Lavazza Museum
At Nuvola Lavazza, the coffee company’s headquarters in the centre of Turin, Universo Lavazza forms the audio-visual heart of the museum. Inside a suspended, semi-transparent “cloud”, visitors encounter the brand through movement, light, and shared ritual rather than product display.
Tamschick Media + Space created the central installation as a room within a room, where projected imagery and an interactive table stage the brand’s history, origins, and everyday coffee culture.
A luminous thread cloud for Lavazza’s stories
Universo Lavazza is formed by a circular curtain of fine threads, hanging from the ceiling to create a semi-transparent enclosure. Projections play on both the inner and outer surfaces, so the installation can be experienced from within and from the surrounding museum areas. When visitors walk through the threads, the projected images ripple, turning the “cloud” into a responsive light body.
In the centre stands an oval unit as a meeting point. Guests receive an espresso cup at the start of their visit; by placing it on the table, they activate different narrative sequences that run across the 360° projection zone.
A moment of coffee
Inside the space, visitors are surrounded by slowly shifting scenes: coffee origins, plantations in dappled forest light, urban piazzas, studio situations, and milestones from Lavazza’s company history. The projections flow along the curtain while sound and music ensures a continuous atmosphere.
The installation becomes a shared setting where people stand together, talk, and watch the images unfold in a spatial equivalent of the social moment around a cup of coffee.
A coffee brand within a shared atmosphere
Lavazza wanted to express its identity as more than a manufacturer: a family company built on hospitality, creativity, and a strong visual culture. The installation had to condense more than a century of stories into a focused, poetic format that feels at home in their headquarters.
The experience needed to be accessible to international visitors, intuitive to use, and flexible enough to host different narrative modes as the centerpiece of the museum.
Universo Lavazza gives the Nuvola Lavazza museum a calm yet iconic centerpiece that expresses the brand’s values through space. By combining a sculptural projection cloud with participatory control via the espresso cups, the installation ties together personal ritual, shared experience, and corporate history in a single gesture.
Project Highlights
- Central “room within a room” built from a semi-transparent curtain of threads acting as a double-sided projection field
- Oval light space with 8 meters height visible from adjoining museum zones as a sculptural object
- Interactive table interface that recognizes visitor espresso cups and triggers different 360° narrative sequences
- Multiple film compositions presenting coffee origins, landscapes, urban life, and Lavazza milestones as distinct yet connected modes
Facts & Figures
Lead agency: Ralph Appelbaum Associates
Interactive media programming: NEO s.r.l.
Music and sound design: Not A Machine
Projection hardware and technical implementation: Acuson s.r.l.
Graphic design: Tarek Atrissi Design
Image Credits: Martin Backhaus
Awards
