SONIC MAZE
An immersive crossover design defying limits for Dutch Design Foundation
Introduction
In a Europe navigating fragmentation, digital isolation, fear, and conflict, SONIC MAZE emerged from the collaboration between French architect mesure studio and German designer ultimo intimo. Their 12 × 12-meter structure is an original, custom design composed of two independent inflated bodies. At Dutch Design Week 2025, it rose to its full shape within minutes on the festival’s central plaza. Selected as Grand Project by the Dutch Design Foundation, the installation was conceived as an introductory threshold welcoming the 350,000 visitors expected over the nine days of the fair. A radical presence that resists categorization, SONIC MAZE challenges the boundaries between design, art, music, and architecture – inviting visitors to collectively imagine the future and to reconsider the limits we place upon ourselves.
Experience
Confronted with a monumental black presence, visitors were drawn into an unexpected start to their Design Week experience. Entering required physically pushing through soft, inclined walls – a bodily threshold. Inside, dense fog periodically shifted the senses away from sight, while immersive sounds animated the interior, giving the structure the presence of a living organism. At its core, the project explores and challenges the notion of limits. Depending on one’s position, the same surface might appear impossibly steep and impassable, or conversely, as a terrain to inhabit – to sit on, climb, play with, or explore. Visitors were encouraged to drop assumptions and renegotiate the boundaries between themselves and the space. Vibrations travelled through the membrane-like walls wherever bodies touched, leaned, or lay against them.
To create a world apart that invited movement and perceptual drift, French electronic music producer Drux composed a series of spatial soundscapes, each unfolding in infinite variations. Inspired by white noises, drones, and shifting air pressures, the symphonic composition evolved continuously in response to time, position, and chance, ensuring each visit felt unique and ephemeral.
Outlook
The SONIC MAZE revealed the power of open-ended design: a structure that can become a concert venue, festival stage, playground, public sculpture, meditative space, or gallery installation – depending on who enters and how they choose to engage. Its versatility demonstrated how audiences intuitively take ownership of spaces that invite rather than instruct.
Looking ahead, mesure studio and ultimo intimo seek collaborators who share an appetite for experimentation, public engagement, and immersive storytelling – across culture, technology, architecture, music, fashion, and the public realm. Ultimately, the SONIC MAZE leaves a question at the heart of contemporary design: What possibilities emerge when creativity is freed from categories, and when we allow spaces – and the people who inhabit them – to redefine what design can be?
CREDITS
Architect: mesure studio (Raphaël Boursier Desvignes) - Paris
Designer: ultimo intimo (Charlotte Kammerer) - Berlin
Sound designer: Vincent Drux - Paris
