Coachella 2025 | Desert Daydreams

Every spring, a cultural phenomenon occurs, those seeking stories to make and those who are led by the music make their pilgrimage to the California desert for Coachella. It’s more than just a music festival; it’s a sun-drenched sanctuary where art, sound, and oneself blurs into something transcendent. For a few fleeting days, time bends, reality softens, and life becomes a canvas splashed with rhythm, color, and curated chaos. To go is to surrender to the romance of the moment—to chase beauty, connection, and a version of yourself that only exists beneath desert stars and bass lines that shake the magic desert dust off your skin to be embedded into your bones.

With each year the art curated by Public Art Company becomes iconic statements, aiding in the journey and acting as a focal meeting place. Once erected, the installations by world class architects become icons in themselves offering refuge from hot desert days and a perfect photo point to start or end your adventure. Public Art Company founder Raffi Lehrer spoke on the importance of these monumental structures. “If you create an experience that’s artfully produced, then the music, the food, and the entire environment can help people become whoever they want to be. If they’re fully immersed in that for three days, hopefully it breaks them out of whatever box they’re in—and helps them expand their minds a bit, carrying that energy into the other 362 days of the year.”

Walking across the Empire Polo Field as we are met with this year’s three Architectural gems that provided the many music worshipers the chance to take in the spirit of freedom, color, and love. This year’s trio includes Take Flight by Isabel + Helen with its suspended lines and geometry, Le Grand Bouquet by Uchronia which contrast materials and fluidity, as well as effervescent elegance of Taffy by Stephanie Lin.

Isabel + Helen | Take Flight

London-based design duo Isabel Gibson and Helen Chesner of Isabel + Helen— continue to redefine the boundaries between art and design. Their latest installation, Take Flight, is their most ambitious project to date — and their largest exploration yet into the power and poetry of wind energy.

Standing an impressive 60 feet tall, Take Flight draws inspiration from 19th-century flying machines. It channels the spirit of adventure, inventiveness, and environmental responsiveness with a trio of towering structures adorned with a mesmerizing network of spinning turbines. As wind passes through, the intricate mechanisms respond in hypnotic motion, transforming natural energy into kinetic art.

Take Flight is built for movement and exploration. Visitors are encouraged to walk, dance, and meander beneath and around the installation. From the outer perspective the bright white turbines are delicately proposed with elements of color. A step inside offers up a kaleidoscope of colors as the inverse side embraces a playfulness that carries a surreal image of the innie vs outie world.

It is a safe space to rest and retreat. The giant pinwheel act as a reference to the iconic Palm Springs landscape as those traveling from LA would see and know these emblematic compositions mark the arrival into the desert oasis. By day, the installation is serene and meditative. By night, it comes alive with light, evolving into a radiant, dynamic spectacle.

Since forming their partnership in 2015, the pair has become known for their experimental installations and animated sculptures that explore themes of transformation, form, and function. With past collaborations including Hermès and Moncler, and showcases at the V&A and Saatchi Gallery, the studio has earned its place in the international design spotlight.

Uchronia | Le Grand Bouquet

Le Grand Bouquet, the large-scale offering from beloved Parisian dream-weavers Uchronia, led by Julien Sebbans, intersects play and experimental constructions. With its mass scale mixed media, the installation sits in the center as a grand space to gather, soften, glow and lounge. At its heart stands a towering bouquet of oversized inflatable flowers — 10 meters tall and impossible not to smile at. The colors? Unapologetically vibrant. The petals? Soft, stretchy vinyl stretched into childhood memory — a six-pointed ode to scribbled flowers and first discoveries. This is not nostalgia. It’s a rebirth. Spring, after all, is a second chance.

At first glance there is nothing but joy to come from the large-scale installation which leans onto the reference of desert flora and the gesture of friendship as Sebban explains it best, “The idea behind this installation was to do a big flower bouquet inspired by the flowers from the desert. We wanted to do this big offering as the flowers are blooming… When you have a celebration, you always offer flowers to your friends.”

Around the central bloom, six satellite bouquets dot the festival terrain like friendly constellations, turning the grounds into a surreal garden party at scale. As twilight deepens, the installation hums to life. Each petal pulses with gentle light, transforming the desert into a dreamscape where flora floats and time bends. Walking around the form at night as it shivered with light made one feel like a contemporary Alice lost in the fields of Wonderland.

But Le Grand Bouquet is more than an installation — it’s a feeling. Beneath the central stem, petal-shaped bean bags await like open arms. Recline. Breathe. Watch stars appear. Here, the tempo slows. The day dissolves into dusk, and the chaos becomes calm. It’s a gathering place, a landmark, a beacon — for friends finding each other, for souls finding quiet, for strangers finding wonder.

Born from the radical joy that defines Uchronia — the Paris-based studio founded five years ago by Julien Sebban — this project continues their mission of utopia-in-motion. With every line, every hue, every playful curve, Le Grand Bouquet reminds us that even in a world built of bass and heat, softness has a place.

Stephanie Lin | Taffy

In the endless expanse of desert sky, where the sun paints shadows with intention and the air itself seems to shimmer, a new skyline bloomed — soft, towering, and impossibly sweet. Taffy, by architect Stephanie Lin, is a mirage made manifest. A living reverie in mesh and color. A hymn to the desert’s mood swings.

Seven cylinders rise — some 25 feet, some 50 — scalloped like confections, wrapped in airy mesh that flirts with the breeze. As the sun arcs overhead, these moiré-cloaked towers shift hue and intensity, casting hypnotic shadows across the sand. From afar, they ripple like silken dresses caught mid-twirl; up close, they envelop you in a color story pulled from midcentury desert modernism — faded pastels that hum with nostalgia. A heavy color theory and gradient which was well researched and aligned to give us  visual frothiness at every which angle.

Taffy is a structure that allows the patron to feel the tones before  — beneath the towers, curved plywood benches loop and echo their forms, inviting bodies to rest, to wander, to wonder. It is a rare kind of softness in the Polo Field’s wild landscape.

Stephanie Lin, the visionary mind behind Present Forms and current Dean of The School of Architecture, doesn’t just design spaces — she conjures atmospheres. With Taffy, she coaxes the desert into conversation. A space becomes a pause. A shadow becomes a story. Architecture becomes emotion.

As day slips into night, the towers blush and fade into new moods — their ephemeral beauty mirroring the fleeting blooms of the surrounding land. You sit, you look up, and for a moment, the sky feels just a little closer.