A red gateway at the end of a narrow Montpellier street opens onto a courtyard few people have ever seen inside.There, suspended above the stone floor of the Cour de la Petite Loge, Panache de Lumière by Ateliers A+ turns more than 600 coloured elements into a canopy that shifts with the wind and the hour of the day. Visitors who found their way in during the 2026 edition of the Festival des Architectures Vives voted it their favorite, awarding it the festival’s Public Prize.
Hidden behind that gateway, the courtyard belongs to one of the private mansions in Montpellier’s historic centre that the Festival des Architectures Vives exists specifically to unlock. For nearly a week each June, the festival opens these otherwise inaccessible spaces to the public, inviting temporary installations designed for each individual courtyard. The Cour de la Petite Loge, tucked at the end of a narrow street, gave Panache de Lumière an intimate, almost secret setting to reveal itself in.
A lightweight steel structure carries the installation’s weight above the courtyard, holding a suspended net from which the coloured elements hang. The choice of a net rather than a fixed frame let the piece move rather than sit still — every gust of wind travels through the structure and into the colour above the visitors’ heads.
Drawing on stained glass for its logic, the installation’s translucent coloured elements catch natural light rather than reflect it outright, producing the shifting interplay of transparency and colour that stained-glass windows are known for, but freed from any single wall or window frame. As the sun moves across the courtyard over the course of a day, the same 600 elements read differently hour to hour.
Wind sets the piece in motion, animating the elements into a kinetic light installation that never holds one composition for long — a logic shared with Point Cloud, Vincent Leroy’s suspended installation in Beijing, where air movement is similarly left to compose the piece rather than the architects themselves.
Visitor movement adds a second layer of variation on top of the wind: as people walked through the Cour de la Petite Loge and their sightlines shifted, colours intensified, overlapped, and recombined into compositions that no two visitors necessarily saw the same way. It’s a strategy for colour installation as spatial experience rather than decoration, closer in spirit to 100 Colors, Emmanuelle Moureaux’s installation in Hong Kong, where colour similarly reorganizes itself around the person moving through it.
A team of six designed Panache de Lumière: architects Eline Thibaut, Marie Felipe, Valentin Bancarel, and Bastien Lauras, landscape engineer Camille Le Joly, and architect and urban planner Julie Guiraud, all assembled within the Ateliers A+ team specifically for the festival’s 2026 edition. The brief set by the mentoring architects asked the team to build a proposal around the idea of “panache” — a challenge the group answered with colour, motion, and scale rather than restraint.
Marking its 20th edition in 2026, the Festival des Architectures Vives built the year around the theme of Transmission, pairing architects who had participated in earlier editions with newly formed teams — a format that placed Panache de Lumière alongside twelve other installations, each designed for its own courtyard within Montpellier’s historic centre.
Dismantled the following day, Panache de Lumière didn’t stay taken apart for long. The installation has since travelled to Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, where it will appear again during the Architecture en Fête festival, this time inside the Chartreuse Notre-Dame-du-Val-de-Bénédiction — a protected historic monument that will give the same net of 600 coloured elements an entirely different set of walls to catch light against.
Panache de Lumière by Ateliers A+ | Where: Cour de la Petite Loge, Montpellier, France — When: 9–14 June 2026