Miami, are you ready?

Ultra Music Festival is here, ready to kick off the music festival season. Ready to show the world what it means to party in the heart of Miami. Ready to feed on the energy of this city, creating its own micro-utopia, with 165,000 of its closest friends arriving from all across the globe.

Within this pop-up community of celebration, Ultra faces distinct undertakings as a temporary city superimposed on a city, unlike many music festivals sequestered within their own distinct territory. With limited space, places to stay, and policing, tensions run high between residents of Miami and festivalgoers. If Miami is the modern day mecca of electronic dance music and here to stay, how can temporary architecture be leveraged to stage other, new situations within Miami, an instance of the growing “festival industrial complex”?

Festival goers can become an active part of their built environment by building together, producing an architecture “as light as Twitter.” Offering the option for extended stay emphasizes a culture of codependency, compared to the culture of a throwaway society often present at music festivals.

In testing a built environment for this temporary community, Residual Effects reinforces the sense of community that festivalgoers seek. By introducing deployable structures scattered throughout the city, Ultra can anticipate the activities of the festivalgoers following the final beat on stage. By accommodating a range of responsive architecture and hybrid structures that act as a comprehensive system, the festival can expand to meet the needs of festivalgoers. Further, this can create a rippling effect within the growing community of festivals across the globe, catering to the individual that seeks to become a part of a collective, pop-up whole.

Fabrication and Temporary Architecture

In designing for an event-based architecture, these deployable joints are designed in a way to allow for flexibility in structures while minimizing waste. By providing designed joints that provide the structure necessary for these temporary framing structures, campers or festivalgoers can create a structure combining many of these joints. By utilizing milling and 3D printing, many variations of these joints were created and studied, with the wood joints utilizing a domino joiner and 3D prints serving as a plug-in piece for framing members.

By using the robots to mill and print, the bit acts as a tool to control the movement and standardize production, allowing for production of many deployable joints that are precisely designed and provide an aesthetic appeal.