After two years of cancellations and wait, the exciting re-opening of Coachella took place over the weekend with a new installation by Architensions titled The Playground.

The studio’s installation joins others by Estudio Normal, Kiki Van Eijk, Oana Stanescu, Christopher Cichocki, and LosDos and is meant to evoke a “vibrant urban landscape” based on the ideas of play expressed by the prolific Dutch intellectual Constant Nieuwenhuys in his visionary idea for a speculative anti-capitalist mecca called New Babylon.

Composed of four separate steel towers totaling 42 and 56 feet in height respectively, the installation hinges on a visual grid meant to “an open space that opposes the isolation and homogeneity of technologically mediated experiences” in ways similar to that of Cedric Price’s seminal early-60s Fun Palace design. 

“The Playground is a fragment of a city,” Architensions co-founder Nick Roseboro explained, “a node for engaging festival-goers in collective interactions and in performance, relaxation, and play.”

“In an analogy with Aldo Rossi's Il teatro del Mondo, [the installation] creates an environment similar to a theater, in which people can interact in a sort of performance,” founder Alessandro Orsini said of the towers’ dual inspiration. “It provides an opportunity to experience a leisure space without the use of technology, simply by interacting with the space and its materiality. The user is at the same time a spectator and performer.”

The Playground features a dichroic film that combines with the warm desert sunlight to amplify the surrounding environment to festival-goers assembled in a piazza below. 

Per the design team: “The height, positioning, and grid of the towers allow for dynamic shadows to be cast on the ground amongst them, in totality comprising a manufactured universe of shapes that symbolize many physical places at once. Sky bridges define the interstitial space, and benches at ground level connect the towers and form the footprint of the 'piazza,' as well as provide a place to rest or to be a spectator.”

“At heart, The Playground provides its audience a space to re-align the spirit, and to re-discover leisure in a way that is not inherently attached to commerce or digital interpolation,” they added finally. “In an age when technology substitutes for real-life experiences through mediated images, the project presents a physical atmosphere that is both dynamic and enveloping, that people can use as a space to interact with one another in the real world. It also proposes a vertical city in a place where decades of horizontal sprawl have defined a certain type of leisure and suburban growth defined by apartness, instead experimenting with the possibilities of improving our environment to foster physical interaction and collectivity.”

The installation opened on the 17th and will remain on view until the close of the festival on April 24th.