Cabane 7L
5th Edition of the Festival des Cabanes, Villa Medici
20 May - 28 September 2026
In the late 16th century, the gardens of Villa Medici, transformed under Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, were organized around the celebrated system of the Carrés (historically known as I Quadrati): sixteen orthogonal compartments structured within a rigorous geometric plan. While the perimeter avenues expressed the language of Medici magnificence, the interior of each Carré supported a highly productive agricultural regime. Archival descriptions confirm the cultivation of vegetables, herbs, and fruit trees; plants valued not only for their rarity and beauty but also as instruments of political identity and territorial order. The Medici treated horticulture as both aesthetic display and economic infrastructure.
This blend of ornament and production was fundamental to the Medici worldview. Collecting and grafting “species from all countries” expressed a Renaissance logic in which botanical abundance affirmed dynastic prestige and scientific curiosity. Before the rise of the glass greenhouse, courts across Europe experimented with proto-environmental structures such as pergolas, loggias, and heated limonaie that managed light, microclimates, and delicate species.
The garden of Villa Medici can be read as an early infrastructural apparatus: a site where climate, power, and representation were co-produced. The Carrés operated as devices of extraction and display, organizing horticultural productivity into a legible geometric field in which nature was disciplined, ordered, and made to signify. The pergolas recorded in Jacopo Zucchi’s frescoes in Stanza degli Uccelli, function as proto-environmental technologies: lightweight, porous, regulating light and movement without enclosing the air they staged. Their logic anticipates the genealogy of the greenhouse in Europe, where early limonaie and stufe evolved from the desire to control delicate climates and to fold botanical rarity into political identity.
Today, in the context of ecological awareness and cultural reorientation, the garden’s historical layers reveal the shifting infrastructures of soft power: from Medici territorial ambition to the French Academy’s cultural diplomacy to contemporary heritage practices that blend ecology, craft, and public programming. Cabane 7L positions itself within this longue durée not as a monument but as a counter-infrastructure: light, permeable, and provisional. It reframes rather than imposes, offering a way to inhabit the garden through air, time, and observation. In doing so, it proposes an alternative environmental ethic: one where architecture creates the conditions for attention, for lingering, and for reexperiencing the spatial intelligence already embedded in the landscape.
Jacopo Zucchi’s frescoes capture this world: spalliere of citrus, extraordinary birds and small creatures, and pergolas that filter light across the Carrés. These early structures made the garden a place of passage and observation, turning horticultural order into an architectural experience. Over time, the Carrés oscillated between productive cultivation and ornamental display, reflecting broader shifts in the property’s political and economic life: from Medici outpost in papal Rome to French Academy and later cultural institution. Yet the underlying logic persisted: each Carré remained a contained world, continually reinterpreted by those who tended it.
Cabane 7L by salazarsequeromedina enters this continuum. Installed within the Carré du Pin, it revisits the pergola’s environmental intelligence through a contemporary lightweight vaulted structure threading movement and air through the garden. Like those early devices, Cabane 7L is a canopy for rest, reflection, and observation; a platform from which to look outward across the ordered grid and inward toward the foliage that defines each enclosure. A stair leads to a small “nest,” within the structure where one may read, listen, or watch the shifting light over Rome. Throughout the summer months, the structure supports Villa Medici’s cultural programming by hosting intimate performances, readings, workshops, and gatherings among the foliage.
Cabane 7L reactivates its latent desire to inhabit the garden from within, to walk under a shaded structure, and to experience the Carré as both spatial and climatic device. It becomes a contemporary punctuation in a centuries-old pattern, continuing the tradition of subtle, lightweight interventions that mediate between horticulture, culture, and the evolving politics of the landscape.
Team
Laura Salazar, Pablo Sequero
Joe Zhao (visuals)
Client
Villa Medici Festival des Cabanes, French Academy in Rome
Chanel, Librairie 7L
Support
Syracuse University
