Tempera is an indoor temporary pavilion in A New Sculpturalism at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The pavilion theme is a fantastic garden where visitors see their own images reflected into a three-dimensional immersive painted canvas. The subject of the graphic depictions of the pavilion reinterprets the topic of “Still Nature”; in particular, the original subject represented here is 3-D scanned acquisitions of natural elements such as flowers and insects. Nature, first frozen by a scanner into realistic three-dimensional computer geometry, slowly melts into liquid paint on a digital color palette. The finished surface of the pavilion is a deliberate appeal to the viewer's attraction to the playful, fictional, pop aesthetic, which represents clearly that architecture enters into the imaginary realm of our “eye-candy” culture.

Elena Manferdini graduated from the University of Civil Engineering (Bologna, Italy) and later received her master’s degree in architecture and urban design from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2004, she founded Atelier Manferdini, a design office in Los Angeles, California. The office is based on a multi-scale work methodology and embraces the philosophy that design can participate in a wide range of multidisciplinary developments that define our culture. Manferdini was recently awarded one of the 2011 annual grants from United States Artists (USA) in the category of architecture and design. In addition to leading her design practice, for the past nine years Manferdini has been teaching architectural design studios and technology seminars for the graduate and undergraduate programs at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Currently she is the coordinator of the Graduate Thesis Program at SCI-Arc. She has also held visiting professorships at Cornell University and Seika University.