Auburn APLA Team Rocks BuildFest 2024

But a group of faculty and students from the Auburn University School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture (APLA) recently put their own spin on the landmark musical celebration at BuildFest 2024 in Bethel, New York, scene of the historic event.

Each year, BuildFest invites academics and researchers to propose ideas for large-scale art installations to be built on the historic grounds where the original Woodstock festival was held. Over the course of a five-day, live-work event, accepted participants work with self-organized student teams to build, install and work through on-site design solutions.

This year, student-faculty teams from seven U.S. universities created pavilions that explored digital and analog methods of construction. Each pavilion demonstrated how machine technology can be used to aid in manual construction, such as sorting wood or pre-marking structures for more efficient assembly.

The Auburn pavilion, designed and executed in collaboration with architecture students from Syracuse University, was entitled “Curtain Call.” With an open-air deck, asymmetrically placed columns and a fabric-wrapped roof structure, “Curtain Call” was designed to evoke the original 1969 Woodstock stage as well as to create a flexible modern stage to accommodate a wide range of organized and impromptu activities.

The Auburn team included faculty members Cait McCarthy, Assistant Professor of Architecture, and adjunct faculty Jordan Young. Also included were students Maddie Brockman, Patrick Fair, Cayden Brown, Ellie Marie Lambert, Micah Betz and Sam Glenn.

In keeping with the theme of exploring digital and analog methods of construction, McCarthy and Young developed a robotic timber marking machine to directly embed assembly information onto their group’s structure. Each piece of the pavilion was marked with its dimension, where to cut, which alignments need to be made and where to drill.

“As opposed to more robotic or fully robotic processes,” Young explained, “we became really excited and interested about the space in between, where the hybridization of digital precision and physical craft allow for new material, tectonic and formal expressions.”

The project was an opportunity to utilize aspects of Young’s major area of research at Auburn—rethinking the relationship between physical and digital craft through the design and development of low-cost robotic machines that inform new methods for architectural drawing and fabrication. The research is the foundation for a series of workshops he teaches on digital fabrication.

According to several students who had attended the workshops, seeing concepts they had learned in class utilized on an actual construction site was one of the biggest highlights of the trip.

“The CNC pen plotter that notated every single piece in the structure made the assembly easy to learn and put together,” said Micah Betz, a third-year student in Architecture and Interior Architecture. “Without that, the assembly would have taken an extra week or more. I learned a lot about various methods of design, construction and sustainability. I also realized how proud I am to be at Auburn.”

“Being part of BuildFest 2024 was a formative experience for me,” agreed fellow third-year Architecture and Interior Architecture student Maddie Brockman. “It opened my eyes to the way technology can drive innovation in architecture and construction.”

“Seeing the software work in real time and how it made construction accessible to people like me who have little construction experience was inspiring. I can’t wait to learn more about various coding-based design programs that can help me create a new kind of design.”