AA Diploma 20 and CAMPO have been invited to design and build a pavilion for the Festival des Cabanes 2025, built in collaboration with Falegnameria K-ALMA and Echo Labs. The project – Chiostro - Who lives there? – reimagines the cloister not as a space of isolation but as a contemporary common; an open, collective space of assembly and reflection. The pavilion is part of Diploma 20’s ongoing investigation of the relationship between architecture, knowledge and power, that radically reinterprets the archetype of the Renaissance studiolo as a tool for shared authorship and spatial emancipation.

Prototyped at the AA woodland campus of Hooke Park in January and completed on-site at Villa Medici in April 2025, the pavilion was constructed using reclaimed timber and modular, demountable techniques. Designed and built by the team over a five-day residency, the project challenges conventional hierarchies of architectural production by foregrounding collective decision-making, participatory construction and material reuse. Positioned as a living archive, the pavilion explores architecture’s potential to support forms of life and production that resist dominant systems of authorship and control. It is both a built artefact and a pedagogical act – interrogating how architecture can shape relationships between territory, community and knowledge.

The pavilion has been offered as a free canvas to South African artist Roger Ballen. The installation confronts the viewer with a chaos of drawings and scattered objects to evoke spirits from the other side, human figures at the margins of the world.

The project team of the pavilion includes: Dila Cakmak, Maria Efstathiadou, Sari King, Hande Kavak, Sara Layoun, Saamia Makharia, Sebastian Nisoli, Belen Niro, Anastasia Papaspyrou, Jacqueline Rosales, Berra Sutcu, Jiayu Xu and Miharu Yamaguchi.