At Studio Bound we designed ceremony environments for Expo 2020 Dubai, staged in and around Al Wasl Plaza — the 130-metre dome at the centre of the site, the largest structure of its kind, serving 192 participating nations. It's the one project in my portfolio where the word "ceremony" applies directly: here I designed the ceremony environments themselves.
The mistake a giant canvas invites
A projection surface that size invites a particular mistake, which is to use all of it, all the time. I went the opposite way, and it rests on a principle I return to often: a design is finished not when nothing more can be added, but when nothing more can be taken away.
Astonishment depends on contrast
The reasoning is perceptual. Astonishment depends on contrast. An environment that delivers spectacle continuously trains its audience to expect spectacle, and the extraordinary quickly reads as ordinary — the eye adapts within moments. The only way to keep a single peak moment feeling like a peak is to surround it with quieter ones. On a canvas as dominant as the Al Wasl dome, that meant deciding as carefully when the dome should fall still as when it should come alive.
Subtractive design
So much of the design work at this scale is subtractive: finding the one moment that has to land, and then protecting it by holding everything around it back. An audience doesn't retain two hours of continuous effect. It retains the moment the restraint was built to deliver.