Crisis City:

FESTIVAL ARCHITECTURE

Gabriella Morrone
ARC505 Thesis Preparation

Primary Advisor:
Brian Lonsway
Secondary Advisor:
Jonathan Massey

Crisis City Primary Faculty:

Julia Czerniak
Anda French
Brian Lonsway
Brendan Moran
Francisco Sanin
“...the idea that festival, like revolution, marks both a break in everyday life and a rehabilitation of the
everyday...” 1

Festivals are a series of temporal events displaying the interactions of identity and place through public
convergence. Through these interactions these inherently social events become the process of connecting
with place and object. Under every utopia there are contradictions, problems, and there is what had existed.
Under every festival there is what still exists, the everyday. Yet festivals also create the everyday; their con-
tinuous occurrence in our world has allowed them to become a prevalent condition and part of our every-
day experience. Festivals simultaneously engage and disengage with their surrounding environments while
constructing and expressing the social identities of place and community.

Festivals are the conglomeration of identities combined to produce a singular image. These identities range
from that of the individual to that of the mass produced. The event focuses both on singular independent
expression and the production of mass experience. It is the mass image which formulates the economic
identity of festivals. The creation of one image allows for easy marketing of event in our exceedingly com-
plex world. How is this individual identity created? The temporal condition allows for the interchange of
identity. One can shift between the multitude of events to fulfill their desires, with each change applying a
different image, creating a heightened complexity of identity which is most effectively demonstrated by the
festival.

“Festivals, while containing worlds, also open out and spill over into ‘outside’ worlds...” 3 They produce an
enclave of events, situations, experiences, and ideas. Yet this enclave rips open and influences the similar
typological festivals occurring simultaneously in other places.

How can architecture heighten / influence the identity shifts occurring in festivals?
Aligned with New Babylon’s conception to, “...give rise to a multiplicity of different ambiences that can be
altered at any given moment.” 2 festivals must embrace temporary architecture to provide this transcendent
communal experience of identity. The architecture of festivals needs to produce event rather than spectacle.
While spectacle, deriving from viewing, removes the viewer from the situations taking place, event allows
one to participate in the formulation of the situation. For example, take the Thames Festival firework display
in London, England and New Years Eve in southern Italy. During the night of the festival the Thames river
and bridges are lined with locals and tourists with their cameras out ready to snap photos of the well-orga-
nized display. The engagement with this event is minimal and gets reduced only to visual connections and
the physical photos for one to remember the “greatness”. On the eve of December 31st each year the locals,
of many southern Italian towns, ignite illegal fireworks to celebrate the end and coming of a new year. The
participants are personally recreating the image of the surrounding landscape of mountains and valleys. The
Italians are designing an environment which they would like to be experiencing. Rather than the architec-
ture of festivals creating shows and displays the architecture must generate individual and public engage-
ment.

The focus of my thesis will use architecture to create experience. In order to best achieve this outcome the
architecture will derive from smaller to a larger scale; focusing on how details and nuances will then inform
the whole. Working in the Crisis City Collaborative I will participate in a multidisciplinary mode of research,
critique, and design of urban environments and will engage public participatory of the designed environ-
ments.
1 Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne [Critique of Everyday Life], 2nd ed., trans. John Moore vol. 1 (New York: Verso, 1991), page xxviii.

2 Ulrich Conrad, ed. “Constant: New Babylon,” Theories and Manifestos. (1960): page 178.

3 Festivals, Tourism and Social Change: Remaking Worlds, 8th ed., ed. David Picard and Mike Robinson, Tourism and Cultural Change (Tonawa-
nda: Channel View Publications, 2006), page 4.
 the urban fabric

festival’s temporary “masking” of the city

the urban fabric

ruptures create nodes of

engagement

provides a uniform identity from the compos-

ite of individual identities

festival’s temporary “masking” of the city

the urban fabric

individual / community identities

influencing the festival

The impersonal and uninteractive Thames Festival firework display (an example of specactle) as compared to a street celebration (and example of event).
Bibliography

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Jeb Brugmann is an innovator in business, market, and government models specializing in formulating solu-
tions for local communities to gain from the benefits of globalization. Coining the term, the City, a network
of city systems reconnecting the local to the global in today’s rapidly changing world. Welcome to the Urban
Revolution focuses on the advantages of the urban environment through economies of density, scale and as-
sociation. Brugmann argues for local community urbanism and change through bottom-up design. How can
we achieve urban advantage without compromising identities?

Conrad, Ulrich, ed. “Constant: New Babylon.” Theories and Manifestos. 1960.

Festivals, Tourism and Social Change: Remaking Worlds. 8th ed. Edited by David Picard and Mike Robinson.
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Lefebvre, Henri. Critique de la vie quotidienne [Critique of Everyday Life]. 2nd ed. Translated by John Moore.
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Roche, Maurice. Mega-Events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture. London:
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Roche analyzes super events and how the processes of design and construction and the effects both socially
and politically ripple out into the entire world. The focus on large scale events demonstrates how mass culture
can so easily be shaped by one event. This analysis provides an understanding of how temporary events and
environments impact both a local and global community. Focusing on festivals and smaller scaled events, I
would like to study the effects of mass culture and also question whether events themselves are shaped by
mass culture and if this is creating a further layer of our global identity crisis.

Sassen, Saskia. “The Global City,” Edited by Koolhaas Rem. Sanford: Mutations. Actar, 2005.

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between cities and nations which set the stage for cultural and social evolution. This provides a framework of
how global cities developed and begins to highlight its effect on global culture and identities.

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spot of dominance over the majority of the international film industry. Popular culture has peaked from its loss
of national control and its life without governmental restrictions has been a factor in the arising global film
industry.
Further Reading:

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge: Blackwell Pub
lishers, 1991.

King, Anthony D. Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture Urbanism Identity. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Bernard, Tschumi. Event-Cities: Praxis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.

Shane, David Grahame. Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design, and City
Theory. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2005.

Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Duke University Press (1979).

Jameson, Fredric. “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Utopia and Anti-Utopia 9, no. 2
(1982): 147-58.

Jameson, Fredric. “Of Islands and Trenches: Naturalization and the Production of Utopia.” vol. 7, no. 2 (1977):
2-21.

Architecture Between Spectacle and Use. Edited by Anthony Vidler. Clark Art Institute, 2008.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.

Fernandez-Galiano, Luis. “Spectacle and Its Discontents: or, The Elusive Joys of Architainment.” Commodifica
tion and Spectacle in Architecture.

Glassberg, David. American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century. The Uni
versity of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Shanti Elliott, “Carnival and Dialogue in Bakhtin’s Poetics of Folklore,” https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bit

stream/handle/2022/2327/30(1-2)%20129-139.pdf?sequence=1

Lechner, Frank J. Globalization: The Making of World Society. N.p.: Blackwell Publishing, 2009.

Sassen, Saskia. The Global City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Smith, Michael Peter. Transnational urbanism: locating globalization. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2001.