Festival des Cabanes

Every summer, since its creation in 2022, Festival des Cabanes at Villa Medici has been transforming the historic gardens of the French Academy in Rome into a laboratory for experimentation and architectural practice. The 4th Festival will be held from June 5 to September 29, 2025 with five cabanes (cabins or huts) to visit in the gardens, a new bookshop, and a multidisciplinary artistic program.

The idea of the cabane, which gives the festival its name, is the starting point for a dialogue between architects, artists, designers, and craftspeople, focusing on a range of concerns: how can we create non-invasive architectural forms? What are the sustainable housing solutions of the future? Designed in wood, steel, bricks, or recycled materials, the cabanes take their place in the quadrati of the historical garden, rectangles of grass planted with pine trees, some of which are nearly 200 years old, and bounded by hedges of laurel, box, holm oak, and myrtle. Wandering from cabane to cabane offers a new experience of the historic gardens of Villa Medici and invites you to adopt a different perspective to appreciate the stunning panoramic view of Rome.

The cabanes are original architectural creations designed by five teams with a variety of practices and outlooks: 

Associates Architecture (Brescia, Italy) has conceived a habitable enclosure in dual dialogue with the panoramic view over Rome and the historic pines of Villa Medici’s gardens, multiplying viewpoints and observational interplay. It is presented in parallel with the exhibition of Louis Le Masson's Panorama (1779).

Atelier MARE (Marseille) offers a cabane that combines craftmanship with innovation, inviting us to rediscover the wealth of techniques and uses of canne de Provence (giant cane), formerly widespread on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Campo & Diploma 20 Architectural Association (Rome and London), with the participation of artist Roger Ballen (Johannesburg, ZA) are together creating a cluster that eliminates the boundaries between reality and fiction, dream and nightmare.

Huttopia Foundation with Théo Kermarrec, Pierre Robion and Charles Waltmann (Lyon, France) has planned a modular, demountable cabane, a reinterpretation of the prefabricated houses of the 1950s, in response to contemporary thinking on light, responsible housing and its application to the tourism industry.

MBL architectes (Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine, France) have designed a shaded reading pavilion for the 7L Bookshop, consisting of a wide brick roof tied to a wood and metal frame. MBL architectes’ intervention extends to Villa Medici’s bookshop, redesigned in collaboration with the 7L Bookshop to offer a selection of books on art, architecture, and landscape.

As part of the festival and in partnership with the la Fondation Louis Le Masson et François Masson—Académie des beaux-arts, Villa Medici will also display the artwork Panorama of Rome Seen from the Terrace of San Pietro in Montorio, painted in 1779 by the architect and engineer Louis Le Masson (1743–1829) from the Janiculum Hill. Considered the first panorama in the history of art, this over four-meter painting takes in the Eternal City in a single glance. For the first time in two hundred and fifty years, the artwork will return to the city in which it was painted and offer a remarkable reverse angle to another panoramic view from Villa Medici