College of Architecture Assistant Professor Dillon Pranger has won first place in this year’s Architizer 2024 A+Awards in the “pop-up and temporary structures” category for a temporary pavilion he designed for an architecture festival on the former grounds of 1969’s Woodstock music festival.
Every year architects and builders descend on the festival grounds in Bethel, New York, to create a temporary showcase of new architectural ideas. The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts now owns the 1,000 acre site, which is used for various events. The Art and Architecture Festival, now in its second year, hosts architecture students and instructors from across the country to create interactive art installations in a group learning environment. Less than 10 projects are selected each year.
Pranger, along with a handful of College of Architecture students, participated in the 2023 festival, leading to the award-winning project and pavilion, which is named WoodStack and emphasizes material reuse, as part of the annual event. He has been invited to the festival for two years as well for his unique designs and educational experiences.
2023 marked Pranger’s second year at the festival. His project, WoodStack, both an inhabitable structure and an art piece, celebrates the use of recycled materials. Says Pranger, “WoodStack’s design and construction techniques embrace the idea of impermanent architecture by allowing its materials to be easily disassembled and reused in another lifecycle.” Nails and screws were replaced with temporary connections, and the lumber wasn’t cut or notched (both leave a permanent mark on the wood and make reuse difficult).
Material reuse and clever construction are something Pranger emphasizes in his projects and in the classroom. He and a handful of students completed the project on IIT’s Mies Campus before carefully disassembling the structure, shipping it to New York, and rebuilding it in a secluded area of the festival grounds.
Pranger completed an earlier project for the Bethel festival, BoardWalk, in 2022. Originally scheduled to be dismantled and recycled, it remains on display due to its popularity among visitors and festival goers.
Pranger, worked with Christopher Battaglia as designer and a student team of Isac Colta (B.Arch ’25), Emily Duong (B.Arch ’24), Michael Graham (B.Arch ’24), Scott Rainen (M.Arch ’24). College of Architecture staff Michael Gillhouse and Brick Cassidy also assisted fabrication at Mies Campus.