The floating installations that created a dialogue between art, architecture and landscape

It was 2014 when Christo and Jeanne-Claude first began thinking about a new project involving water, continuing a line of research that started decades earlier. Back in 1969, with Wrapped Coast in Australia, and especially in 1983, with Surrounded Islands in Biscayne Bay in Miami, the artist couple had shown how water could become an active part of the work, transforming the way the landscape was viewed. In 2016, Lake Iseo became the setting for one of their most memorable installations: The Floating Piers. For sixteen days, a three-kilometer floating walkway connected Sulzano to Monte Isola and the island of San Paolo. Covered in iridescent dahlia yellow fabric, the work allowed visitors to literally walk on water. Entirely self-financed and temporary—a hallmark of Christo's work—the installation attracted over 1.5 million people, transforming the lake into a living work of art.

The first Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980 marked the beginning of a new theoretical and visual era. Alongside the famous Strada Novissima, symbol of postmodernism, Aldo Rossi's Teatro del Mondo remained memorable, a theater built on a floating raft in the lagoon, which could accommodate up to 250 spectators. Inaugurated on November 11, 1979, it was part of the initiatives of the architecture sector directed by Paolo Portoghesi and the theater sector directed by Maurizio Scaparro. The structure, 25 meters high, was made of iron tubes and covered with wood on the outside and partly on the inside. Ephemeral and itinerant, the theater embodied the key themes of the Italian architectural debate: memory, archetype, and timelessness. Conceived as a visual metaphor and theatrical space, it was reminiscent in some ways of North American lighthouses and Renaissance baptisteries. In Domus issue 602, dated January 1980, Manfredo Tafuri described it as an alienating object that found meaning in its journey and temporary presence in the lagoon landscape, becoming a silent icon laden with meaning.

On the occasion of Manifesta 11, the nomadic European biennial of contemporary art, thirty architecture students from Studio Tom Emerson (ETH Zurich) designed and built the Pavillon of Reflections: a floating platform on Lake Zurich, opposite the city center. Conceived as a public forum for the biennial, the pavilion hosted film screenings, swimming areas, and meeting spaces. Five wooden structures—a tower, a grandstand, a bar, a solarium with changing rooms, and a central swimming pool with a screen—made up the pavilion, which was the result of a competition among the students, then developed and built in ten months using simple screw joints and exclusively European fir wood. The pavilion was the concrete result of a collective process in which the students experienced all phases of the project, from conception to construction.

In 1999, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Francesco Borromini's birth, Mario Botta created San Carlino on Lake Lugano: a 1:1 scale reproduction of the famous San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, sectioned to enhance its interior space. The installation, conceived as a tribute to the Ticino master, was also inspired, as Botta recounts, by an observation made by Carlo Dossi: “The dominant character of architecture is given by the context that strikes the artist's eye.” Mario Botta thus reflected on the landscape that gave birth to Borromini in 1599, and on the possible link between those places and the formal qualities of his architecture. With San Carlino, Botta transported one of the master's early works to the shores of the lake, where the mountains drop sheer into the water, suggesting an interaction between the geometry of the building and the lines of the natural landscape. The project was a symbolic gesture of restitution, a poetic hypothesis on how the territory may have influenced Borromini's formal sensibility.

Yukinori Yanagi's Floating Museum, currently under construction on the Shinan archipelago (South Korea), consists of seven floating cubes representing the continents and islands of Jeollanam-Do. The structure, mirrored on the outside, reflects the surrounding landscape, multiplying perspectives and creating a dreamlike, suspended atmosphere. Inside, various installations linked to the Japanese artist's practice tell the story of the Korean peninsula, a symbol of the Eurasian Far East. The project is part of the "One Island, One Museum" initiative, created to promote an extraordinary but progressively depopulated area, and inspired by Yanagi's work on the island of Inujima in Japan. Despite delays due to the pandemic and diplomatic tensions, the museum – the artist's second architectural project – will be completed in spring 2026, helping to rewrite the cultural identity of the area through art and shared memory.

Ryo Yamada's Infinite Landscape Pavilion is a floating installation built in the middle of a lake. It is not architecture in the traditional sense, because it does not “support human life,” but rather focuses on the time spent inside it. Visitors accessed the pavilion via a narrow, 27-meter-long passageway designed to slow them down and encourage them to reflect on movement and memory. The heart of the work was a corridor with a floor covered with hundreds of Mirror Water Lilies, metal sculptures that reflected light and water. The pavilion was an invitation to perceive essential but often overlooked elements: the sun, water, time. It was not an intervention that projected towards the exceptional, but rather aimed to draw attention back to what is close to us in everyday life: the landscape, to be rediscovered through a slower and more conscious gaze.

Atelier Pierre Thibault's Atelier en mouvement is a nomadic and modular installation, designed as a poetic laboratory in dialogue with the landscape. Composed of four lightweight and removable modules, it can take on different forms: raft, pier, shelter, or sculpture, adapting to its context as a floating structure, on stilts, or on the ground. Covered with a white veil, it generates evocative images and stimulates new design ideas: each movement is an opportunity to read the space differently. The experimental modularity of this project also stems from the direct experience of the installation, which has allowed the knowledge gained by the team on a 1:1 scale to be transferred to a larger scale: assembly techniques, materiality, light, and relationship with the landscape. These elements become tools for observing and understanding places in a new way, freeing oneself from established patterns. The installations are thus configured as forms of pre-architecture: temporary devices that stimulate a new way of looking at architecture and landscape, renewing their meaning and vision.

Floating Dreams by Ik-Joong Kang is a monumental floating installation on the Thames, next to the Millennium Bridge, commissioned for the Totally Thames 2016 festival. Three stories high and composed of five hundred original drawings on hanji (Korean rice paper), it collected the memories of elderly North Korean refugees in the UK, whom the artist invited to recount through drawings the places of their childhood lost during the war. The work, illuminated from within like a large lantern, reflected desires for peace and reunification, becoming a collective symbol of pain and hope, a special source of light in the London nocturnal landscape, bearing intimate memories transformed into public art. An integral part of the message was also the gesture of return: Kang returned to Korea to collect these visual testimonies and bring them to the heart of a European capital as a poetic act of reconnection between past and future.

Launched in 2016, Swale is a floating art project conceived by interdisciplinary artist Mary Mattingly to sidestep a law prohibiting the cultivation of food on public land in New York. Sailing under maritime law, it functioned as a sculpture, ecological infrastructure, and civic proposal. It hosted over eighty species of edible and medicinal plants, offering the public the opportunity to harvest them for free. By docking at various public piers and collaborating with local organizations, Swale sparked new debates on food access, land rights, and urban ecology. In 2017, thanks to its influence, the first terrestrial “Foodway” was created in the Bronx, which is still active today. In 2025, Swale will launch a permanent fleet of three barges, designed in collaboration with local communities, students from the Pratt Institute, and over 130,000 citizens. The public program's activities will include topics such as public art, climate justice, well-being, and ecological pedagogy. Swale aims to inspire new uses for urban public spaces, with a focus on resilience and accessibility.

Locus is a visual-sound performance created in the bay of Sapri (SA) in 2017, as part of the experimental project Derive, born from the collaboration between sculptor Edoardo Tresoldi and musician IOSONOUNCANE. It is a metal mesh sculpture, a sailing ship suspended over the water like an apparition, which hosted an original musical composition, designed to blend with the seascape and its elements. The bay was conceived as an integral part of the work, as an evocative acoustic and scenic space, to create an immersive and site-specific experience, and also to redefine the relationship between the work, the audience, and the natural context. Conceived as a temporary presence, a symbol of fragility and transience, which disappears at the end of the performance, restoring the landscape to its original state, Locus is an example of how art, music, and the environment can converge in a single poetic and unrepeatable experience.