Umbrales de Ensueño: A dreamlike reimagining of the arch at A Cel Obert 2025

A RENAISSANCE COURTYARD AS THRESHOLD

Umbrales de Ensueño (Dream Arches) has been selected for A Cel Obert 2025 in Tortosa, Spain, a festival dedicated to activating historic architecture through ephemeral artistic interventions. The installation is set within the Patio de Sant Jordi i Sant Domènec, the central courtyard of the Reials Collegis complex, one of Catalonia’s most significant Renaissance ensembles. Defined by arcades rising in three ascending tiers, the courtyard reveals an architectural rhythm of stone, shadow, and light. Its repeated arches, shifting from wide semicircular spans below to more restrained forms above, create a palpable sense of historical gravity and layered time.

REIMAGINING THE ARCH AS A DREAM STATE

Created for this year’s theme, “Dreams,” the installation transforms the courtyard’s defining arch into something fleeting and immaterial. Released from its structural purpose, the arch becomes a threshold of light and movement. The forms float above the courtyard in layered suspension, creating a dreamlike field where reality appears refracted and gently blurred. The installation proposes a vision of architecture in which permanence yields to atmosphere, and solidity becomes a veil.

A LANDSCAPE OF FLOATING CURVES

The work is composed of translucent curtains made from white reflective organza. Spanning the courtyard, the fabric forms a subtle radial pattern that draws space inward and releases it outward. Arches of multiple scales are cut into the material. Some rise at monumental proportions, reminiscent of palace gateways. Others narrow into intimate passages, small enough for a child. A few arches are simply suspended apertures, floating in midair, framing fragments of sky and architecture. As viewers move, sightlines shift and dissolve. Figures appear, vanish, and reappear in overlapping transparencies. The experience is one of continuous transformation, where clarity and blur coexist.

A SPACE THAT BREATHES WITH LIGHT AND AIR

When wind moves through the courtyard, the curtains lift and fold with a slow, uncertain rhythm. The arches lose their rigidity, becoming fluid outlines that advance and retreat. In these movements, the space feels alive. Boundaries waver like reflections on water, and the architecture enters a state of soft instability. The arches seem to melt in the changing light, as if the courtyard were slipping momentarily into a dream.

LIGHT AS MATERIAL AND MEDIUM

Throughout the day, the organza fabric interacts with sunlight in shifting patterns. The installation transitions between translucency and reflection, transforming the atmosphere into a luminous field. Layers of material overlap to scatter light in delicate gradations, allowing brightness and shadow to circulate through the courtyard. At certain moments, the surfaces take on a silvery sheen that collapses distinctions between veil and reflection, foreground and background, depth and surface. Stone and fabric coexist in a single visual register. The ephemeral breathes within the historic, and the dream unfolds inside the real.

A POETIC ENCOUNTER WITHOUT FIXED BOUNDARIES

As people move through the courtyard, the installation responds with subtle reflections and tremulous shadows that drift across stone and column. Arches appear and disappear. Some are glimpsed from above, others felt at eye level. The piece offers no fixed path, only a shifting experience of recognition, memory, and longing. Like a dream, it refuses resolution. Instead, it invites visitors to inhabit a state of openness, where the solid world briefly dissolves into light, motion, and possibility.

Project Credit

Name: Umbrales de Ensueño
Architecture Firm: ELSE / @design_by_else
Year: 2025
Location: Tortosa, Spain

More Photos

ELSE was founded by Zhifei Xu (Fei) and Zimo Zhang in 2023. ELSE is a cross-disciplinary design firm that pursues innovation and boundary-breaking in everyday reality. With an international background, the firm conducts design work simultaneously in the United States, Europe, and China, and has completed projects in both China and Europe.