Eco-Friendly Pavilions Take The Stage At A Chinese Music Festival

For a Chinese island music festival, Also Architects’s reusable, modular pavilions provided shade while resembling sound waves.

Also Architects Crafts Sustainable Pavilions For A Music Festival

• 10 Designers, Engineers, and Installers led by Also Architects founders Valo Xiao and Ziming Ye
• 16 Structures
• 11 Feet High
• 168 Bamboo Poles
• 328 Yards of Polyester

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A rendering by Also Architects presents the Chinese studio’s installation of canopies created for the R-Day Music Festival, a two-day event that took place last winter on Hainan in the South China Sea, organized by the Urban Nomad Art Museum, a virtual platform championing more sustainable ways for art to exist.

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The umbrellalike structures were supported by poles of renewable bamboo, which was first soaked, heated, and bent in a factory to the required curvature before being assembled into building components using threaded rods, coated with a protective finish, air-dried, and transported to the site.

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For each 10-pound module, a ring of prefabricated steel pipe was inserted within the branching bamboo poles, which were dug deep into the sand for stability.

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A canopy of white rainproof polyester was secured to the steel ring with rope and zip ties.

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Also Architects’s use of the hexagonal form allowed the modules to gang together into one large canopy, with the center module pitched upward like an umbrella and the surrounding six shaped like a gramophone, inspired by the concentric ripples of sound waves.

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Paired with wood-crate stools and bamboo benches, they acted as shaded gathering zones for festivalgoers, who came to see such local indie bands as Wu Tiao Ren and Omnipotent Youth Society and international acts like Sweden’s U137 and Japan’s She Her Her Hers.

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A large floodlight suspended from wire over each funnel shape made the stretched polyester glow, and LED strips were attached to the steel ring illuminating the bamboo structure.

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When R-Day concluded, on January 12, the pavilions were dismantled and rebuilt for the Sheng Lang Music Festival in April, after which the bamboo was repurposed into chairs.