installations that shaped 2025
As 2025 comes to a close, this final list in our annual round-up pulls together the installations that shaped the most immersive encounters of the year. Across deserts, plazas, courtyards, coastlines, and museums, artists and designers turn movement, light, sound, and material experimentation into living environments that ask us to slow down, listen, and look again.
A single year brought iridescent glass shimmering in the Coachella Valley, a fictional equestrian mystery unfolding inside a New York warehouse, plush flowers blooming under Rockefeller Center’s flags, and a rotating library of 3,000 books glowing at the heart of Milan. Elsewhere, flip-flops became a pneumatic orchestra, porcelain bowls drifted across a vast water basin, inflatables mimicked granite landscapes, recycled mats mapped a nation’s plastic waste, bamboo baskets harvested rain and fog, and a bench began to dance.
Apart from spectacle, what connects these works is the way they reshape public space inviting touch, play, introspection, or collective rhythm. Many of the projects lean into circularity and low-impact construction, while others explore the emotional weight of collective rituals, ancestral crafts, and cultural histories. As we wrap up 2025, these are the ten installations that capture the year’s evolving sensory and spatial imagination.
KIMSOOJA’S GLASS WORK BATHES DESERT X IN IRIDESCENT LIGHT
image by Lance Gerber, courtesy Desert X
For Desert X 2025, Kimsooja presents To Breathe – Coachella Valley, an iridescent glass installation, wrapped in diffraction film that refracts sunlight into a spectrum that evolves throughout the day. The work extends the artist’s long-standing exploration of movement and interconnectedness. Its grid-like surface, etched with vertical and horizontal scratch lines, echoes textile structures.
As the sun moves, the installation behaves like a living canvas, altering both itself and the surrounding view. To Breathe – Coachella Valley also forms a conceptual bridge to her installation in AlUla, linking two arid landscapes through light-based interventions. Infused with East Asian philosophies and resonant with the Light and Space lineage of the American West, the piece underscores the universality of natural elements across distant geographies.
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HERMÈS INSTALLS INTERACTIVE ‘MYSTERY AT THE GROOMS’ IN NYC
image © designboom
At Pier 36 in Manhattan, Hermès stages Mystery at the Grooms’, an immersive installation that turns a former warehouse into a fictional French estate built around a playful disappearance. Visitors move through six theatrical rooms, from the Head Groom’s Office to the Laundry, where lighting, scent, and sound shape a shifting atmosphere.
The experience revolves around a mobile-based hunt for a herd of missing horses, linking digital clues with physical
exploration. Objects from Hermès’ sixteen métiers blend into the scenography, doubling as both set pieces and hiding places, while hidden safes, peepholes, and material details punctuate each space. Performers dressed as grooms guide the journey, joined by the disembodied voice of fictional detective Mr. Honore, who adds narrative momentum. Those who solve the entire mystery receive Hermès-designed keepsakes, as the installation continues its global tour after New York.
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CJ HENDRY’S FLOWER MARKET BLOOMS AT ROCKEFELLER CENTER
image © Cj Hendry Studio
Cj Hendry brings Flower Market 2.0 to Rockefeller Center, with her greenhouse-like installation filled with hand-crafted plush flowers. Visitors move through rows of oversized botanicals and assemble their own bouquet, extending the work out into the city as blooms circulate through the streets.
This second edition scales up the viral concept, introducing twenty-seven new plush flower designs and placing the installation under the plaza’s world flags, overlooking the iconic sunken courtyard. The immersive setting is accompanied by editioned wall sculptures and limited merchandise that expand the visual language of the project. A satellite Flower Cart at Top of the Rock pushes the installation beyond ground level, offering an exclusive twenty-eighth flower tied to observation-deck entry.
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ES DEVLIN’S ROTATING LIBRARY LIGHTS UP MILAN COURTYARD
all images by Monica Spezia
Es Devlin transforms the 17th-century Cortile d’Onore into a revolving sanctuary of books with Library of Light, a kinetic installation that casts the historic courtyard as a luminous theater of reflection. The 18-meter-wide circular structure holds more than 3,000 illuminated books, rotating slowly to redirect sunlight by day and becoming a glowing lantern by night. Visitors read, pause, or step into readings and performances embedded within the library’s program, turning the installation into a living cultural space.
Mirrors, moving light, and shifting shadows interact with the courtyard’s colonnades, while recorded voices, from Benedict Cumberbatch to Devlin herself, echo through the space. The work draws inspiration from the neighboring Braidense National Library and the legacy of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, whose presence within the courtyard resonates with Devlin’s focus on knowledge, introspection, and the transmission of ideas. As books donated by Feltrinelli circulate through the installation and back into the Milan Library System, Library of Light becomes an evolving public archive.
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MERIEM BENNANI STAGES A 201-FLIP-FLOP ORCHESTRA IN PARIS
all images by Aurélien Mole
Meriem Bennani employs the humble flip-flop and creates a kinetic orchestra for Sole Crushing, a large-scale installation within the vertical volume of Lafayette Anticipations with 201 pneumatically animated sandals. The work becomes a living instrument shaped by ladders, spirals, floor clusters, and a suspended drum pulse with coordinated beats composed in collaboration with producer Reda Senhaji (Cheb Runner).
Each flip-flop strikes different surfaces, including wood, plexiglass, fabric, and metal, resulting in a shifting percussive environment where visitors can walk through. Drawing from Moroccan rhythmic traditions like dakka marrakchia, Bennani channels the ecstatic energy of crowds, chants, and collective rituals. The installation builds toward a shared pulse that feels equal parts protest, stadium fever, and street celebration. Her use of flip-flops, cheap, elastic, universal, transforms an everyday object into a metaphor for play, resistance, and the democratic nature of communal rhythm.
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WATER-DRIVEN SOUNDSCAPE FILLS BOURSE DE COMMERCE
image courtesy of Bourse de Commerce—Pinault Collection
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot transforms the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce into an aquatic soundscape with clinamen, an installation where porcelain bowls drift across an eighteen-meter basin and create delicate, unpredictable chimes as they collide.
The still surface mirrors the dome of the museum, turning the space into a quiet, resonant field of water, movement, and sound. The work expands the artist’s long exploration of self-regulating sonic systems. Powered by invisible currents, the bowls operate like a living organism, producing music that resists control and evolves moment by moment. The Rotunda’s circular geometry, framed by Tadao Ando’s concrete ring and capped by the glass roof, amplifies this sense of breath and atmosphere. Drawing on the Epicurean idea of clinamen, or the random swerve of atoms, the installation embraces chance as its central force.
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ENESS’ INFLATABLE ROCKSCAPE GLOWS IN MELBOURNE
all images courtesy of Ben Weinstein
ENESS brings Iwagumi Air Scape to Prahran Square, installing a field of large inflatable rock forms that play with perception and scale. Inspired by the Japanese concept of Iwagumi, the work introduces a sculptural landscape that interrupts the urban setting with an artificial wilderness. By day, the inflatables mimic granite through detailed photographic textures; by night, they glow with shifting light and an immersive soundscape.
Sixteen air-filled structures create narrow passages and canyon-like routes that visitors can walk through. As people move across the site, sounds of native birds, insects, and flowing water activate unpredictably, weaving natural atmospheres into the city’s ambient noise. Founder Nimrod Weis frames the project as a contemporary interpretation of Japanese rock gardens, a playful translation of traditional stone compositions into soft, inflatable forms.
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MVRDV’S WOVEN MEGA MAT TRANSFORMS PLASTIC WASTE
image © Depth of Field Co.
MVRDV presents Mega Mat in central Bangkok, transforming more than 500 recycled plastic mats into an 860-square-meter public platform that doubles as a data-driven artwork on Thailand’s plastic waste crisis. The modular installation reinterprets the traditional Thai sua-mat at urban scale, turning Laan Kon Muang Plaza into a colorful communal surface for sitting, gathering, and learning.
Color functions as both texture and information: red, orange, yellow, and green map the flows of plastic waste across the country, from unprotected landfills to the percentage that is actually recycled. One elevated corner forms a shaded exhibition space, echoing the rooflines of nearby temples and offering visitors an interactive look into Thailand’s recycling system. After Bangkok Design Week, the installation was dismantled and repurposed, redistributed to temples, reused as yoga mats, or upcycled into bags.
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CANALSIDE STUDIO’S BASKETS COLLECT RAINWATER IN HONG KONG
image courtesy of Canalside Studio
Canalside Studio introduces the Blue Water Catcher in the rural landscape of Kuk Po, Hong Kong fraturing five large, droplet-shaped structures made from painted rattan, bamboo, and porous fabric that act as both sculptural markers and functional devices, collecting rain and fog through a modular, low-impact system. The installation revives historical irrigation practices from the former Hakka village, echoing the old networks that once sustained local agriculture.
Plastic pipes reference these vanished infrastructures, now enveloped by wetlands that support mangroves, egrets, and mudskippers. Each structure channels mist or rainfall into a nearby well, anchored by water-filled counterweights buried in the soil. Lightweight and transportable, the Blue Water Catcher is designed for remote deployment and educational use. Its vibrant blue forms stand in sharp contrast to the landscape, drawing on visual cues from large-scale environmental artworks. The installation can be dismantled, moved, and reassembled, reinforcing its role as a tool for environmental awareness and hands-on learning around water scarcity.
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SOFT BAROQUE’S KINETIC BENCH SWAYS AND TWISTS IN SPAIN
image courtesy of Josema Cutillas
Soft Baroque brings movement into the public realm with the Dancing Bench, a kinetic installation presented at Concéntrico in Logroño. What looks like a simple geometric bench reveals its true character only when someone sits down. Then, parallel planes rotate under the weight of the user, creating a gentle ripple that shifts perception and turns sitting into a shared, slightly uncanny motion. The bench transforms a passive piece of street furniture into an active participant in public space. As users sway or shift, the structure sways with them, creating an experience that sits somewhere between a rocking chair and a hammock. The piece draws on mid-century visual cues while pushing them toward performative ends. The crisp geometry and minimal palette veil a playful, meditative mechanism that only comes alive in use, reimagining everyday urban furniture as an instrument of motion and attention.
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