• Tokyo The last day of the capsule tower

There was a time when

the other

big issue at the Coachella Festival, apart from the music, was the clothes,

the photos of models, actors and emulators who arrived in the Indio Valley, California, dressed

as Ibizan hippies, by Kate Moss in the 90s or ironic versions of rock history.

Then there was a moment when that attention to the Coachella runway turned awkward, proof that music festival culture had become

a matter of high-income adults with leisure time and, probably, narcissistic tendencies

.

The conflict has been resolved in an unexpected way: all the Coachella ambient photographs that in 2012 spoke of fashion, in 2022 spoke of architecture.

What architecture?

The festival, held last weekend after two years of suspensions due to the coronavirus pandemic, has occupied a 315,000-square-meter site of a polo club (the figure does not include camping and parking areas), without relevant orography or a consolidated city in the environment.

The municipality of Indio, in the Coachella Valley, is the suburb of a suburb of Los Angeles, from whose center it is 200 kilometers away.

It has a density of 1.1 inhabitants per square kilometer and

withstands temperatures of between 41ºC and 6ºC at the time the festival is held

.

Cocoon (BKF + H300), by the Buenos Aires native Martín Huberman.

Since 2019, the Coachella Festival, the largest in North America, has been creating

an architecture/art collection that works as entertainment and attraction for its spectators

and that makes it recognizable at a glance.

In 2019, Francis Keré, the winner of the last Pritzker Prize, created for the

Sambaré Ké

festival , an installation made of 12 19-meter-high towers that emulate the baobabs of the country of Keré, Burkina Fasso.

This year, one of the great attractions has been the work of Alessandro Orsini and Nick Roseboro.

His work,

The Playground

, is a gigantic colored structure reminiscent of the children's castles of the 80s and that also seems an ironic nod to the historicist architecture of that time... which, in turn, already used an ironic language.

The other great piece of Coachella 2022 has been

Spectra

, by Newsubstance, it is a kind of pop, colorful Tower of Pisa that offered colorful views of the venue from a height of seven stories.

Ecstasy for Instagram users.

And there was more:

Cocoon (BKF + H300)

, by the Buenos Aires artist Martín Huberman, and

Circular Dimensions x Microscape

, by Cristopher Cichocki, are architecture-sculptures that

They make you think of the universal exhibitions of the 90s

.

And

Buoyed

, by Kiki Van Eijk, refers to the dreamlike settings of children's stories.

Spectra, from the polo fields.

What does all that effort to create a place in the middle of nowhere sound like?

Javier Arnaiz, head of the Mad Cool festival in Madrid, had already realized that something is happening with the architecture of Coachella: "

Coachella and Tomorrowland in Europe are two benchmarks that work a lot on architecture, they try to impact their clients

from the moment they enter to the event. Both have different forms of architecture, their personal touch. Tomorrowland is more associated with a fabled tale, with its scenic montages and areas configured with magical overtones. Coachella has a much more minimalist and less ornate line, with a series of artistic installations that, year after year, surprise and generate that most modern image".

There's another mirror to compare Coachella's architecture to: the Burning Man Festival, which takes place in late August in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.

"The place is also a place without orography, even more so in the middle of nowhere, but the concept of Burning Man is broader and more complex than that of Coachella," explains

María Calleja, a Spanish architect

and author of the academic study

Burning Man.

The ephemeral city.

Architecture for a festival

(University of Valladolid).

The complexity of Burning Man that Calleja refers to is that the music is only part of a vindication of

another way of living that refers to the hippie communities of California in the 1960s

.

What is surprising in his way of occupying the space is not in a handful of amazing installations but "in the way in which the attendees occupy their space within the enclosure".

Each tent and each person who sets up in the desert is a performance, half theater and half art.

All are arranged radially around the wooden idol that gives its name to the festival,

as if it were a totem

.

If all the utopian architecture of the last 70 years speaks of a lighter way of inhabiting the city, Burning Man,

a city of 80,000 inhabitants that is assembled and disassembled in a month

, is its most perfect expression.

Return to the conventional world.

"In each edition we try to manage the architecture of the space, giving importance to its habitability and the image of the environment, so that the user experience is as positive as possible", explains Javier Arnaiz.

"We have a specific team that works to create the environment of the venue.

Changes are generated from edition to edition, but we try to maintain a very specific line, which is what gives us that vital visibility

that relates the venue to the brand."

The Mad Cool occupies a more or less isolated and empty site, it does not have to adapt to a previous architecture such as the Parque del Fòrum for Primavera Sound.

Is that an advantage?

"The obvious advantage is having a space with a very clear and defined configuration from minute one, since this helps to

generate the architectural ecosystem that the event wants to develop

. Year after year, new icons are implemented in the venue that help to continue gaining in corporate image of the same. In general terms, the public that repeats knows what the distribution of the venue is and knows how to move so that their experience is comforting".

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