Anders Berensson Architects has designed a public stage in the Swedish town Tibro in collaboration with the municipality and local students in the art of faux marble painting.

Marble has natural limitation that faux marble doesn’t have. The design tries to take advantage of this by painting a livelier, more eye-catching unreal marble on fake giant dimension stone blocks, with the aim to make nature grander but just enough that you still can imagining it being real.

With a low budget but with many talented students we designed a stage that tries to take advantage of an unusual economy where craft is cheap although material is still expensive. Therefore, the building is designed with a simple wood structure with a secondary structure of marbleized fiber cement sheets attached to it to make the building elements look like heavy stone blocks. Each block is made in its own faux marble and shape making the building look like an assembly of different giant marble blocks.

Rock Stage is the first permanent structure out of fifteen sketches made in the urban developing project “Tibro Train Tracks”, a three phased project starting with a citizen’s dialog asking the people in Tibro what they need and want. A second phase investigating local resources and what the town and its citizens can produce by themselves and a third phase proposing fifteen sketches that can be locally produced based on the needs and possibilities found in phase one and two. Rock Stage is the first of these sketches to be further developed and permanently realized into a public building.

The citizens dialog exposed a need for a public outdoor stage. The municipality had a budget of 30 000 euros to build a roof over an existing stage in the town park. From the second phase inventory we found the great resource of having a craft school in town. We proposed that it would be involved in making the stage. When developing the project further we decided to work with a team of faux marble painting students and teachers. Together with the students we made several tests of marbelizing parallel with designing a structure that could handle and highlight the work of the students. The project has taken three years of planning, sketching, and finally realizing the project together with the municipality Tibro kommun, students and teachers at the craft school Tibro Hantverksakademi.