Moving and Evolving Soft Architecture: The Soft Palace

SPACE April 2026 (No. 701) 

 

 

The Netherlands-based studio Studio Ossidiana has long been committed to experimentation with materials and space, blurring the boundaries between architecture, design, and landscape architecture. They see architecture not as a ‘fixed object’, but as an entity capable of functioning autonomously through interactions with its users—both human and non-human. From 6 ‒ 15 June 2025, as part of ‘Fun Palace’, a joint programme organised by the Centre Pompidou and the Grand Palais Rmn, they filled the Grand Palais’s Salon d’Honneur with a pink fabric installation. This work evokes an imaginary palace while summoning the formative sensation of hiding under a blanket and playing as a child. SPACE listened to the story behind their vision for The Soft Palace.

 

 

 

©Erik Benjamins 

 

 

Interview Alessandra Covini, Giovanni Bellotti Co-Principals, Studio Ossidiana × Kim Hyerin

 

 

 

Kim Hyerin (Kim): Studio Ossidiana’s work crosses architecture, design, and landscape. Your interests also extend to material research and ecological approaches.
Alessandra Covini, Giovanni Bellotti (Covini, Bellotti): We work across different themes, but something that often connects our projects is a sense of action, agency, and operativity. We are interested in environments that can act and interact with their surroundings and their inhabitants, whether this involves birds, plants, children, or adults. Many of our projects try to create situations to which people feel invited, or are sometimes challenged, to become active participants. Rather than simply observing a space, visitors might become performers, gardeners, makers, inhabitants or caretakers within it. We are interested in spaces that encourage this kind of engagement, where people can shape, transform, or inhabit the environment in different ways. In this sense, our research often focuses on how architecture can enable forms of participation and coexistence, and thus define ideas of ownership and belonging. We explore how materials, landscapes, and spatial structures can support different forms of life and activity, allowing the environment to evolve through use. For us, architecture becomes less a static object and more a framework that allows actions, interactions, and transformations to happen over time. The research that we prioritise in the studio is along these lines; in our process we often begin with contextual and typological research, often associated with a material to which we have flet drawn, then we work with endless amount of diagrams to test possibilities and configurations, and from the earliest phases we work with material samples, be they a terrazzo tile, a earth wall, or a game sewn in felt.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim: Studio Ossidiana uses a wide range of materials, including textiles employed in this project, and also engages in material experimentation by directly fabricating elements such as tiles and artificial stones.