We are Love

Boom festival. Idanha-a-nova

There is a summer festival that has turned architecture into a major feature of its programming. Besides the music and the group experience that attracts thousands of people to the same place at the same time, the Boom Festival is intended to be an instrument of change, “to create a reality that has a positive relationship with the environment and contributes to our education and knowledge”. The architecture to be found at the Boom Festival isn’t canonical in any way, but it does respond to certain technical considerations and environmental problems without questioning the psychedelic experience of the music. Perhaps because of this, the organisation of space and the built forms offers clues for overcoming the limits of conventions and rethinking the universe as we know it. “We are love” is the theme of this festival: so, is there any room for an architecture of love?

 

A logistical policy

Every summer, there’s a widespread proliferation of music festivals. Each festival has its own complex logistics, which basically consists of temporarily accommodating thousands of people in one place. These are operations that come close to military architecture, deploying light structures and supply systems that are capable of guaranteeing people’s comfort and their enjoyment of a unique moment. In the space of just a few weeks, cities are assembled and dismantled, with areas for housing (camping) and commerce (essentially food, but also other things), parking spaces for thousands of vehicles, loading and unloading bays for the delivery of goods, and, without fail, all the spotlights shine towards the stages and the monumental scenarios. In most cases, the architecture succumbs to the demands of engineering and industrialised modular systems, but there is one Portuguese festival where architecture plays a preponderant role, and where, from the marketing to the physical experience of the place, the organisation of the space and the built forms are central elements of this event’s conception. The Boom Festival, the most international of all the Portuguese festivals, with its roots in psychedelic culture and trance music, is also a festival of architecture.

The importance given to architecture is in keeping with the social and ecological concerns underlying this festival’s specific culture. The discourse of sustainability, renewable energies, composting waste, protecting ecosystems, bioconstruction, and environmentally aware practices, is all part of a political stance adopted by the festival’s organisation and participants alike. It isn’t about keeping one’s conscience clean or spouting fine words in order to raise non-repayable public funding for the event, since the ticket sales alone entirely cover the costs of the festival (tickets cost between 120 and 160 euros, and their number is strictly controlled, with the event being sold out long before its start). Or, in other words, the festival’s organisers and fans strongly believe that it is possible to build an alternative world to that of the consumer society, and the physical construction of the festival’s space reflects this conviction and takes on objective forms. All of this happens regardless of the fact that reality is much harsher than the dream, and that, when all is said and done, the festival’s activities and strategies take place within the social and economic context that is being opposed. Such domestication explains the “third wave” that the Boom Festival is going through: if, in its early years, this was an openly “anarchist” festival, later passing through a “psychedelic” period, the Boom Festival is now decidedly “ecotech”.

For seven days in August, the festival enclosure is home to roughly 30 thousand people, who are active 24 hours per day. How do you organise a space of this nature? According to Artur Mendes, one of the festival’s organisers, the strategy appears to be simple, somewhere between a Vitruvian theory and a modern conception of planning. The work begins by studying the place, namely the topographical and geological characteristics of its terrain, the water resources and the watercourses, the existence of naturally shaded areas, the most appropriate slopes for building the seating. The second phase involves comparing the zoning plan with the flow system: a festival is made up of people circulating, between the camping and stage areas, between the rest areas and the food areas. The audience’s flows discover the nature of the place and everything seems to happen naturally, as if the singular nature of the psychedelic social experience has somehow erased the effort and the reason underlying the enclosure’s conception and design.

Herdade da Granja, an estate that spreads over roughly 150 hectares on the banks of the reservoir formed by the Idanha dam, is occupied by the rest areas and the festival’s various stages. Around this central space are 41.3 hectares used for camping, 19.1 hectares for caravans (and tents) and 19 hectares for car parking. There is just one access control point, and the whole enclosure is carefully fenced in. Despite the access system and the availability of public transport, it is the endless lines of vehicles covered with a fine dust that mark the entrance to the “Boom world”. Tractors transformed into shuttle buses convey visitors to and from the car park and the campsite and the festival’s centre of events: the reservoir banks, where the concert stages are located, together with the tents for dancing. There are crucial logistical aspects, namely the management of the water consumed in the showers (water is provided free of charge from the public supply network), or the decision made to compost the solid waste from the toilets. Here we can also see the festival’s ecological side, when the organisers say that “we love to transform human waste into fertile earth”. In turn, this earth is used to grow horticultural produce, consumed in particular during the period when the structures are being assembled before the festival. During the days of the festival itself, there are 315 people working permanently to keep the enclosure clean, although, even so, this does not prevent the permanent sprinkling of cigarette ends all over the ground. But then there are also the 45 food areas (and their respective loading and unloading systems), the security teams, the first aid centres, the offices for coordinating the whole festival, as well as the technicians responsible for the maintenance of the powerful sound equipment, which is the festival’s main attraction.

There is a critical point at which the size of the enclosure, the logistical complexity of organising the event and the presence of the crowd come into conflict with the expectations of a political and cultural alternative. The doubts over the presence of cash machines enable us to gauge the exact nature of this tension. Despite the long queues of people waiting to withdraw money, the organisers say that, for the next edition of this event, there won’t be any more ATMs: “being at the Boom Festival isn’t like being in a shopping centre,” was one of the statements made, clearly mirroring this major doubt:

… opinions differ among the “Boomers” about what brings in ever greater numbers of participants: for some, the festival spirit is lost; for others, this situation shows that ever more people are imbued with the spirit of psytrance, the psychedelic culture and alternative ways of life.

The festival organisers guarantee that their aim is quality, “in the future, there will be fewer tickets available.”

 

The chicken and the egg

The epicentre of the Boom Festival is the Dance Temple, a cathedral built of bamboo. It is colossal in size (with a diameter of roughly 75 metres and towers measuring between 25 and 31 metres high) and its technical complexity is clear to see. The whole building has a cruciform floor plan consisting of fifteen vaults, ringed by a series of towers from which four “leaves” are suspended, covering more than four thousand square metres of dance floor. The focus of attention is the stage, which stands at one of the ends of the cross, to which the slight slope of the terrain points, although the vertical force of the bamboo structures gives rise to an isotropic space. The towers are the most formally intriguing elements, being composed of six vertical ribs and subdivided into three structural levels (base, shaft and spiral), joined together by belts, rings and metal screws. These towers support a mast that makes it possible to suspend the cables giving shape to the canvases, and are also used to incorporate the decorative lighting that gives the structure its nocturnal feel. At the point of the base where the diameter is longest, a ring of buttresses have been planted to hold up canvases with a seven-metre radius, which are linked to the four leaves and the central cross and complete the composition. The bamboo construction is further complemented with a substantial technological apparatus consisting of a series of wires connecting the control area, the stage and the many sound diffusion points, as well as a remarkable ornamental apparatus.

The spiral shape of the towers led their designers to quote the Basílica de la Sagrada Família as their model, a project in search of the sacred dimension of space. But the textile structures covering the pavilion seem to be the most important aspect, since they serve both to provide shade for the crowds of dancers and to guarantee the best possible acoustic performance for the tent. The quality of the sound is extraordinary and the bamboo and canvas structure is transformed into a sound box that absorbs and amplifies the sound. Perhaps it’s the old problem of the chicken and the egg: which came first? The designers of the project neither confirm nor deny anything, as François Baudson told us:

The architecture of the Dance Temple as a space of communion profoundly influenced by the Sagrada Família was surely more powerful than the sound.

First of all, people gather together in that “sacred space” to enjoy the experience of the sound. The large horn speaker towers that we built for Funktion-One were an attempt to deliver something between sound and design... And, in the end, this isn’t all about architecture.

This ambiguity in the building’s interpretation is also confirmed by Gerard Minakawa:

I’m not sure if “being inside a gigantic loudspeaker” is a good or a bad thing, but we definitely had to run the structural design by the Function One team before building anything. They gave a lot of input to the process from the very beginning.

And we also found the same conflict between reason and emotion in the conversation we had with André Soares, one of the architects of the Boom Festival. The project has a practice that is grounded in ideological or conceptual concerns, so that the reason for the construction and its technological supports merely provide the tools needed to carry out the work. Although these tools determine the development of the project, it is absurd to focus attention on these aspects: if they were different, the finished work would be different too, but the aim would be the same.

While the design of the Dance Temple was entrusted to Gerard Minakawa and François Baudson, the three-dimensional model used for structural calculations and the control of its execution was developed by the Mexican Alejandra Sotelo Cortés. Another team designed the canvases of the roof and other artists also collaborated on the formal design of the entrance doors, while the Funktion-One team designed the sound performance. Unlike other pavilions at the Boom Festival, in the bamboo pavilion, the project’s predetermined requirements are fundamental. The technology adopted requires a control of its representation and detail that comes close to the work of industrial design, moving it away from the design of conventional models of representation. Ground plans, cross sections and elevations only make sense as schematic representations that guide the distribution of the wiring for the sound and lighting systems. The work’s apparently natural simplicity, which is greatly appreciated by the “Boomers”, is only made possible by the technological sophistication underlying the project. Rather than being a contradiction, this paradox lies at the very core of the Boom culture. Technology offers the tools that are necessary for overcoming conventional limits and paving the way for building a more beautiful society. The Boom Festival architectures are a reflection of these experiences.

 

Exemplary architecture

The festival area is filled with people moving back and forth. “Boomers” make their way between the Dance Temple and the Chill Out Gardens, or between the Alchemy Circle and the Liminal Pavilion/Art Museum, contemplating the Sacred Fire to the west of the enclosure or eating at the tents to the east, swimming at the Funky Beach or making their way up to the camping areas. The movement is not random, mobile phones are the fundamental technology used for navigation (and for meeting up with others), and each construction is like a lighthouse guiding people’s movements. There is no network of infrastructures ordering the terrain. Instead, there are just constructions, each with its own capricious symbolism, which stand out as reference points and help to structure the landscape. Each stage, or each function, assumes the status of a monument, insofar as it is organised in a self-sufficient manner and is capable of generating references in the structure as a whole.

There are very different works, but they all seem to arise from a specific passion. The Chill Out Gardens are populated by creatures moulded out of earth, there are various baskets and nests inviting people to spend time together intimately, and each of these pieces has its own artisan, who builds them in their place, working in harmony with the other builders, who put their own special stamp on their work.

Or, seen from another perspective, there are special landmarks, such as the Wish Tower, a brightly-coloured and luminous tower designed by the collective Like Architects. And other stages are more or less conventional structures. In the midst of this biodiversity of architectures, one of the highlights, besides the Dance Temple, is the Liminal Pavilion.

The Liminal Pavilion is a conference hall built in superadobe, a technique that uses clay packed in propylene earthbags, and makes it possible to construct walls with organic forms, compressed and stacked, but without needing to resort to the use of formwork. The circular walls construct various niches with a remarkable thermal resistance (offering “Boomers” small cool rooms contrasting with the heat of Idanha), and these niches shape an interior space covered with an awning, pulled tight between the stage and a series of masts set against the curves of the superadobe. André Soares, the architect, highlights the fundamental role of the work of collaboration involved in its construction. The team discusses the project, and each member brings their own particular skills to bear in the formation of a collective work. There is much room for improvisation, taking advantage not only of any unexpected difficulties to provide new solutions, but, above all, of the skills and commitment of each of the collaborators-constructors. The work becomes a place for experimentation, but, as the architect underlines, above all it becomes a place for the “celebration of knowledge”. The initial sketch launches the “seed of the idea” and offers room for each worker to share their pleasure and their special skills, coordinating and integrating these contributions into an organic construction. It is a tribute to “architecture without architects”, but, more than that, it is a notion of a project that opens up other paths to the notion of efficiency. As André Soares puts it, “the work is done on the construction itself, and not on the project. We can’t be imprisoned by the project.”

The most explicit face of the possibilities opened up by knowledge and by technological mastery is manifested in the management of urban resources. The use of renewable energies, especially solar power, the organic treatment of water and the composting of waste combine technological refinement with the desire for a conscious use of resources (10% of the building materials are recycled, most of them originating from the Rock in Rio Festival, 60% are natural materials and only 30% are industrial materials).

In 2014, the Boom Festival was held for the tenth time, seventeen years after its first edition. This was also the fourth time that the festival has been held in Idanha-a-Nova, and the second time that it has been held at the same site, which is now set to host the next editions. This gradual fixing of the venue has brought  with it one substantial change: what was previously a temporary occupation of the site will now become a permanent affair.

 

Psychedelic experience

“Boomers” are unique creatures. They move around at night heading for the right stage, the physical experience of the sound and the pleasure of the senses, always with a smile on their faces. The Boom Festival is a world apart, an enclosed universe where everything seems to make sense, an experience made to happen even faster by the psychotropic combustion that can be seen on the faces and bodies in the blazing heat of Portugal’s Beira Baixa region. Can architecture be like this too?