Curtain Call Pavilion / Office Office

Architects: office office
Area: 525 ft²
Year: 2024
Photographs: office office, Alon Koppel, Breyden Anderson
Project Leads: Jordan Young, Cait McCarthy
Fabrication Team: Jordan Young, Cait McCarthy, Emily Herr, Miles Smith
Construction Consultant: Lawson Spencer
Assembly Team: Jordan Young, Cait McCarthy, Christopher Battaglia, Helen Bennett, Micah Betz, Maddie Brockman, Cayden Brown, Patrick Fair, Varun Gandhi, Jacob Taro Gibbons, Sam Glenn, Emily Herr, Gretchen Hundertmark, Sanskruti Kakadiya, Ellie Marie Lambert, Andrea F. Olmedillo, Miles Smith, Lawson Spencer, Riley Wines
City: Bethel
Country: United States

Curtain Call Pavilion, designed by office office for the 2024 BuildFest at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, integrates Human-Robot Collaborative Construction (HRCC) techniques to reinterpret the Woodstock ’69 stage. Situated on the historic festival grounds, the pavilion features a dynamic roof of fifteen unique wood trusses wrapped in red mesh, twenty-six asymmetrical columns, and an open-air deck, creating adaptable spaces for performances, movie nights, and casual activities. Inspired by Woodstock’s original wood trusses and fabric canopy, the pavilion uses marked timber components to blend digital precision with human craft, enabling efficient fabrication and assembly by teams of varying skill levels. Designed and pre-assembled within four weeks, the pavilion was constructed during a five-day festival, fostering collaboration between faculty and students.

Curtain Call is the winning design for the 2024 BuildFest at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. BuildFest annually invites university faculty teams to design and construct large-scale art installations on the historic grounds of the 1969 Woodstock festival. The 2024 theme tasked participants with exploring the intersection of digital and physical construction methods. Curtain Call incorporates Human-Robot Collaborative Construction (HRCC) techniques to depart from traditional design and fabrication approaches, creating a pavilion inspired by the tectonics of the Woodstock ’69 stage. Conceived as a new type of performance infrastructure, the pavilion offers a flexible stage to support a variety of organized and spontaneous activities. Its design features a playful combination of an open-air deck, asymmetrical columns, and a mesh-wrapped roof structure, enabling versatile adaptations. The pavilion serves as a venue for performances, movie nights, and pop-up events, as well as a shaded space for visitors to lounge, picnic, or read.

The project draws inspiration from the wood trusses and fabric canopy of the original Woodstock stage, reinterpreting these elements to form a contemporary performance structure. Its design features fifteen unique trusses that compose a dynamic roof, wrapped in a red lightweight mesh that changes shape and color throughout the day in response to wind and light. The roof is supported by twenty-six asymmetrically arranged columns that connect it to the deck, creating small, medium, and large spaces adaptable for varied programming and stage configurations. Curtain Call employs Human-Robot Collaborative Construction (HRCC) techniques to achieve a balance between digital precision and physical craftsmanship. Architect Young described the appeal of this hybrid approach as “the space in between where digital precision and physical craft allow for new material, tectonic, and formal expressions.” This methodology facilitated the creation of a custom, non-repetitive structure that was fabricated efficiently. A low-cost timber marking robot was developed to embed essential fabrication and assembly information directly onto each wood component. The robot inscribed details such as cut angles, drill points, alignments, and unique identification tags, ensuring straightforward assembly and fabrication processes.

The detailed instructions embedded on each timber component enable individuals of all skill levels to easily understand, fabricate, and assemble the structure. McCarthy explained, “The method we developed allowed materials to act as both a fabrication and assembly guide, eliminating the need for elaborate construction documents and complex on-site coordination.” In the four weeks leading up to the festival, all materials were marked, processed, and pre-assembled before being transported to Bethel, NY. During the five-day live-work festival, faculty and student teams collaborated to assemble and install the pavilion on-site.