Mutina takes part for the fiirst time to the fifth edition of the Festival des Cabanes, held at Villa Medici in Rome, through an installation developed by ECAL (École cantonale d'art de Lausanne) Master Product Design students in collaboration with French designer Ronan Bouroullec.
Every summer since its inception, the festival has been transforming the historical gardens of the French Academy in Rome into a laboratory for architectural experimentation and practice. The idea of the cabane, which gives the festival its name, is the starting point for a dialogue between architects, designers, artists, and thinkers, bringing together architectural innovation, contemporary creativity, and landscape enhancement in a heritage context.
For its 2026 edition, Festival des Cabanes unveils six new architectural interventions accompanied by a multidisciplinary programme exploring the dialogue between architecture, landscape, and contemporary culture.
Within this context, ECAL and Mutina present Façade, an installation conceived by ECAL using Michael Anastassiades' Fringe collection and Bloc collection by Ronan Bouroullec. Reducing architecture to its most essential gesture, a single wall becomes both structure and experience, transforming a simple fragment into a real space. Through a subtle use of motifs and colour variations, this installation interrogates the boundary between surface and depth, reality and illusion.
Drawing on the centuries-old tradition of trompe-l'œil—a pictorial technique that originated in antiquity and flourished during the Renaissance—Façade reinterprets illusion through a contemporary architectural lens, where surface, materiality, and perception converge to redefine the relationship between object, space, and nature.
Façade is the outcome of a months-long process of research, design, and creative exchange developed through the collaboration between Mutina, ECAL, and Ronan Bouroullec. As part of the project, Mutina welcomed the students to its headquarters, guiding them through an in-depth exploration of materials and the expressive potential of ceramic, the defining element at the heart of the project.
The resulting proposals were subsequently developed into a series of micro-architectures and presented to a jury comprising ECAL faculty members, Ronan Bouroullec, and the Mutina team. Among them, Façade was selected to represent the Swiss design school at the fifth edition of Festival des Cabanes at Villa Medici in Rome, standing out for its ability to articulate the dialogue between architecture, materiality, and landscape through an essential and contemporary architectural language.
The Festival des Cabanes is open to the public until 28 September 2026.
Festival des Cabanes
21 May – 28 September 2026
Monday–Sunday, 10:00 am – 7:00 pm (closed Tuesdays)
Villa Medici, Rome
