Architecture Senior Lecturer on co-creating public exhibition in France
14 August 2026
The Solastalgia Pavilions: Four Vanishing Plants is a recent exhibition that took place at Jardins Botanique in Marnay-sur-Seine, France. Each pavilion featured a plant species from the local region that is either critically endangered or extinct; addressing the climate emergency directly while offering attendees a meditative space to both reflect and mourn.
BA(Hons) Architecture Senior Lecturer, Dr Sarah Riviere, collaborated with LA-based artist Nya Patrinos to create the exhibition, where four pavilions are suspended as fabric canopies, printed in high definition with motifs generated from each of the threatened plants.
“It has been exciting to collaborate on this project with Nya,” Sarah told us. “Together, we're using soft architecture and textile design to explore something called solastalgia – the grief we feel when we lose the landscapes and ecosystems we love and where we feel at home.”
“It's not just about what's disappearing: it's about how that loss feels. Environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht has coined the term solastalgia to describe this.”
Addressing the climate emergency, the four pavilions engage with the emotional condition Albrecht described: distress arising in response to climate disruption and environmental change. Each pavilion reflects contemporary design approaches, while also holding space for anxiety, offering communal surfaces on which emotional responses can be held.
“Emotions such as solastalgia, climate grief and eco-anxiety are often unspoken and difficult to express,” Sarah noted. “The pavilions provide material structures through which these feelings can be rendered visible via thread, pigment and text. It makes the intangible, tangible.”
“By printing endangered and extinct flora onto the tent’s fabric, we mirror both preservation and loss. In this way, the exhibition has been an attempt to hold on to what is vanishing while acknowledging absence.”
The summer installation draws on France’s history of formal gardens, where temporary pavilions and marquees were a common and ornamental part of gardens during the 17th and 18th centuries. “These ephemeral architectures, sometimes richly embroidered, other times made of simple canvas, blurred the line between indoors and outdoors, cultivating an atmosphere of both spectacle and retreat.”
Sarah’s work focuses on the architecture of social change, ecological design and participatory spatial practice, combining research, teaching and international projects with activist-oriented interventions. The Solastalgia Pavilions: Four Vanishing Plants is Sarah’s latest installation.
You might also like
MA Photography Senior Lecturer launches major show at the National Gallery of Scotland
Online Creative Writing lecturer is shortlisted for Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize
Falmouth University announces appointment of next Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive
The MA Fine Art Online team explore 'thoughtful, generous and alive’ research-led teaching
