This weekend’s Pickathon music festival (August 3 - 6, 2023, at Pendarvis Farm in Happy Valley) once again features an original, temporary, minimal-waste performance venue known as the Cherry Hill Stage, designed and built by students and faculty in Portland State University’s School of Architecture. One of seven distinctive stages at the festival, the Cherry Hill venue will host 17 performances throughout the weekend. The structure, like its predecessors, will leave no trace once the festival is over (except in the lingering memories of the 3,500 attendees who experience it).
A sustainable “forest” within a forest
The 2023 Cherry Hill stage and surrounding “neighborhood” is made from 26 composite timber arches, which are constructed using 16-foot-long, 1/2-inch-thin strips of Western hemlock, gracefully steam-bent to form elegantly curved composite timber arches. A team of 10 students designed and built the 20-foot structure on site at Pendarvis Farm, tucked into a sloping meadow surrounded by trees.
In keeping with the “diversion design-build” concept, after the festival, the stage materials will be transformed and put to use rather than discarded. In Fall 2023, the composite timber arches will be repurposed to create a new outdoor classroom structure at Portland State’s Oak Savanna. This natural space on the PSU campus is a lightly forested grassland that was restored in 2012 by a group of students for use by the Indigenous Nations Studies program. The repurposed Cherry Hill stage will become a permanent installation in the Oak Savanna, to be used as part of the new Indigenous Traditional Ecological & Cultural Knowledge initiative.
"I have really enjoyed seeing how a design comes to fruition with the Pickathon design-build class,” said Athena Rilatos, also a Master of Architecture student and an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. “I have been surprised to see mostly women volunteers coming out to work on the PSU Cherry Hill Stage and being truly supportive, strong, inspiring, and transformative to work with. The design process didn't stop at the computer," said Rilatos.
"Our ‘Forest in the Forest’ design is made up of arches that provide shade for the stage as well as for the gatherings on the Oak Savanna site," said Vicky Fuentes-Sotelo, a Master of Architecture student who is participating in the Pickathon design-build effort. The team was inspired by the idea of a tree, with the arches forming the metaphorical branches, leaves and petals.
One of seven venues at the festival, the Cherry Hill stage will feature performances by 17 musical acts, including genre-bending soul singer Madison McFerrin, Algerian Tuareg quintet Imarhan, classic-soul ensemble Thee Sinseers, and Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Touré.
The diversion design-build concept was pioneered by PSU School of Architecture professors Clive Knights and Travis Bell. This idea involves the creation of a transformative performance venue from mass-produced construction-related materials that are temporarily diverted from their usual industrial purpose, and then returned to their usual purpose (or put to a new use) once the festival ends.
A history of Diversion Design-Build at Pickathon
Past PSU Architecture stages at Pickathon have been made from a variety of innovative materials:
- Giant wooden cable reels (2022)
- Wooden apple bins (2019)
- Dimensional lumber (2018)
- Wooden trusses (later used to build sleeping pods for houseless veterans at the Clackamas County Veterans Village, 2017)
- Dimensional lumber (2016)
- Giant cardboard tubes (2015)
- Shipping pallets (2014)
- Bamboo (used to create gateway structures at the festival entrance, 2013)
Pickathon performance venues created by PSU Architecture students have been recognized and featured in ArchDaily, Architects Newspaper, Archinect, Bloomberg CityLab, OPB and other outlets. In 2017, the Treeline Stage won a Citation Award in the AIA Portland’s Architecture Awards, and PSU Architecture and collaborator SRG Partnership won a Gray Magazine Award. The 2015 Treeline Stage received the Jury Award at that year’s AIA Portland Architecture Awards.
PSU Architecture’s spreading influence
PSU’s design-build ethos has spread across the festival. Four of the stages, in addition to the Cherry Hill stage, have been designed and built with involvement by PSU Architecture alumni, now working at architecture firms around the city. Firms involved include Skylab Architecture (Paddock Neighborhood), EMA Architecture (Windmill Neighborhood), Holst Architecture (Grove Neighborhood), Communitecture (Woods Stage) and Hoffman Construction and Precision Construction (Farmhouse Neighborhood). A team made up of three PSU Architecture alumni have created the Orchard Neighborhood.
Learn more about Pickathon.