Large-scale works by Paris design studio Uchronia and TSOA's dean Stephanie Lin feature among the installations created for the 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California, USA. Three floral-inspired installations by prominent architects and designers were installed throughout the grounds to complement the lineup of international music acts at the annual Coachella festival.
Floral-Inspired 2025 Coachella Installations
Playful and monumental, the works of art across Coachella 2025 are not standing still, literally or conceptually. As festivalgoers descend once more on Southern California‘s Colorado Desert, they’re greeted not only by sonic booms from the main stage but by a chorus of kinetic sculptures, light-blooming inflatables, and temporary works of architecture that sway, ripple, and all but vanish in the shifting sun.
Meant to serve as objects of interaction for festival goers, the monumental installations can be seen from across the site, the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, a short drive from Palm Springs. Every year, the festival works with arts programmer Public Art Company to select three designs that are developed nearby.
The design had to be elegant from both a production and aesthetic standpoint, and that comes through in the experience of the work. The three installations make a great family with shared qualities despite their unique approaches – there is a time-based concept in all of them, while each offers a really different type of mesmerizing engagement. The architects love the radial and floral echoes across all of the works.
Blooming Inflatables Transforming Into Ephemeral Clouds for This Year's Coachella
A standout art installation at Coachella 2025 is Taffy by Stephanie Lin, an incredible work that continues to blur the line between sculpture and environment. Seven cylindrical towers cloaked in scalloped mesh flutter and ripple in the wind, creating flickering moiré patterns that appear and disappear with each gust. Painted in colors borrowed from midcentury desert modernism, the structures shimmer with the day’s changing light — monuments not of permanence, but of becoming. Beneath them, curved benches invite visitors to pause, reflect, and dissolve, just for a moment, into the mirage.
Meanwhile, Isabel + Helen Studio‘s Take Flight is inspired by the elegant impracticality of 19th-century flying machines, the installation features giant turbines that catch the desert wind and spin hypnotically, seemingly hovering between motion and stillness. Two skeletal bicycles roam the festival grounds, channeling the madcap ambition of human-powered aviation. By day, Take Flight reads as a mechanical relic lost in time; by night, it becomes a glowing, ghostly turbine—a reminder that sometimes the beauty lies not in success, but in the audacity of the attempt.
Le Grand Bouquet by Uchronia is a surreal garden of inflatable flowers that glow from within. Towering and translucent, these blossoms stretch skyward, their oversized petals providing shade and wonder. As the desert light shifts, the work transforms from radiant sculpture to floating mirage, toeing the line between reality and reverie. Beneath the flowers, festivalgoers can lounge in ephemeral springtime, gathered in pockets of soft nostalgia and shared display.
Art That Encourages Touching, Moving, and Inhabiting
The art installations across the grounds at Coachella 2025 are assembled on-site. Since 2016, Clemente and a skilled in-house team of builders, carpenters, painters, and riggers have brought large-scale commissions to life from the ground up, embracing architectural scale and structural integrity without losing playfulness. From the curator‘s perspective, Lehrer’s vision draws from artists with ‘an intuitive understanding of scale and elevations’ who can evoke emotion through material, form, and color. Many of these collaborators come from architecture and design backgrounds, chosen as much for their technical fluency as for their spatial imagination.
The works do not shy away from interactivity. Many of the installations—architectural in ambition, sculptural in feel—invite touch, movement, and inhabitance. Some twist in the wind, some glow from within, others transform from day to night. What unites them is an attunement to Coachella’s extremes: blinding light and deep shadow, crowds and solitude, the monumental and the fleeting.
Every piece is site-specific and tailored for the festival’s unique demands, often requiring up to three years of development in close collaboration with the curators.
