For this year’s 2024 TreeFort Music Festival here in Boise, Idaho, I, along with five other graduate students from The University of Idaho, got the opportunity to engage in a design build project aimed at creating an architectural installation for the event.
Starting out, we all came up with a wide variety of ideas, sketches, and study models to present to the TreeFort Board. Next we had them pick their favorite designs, split off into two groups of three, and then created new designs off of that. Eventually we landed on this idea of construction three towers, each with their own unique and playful personalities, roughly based off of Where the Wild Things Are.
These towers were designed to be beacons throughout the festival that would help festival goers meet up with friends, sit and relax on the benching around the towers, and overall use these towers as effective way finding tools. Each tower, with its own unique ornamental personality assist with this concept as well as each tower being illuminated at night with colorful and playful light.
The construction, assembly, and overall tectonics of each tower followed the same system of LVL columns, 2x4 cross and diagonal bracing, and through bolts. We started by prototyping the full scale tower builds at a wood working and fabrication shop downtown boise to work out all of the assembly kinks. Then, after it was all figured out, we simply disassembled each tower into “packs” to be transported to the festival ground in which they would then be re-assembled again.
All three towers were specifically designed to be assembled and disassembled so that they can be re-used by TreeFort for years to come.
Utilizing mass timber, this design proposed for the Moscow/Pullman Reg Airport incorporates an algorithmic, parametric structural design that is both functional and dynamic. Highlighting how the Palouse meets urban, this architectural intervention shows their delicate relationship. The delicate relationship is what forms the basis of the phenomenology that we experience while living here. The Palouse and urban cities remain separate entities, yet meet each other in a balanced, cohesive way. The structural design, using algorithmic, parametric logic, reflects these qualities by providing a similar phenomenological experience. Having two massive parametric columns smoothly come down to a delicate touch with the urban environment that is the Moscow/Pullman Airport, this quality is replicated.
