Monumental Arcadia is located in Rousham House & Gardens in West Oxfordshire, England. The project takes into consideration the construction of a monumental arcadia where the main activities are performing weddings and events, celebrating nature and the animals that live there with an ecological sanctuary, and, finally, a theatre.

The proposed building is not in one location but scattered across three main areas of the park, following Kent’s previous iteration of using the entire park. The programme over the year changes with seasonality.

For this reason, some materials need to move side to side in the park, while others stay and resemble what looks like the remains of a building. Eventually the building will arrive at its exhausting phase where the building will become part of the landscape and the memory of what it was.

The building acts like a theatre on-site, changing its scenography to adapt to a new season, to a new act. Event materials, through the process of ageing or erosion, act like others to keep the theatrical illusion of fake reality.