Studio Nomad created an installation to draw visitors back to nature. Their mirrored pavilion is a simple approach that creates a powerful experience for visitors, as more than 1200 reflective plastic sheets create shards of reflections which appear to fragment the surrounding forest.
On display for one week during the festival, the installation was meant to be both simple to build and easily taken down. As more and more installations rely on digital mapping, tracking, and LED visual effects, Studio Nomad sought to challenge these ubiquitous technological installations with one that uses only basic architectural tools and elements.
Mirrors became a powerful tool for the design team as they relied only on the natural light and existing scenery of the site. Inspired by the camouflage patterns of WWII battleships, they incorporated a checkered pattern of mirrors suspended from an invisible structure between the trees. The pattern of mirrors allows viewers to simultaneously look through the installation to the scenery in the background, while the reflections of the mirrors serve to fragment their views and create a dynamic visual collage of refracted light.
The resulting structure was a 25 meter long curvilinear wall among the trees, in which visitors become momentarily disoriented while attempting to distinguish the dissolving foreground and background scenery of the weaving structure.
