Most of production designer Patrick Larsen’s career has been built around work that disappears.
Expo 2020 Dubai ceremonies that ran for one extraordinary evening. Broadcast sets rebuilt when a show changes format. Singapore’s National Day Parade — months of design and fabrication for a single performance.
Permanent installations operate on entirely different logic. Universal Studios Singapore: attractions receiving millions of visitors annually for years. The Ba Na Hills Entrance Arch in Danang, Vietnam. Sun of the Sea at Bali Safari Park. Studio Bound has designed for both, and the difference in thinking starts at the very first sketch.
Why Temporary Work Allows More Risk
Designing for a defined lifespan allows creative risk that permanent work cannot. Materials that would degrade under extended use, structural configurations that would fail under sustained operational stress — all permissible if the production performs brilliantly for the time it needs to exist.
Permanent installations carry none of that freedom. The environment has to look right, tell the right story, survive thousands of daily visitors touching every surface, function while equipment is serviced, and maintain its experiential integrity years after opening. Story and structure pull in opposite directions. What creates the strongest audience experience is not always what ages best — managing that tension across the full design process is the core challenge.
What Theater Prepared Studio Bound For
Patrick Larsen’s theatrical background proved relevant to permanent installation design in unexpected ways. Regional theater sets travel, get stored, get reassembled. Things break during performances and get repaired quickly. The polished audience experience depends on backstage infrastructure designed to function under imperfect, messy conditions.
You learn to design for maintenance access, to understand how crews actually move through a space, to identify what will fail first, to accommodate the repairs you already know are coming. Theme park attractions and permanent theatrical shows require identical thinking at greater scale. When millions of people interact with an environment every year, durability is not a specification item on a checklist — it is the condition under which the creative vision either continues to exist or gradually disappears.
The Production Design Lesson From Universal Studios
Universal Studios Singapore made this principle concrete. Studio Bound’s production design work there confirmed that a successful opening day is necessary but insufficient. If the environment degrades over months, the project has failed regardless of what the premiere looked like.
Operational reality has to be built into the design from the beginning — not addressed as an afterthought when maintenance issues start appearing. This is a different design frame from broadcast work, where the primary variable is evolving technology. It is different from ceremonial work, where intensity matters more than longevity. Each context has its own governing constraints. The underlying discipline is consistent: understand what the design actually has to withstand and build for that specific reality, not for idealised conditions.
About Patrick Larsen
Patrick Larsen is an Emmy Award-winning production designer and the founder of Studio Bound, based in Singapore. Over two decades, he has designed environments for global audiences — from the Expo 2020 Dubai ceremonies and Olympic broadcast sets to Las Vegas residencies, Broadway-scale theatrical productions, and permanent installations across Asia and the Middle East. Studio Bound takes projects from concept to build with one fully integrated team of designers, concept artists, technical drafters, and production managers. Patrick Larsen is an Emmy Award-winning production designer and the founder of Studio Bound, Singapore. Read more at patricklarsen.studio or visit studiobound.sg
Further reading: Designing for Permanence | Studio Bound: Where Ideas Become Reality
