On a summer's afternoon a quiet garden in munich was magically transformed for an arts festival preview party by huge flowers that at any moment seemed capable of gentle flight. (Delight).

This year's festival of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich was opened with a garden party, and a team of young architects was asked to make installations that could provide protection from sun and rain. After some experiment, the team came up with huge parasols that could be hung from the trees. Each was made from a long rectangular piece of cloth, hemmed on each long side to allow a cord to be inserted at the top, and a light plastic plumbing tube at the bottom. The pipe was bent into a circle, forming the cloth into a cylinder. Then the cord was pulled tight to cause the top to contract and the cloth to fall into natural pleats, forming an inverted funnel.

Assembly may sound complicated but, once past the hemming stage, it was quick and simple (and so of course was the process of demounting). In their short lives, the parasols transformed the garden like gaily-coloured giant flowers that almost seemed to have animate life; at any moment they might have started to fly gently through the trees with the sort of languid grace a jellyfish uses to swim in the sea. They have been stored and may bloom again.

Design team

Toshiki Yokoo, Kay Kulinna, Anja Zant, Anna Reitmanova, Katharina Magdalena Rieger, Sinisa Inic, Maja Pualic, Tania Luebs, Ilka Grund, Magaly Rojas, Robert Schraml