Soft Dome, installation by Atelier YokYok

The designers from French firm Atelier YokYok have crafted Soft Dome, an installation in the rotunda of the National Museum in Singapore for Children's Season Singapore (CSS). A visit to the museum becomes doubly interesting, particularly for children!


The National Museum of Singapore, founded in 1887, is the oldest museum in the south-east Asian country and is dedicated to history and culture. The building itself is an architectural landmark and was completely revamped between 2003 and 2006 to meet the new exhibition needs, but also as an urban cultural reference with lots of festivals and events on top of the normal museum programme.
One of these collateral initiatives is the annual Children's Season Singapore (CSS) festival, being held for the tenth time this year. The festival is dedicated to children from the ages of 3 to 12 and is held during the May-June school holidays. As invited foreign artists, the architects from Atelier YokYok created a temporary installation to bring to life this year's theme, “connections”.
The result is “Soft Dome”, a kind of bouncy hemispheric net that you can experience in the museum's main rotunda that, given the whole architectural space, is completed in the museum's dome, which gives the installation its name. So visitors to the museum are confronted with this majestic black net structure that invades the space. But awe soon gives way to curiosity as you work out how to climb inside the Soft Dome made from about 200 square metres of 5 mm thick knotless polypropylene safety net, with a mesh size of 45 x 45 mm wide, attached to the rotunda's eight pillars. Once you venture inside, the visual connection with the museum architecture becomes obvious, as does the link with the building, and you can dive, swing, climb inside the inverted dome, enjoying this playful and exciting interpretation of the museum space by Atelier YokYok.
The Soft Dome will be open until the end of July - all the more reason to visit the National Museum of Singapore, particularly if you're travelling with children.

Christiane Bürklein

Project: Atelier YokYok
Location: National Museum of Singapore, Singapore
Year: 2017
Images: courtesy of Atelier YokYok
Find out more: http://nationalmuseum.sg/