Roskilde
Denmark
• July 5th-8th 2007
80,000 pairs of rubber boots came together for four days of music in Roskilde this year. The giant music festival takes place in one of the oldest cities in Denmark, just a short train ride outside of Copenhagen. I got there for just the last day—Sunday—so the rain had stopped and the sun almost came out. The bands were great but it was the people and architecture that had me. I was consumed by the micro-urban bustle and life expressed by the cultural snapshot of my generation. Not just music—film, food, dance, architecture, design, fashion are used to express the communal ideas. You are paying for the creativity of the planning, curation and choreography.
Sculptural furniture, rendezvous pavilions, vendor shacks and tents with food, drinks, clothes and other experiences, and stages of course. It was well organized without losing its spontaneity. There was never a line for anything. Quick trips to the bathroom and easy access to good healthy food and beer made the crowd very happy.
I tried here to pick a selection of photographs that capture people and design together in any which way. This is not about juxtaposition or relationships, it is about being a part of something as a person, a user, a feeler. It is not passive. Everyone is a performer in communication, in community.
"Gratulerer med dagen."
The May 17h celebrations in Oslo were huge. A breakfast feast started the day off right. Ane and Michael hosted the 'frokost' at their place. Architecture students were in attendance to give toast to tradition and friendship with Norway I guess you could say. Everyone wishes each other happy birthday with a 'gratulerer med dagen.'
The Parade is a big part of celebrating independence, everyone gets a chance to strut their stuff in the streets and parks. The women wear traditional dresses from their home towns and the men don suits with ties, occasionally you see some in short pants with lacey wool socks, a little black ball cap like lid and a knife on the belt for show. The Royal Family stands there on the balcony and waves to everyone, all day.
Kubaparken • Grünerløkka, Oslo
Put on by S.O.S. Rasisme, the idea is to celebrate the diversity of Oslo and acknowledge the multi-ethnic population. It was a young but diverse crowd with some really great music. Tons of people were in the park grilling and drinking. May 27th is really just a huge public party. My apartment looks out onto the festival as you can see to the right and in the videos.
There is something nice about the presence of a booth all shut up for the evening. It's on the opposite schedule of a trundle-bed, the contents get tucked away neatly for the night. It looks like a envelope folded up ready to go. One aspect of the festival is that it can be nomadic. In this case the container might serve multiple festivals and uses throughout the year.
The park becomes like a temporary mobile home facility while it provides a place for the carnival to take place. The physical context is somewhat inconsequential here, you loose most of the ground as the figure—the carnival—occupies the park. The carnival is a temporary inhabitant on an otherwise complete and sustainable public realm. It amplifies a certain aspect of the location for a brief amount of time. Its presence is spontaneous and hard to resist.
Public space here provides for the event to occupy it. Variety is what provides for the public interest. Not just the variety of this one space, but the simultaneous variety within the various parks and festivals of the city happening on any given day.
It's amazing what a little sunshine and some moveable benches can do. Here, the stage remains a focal point of the park by framing an outdoor room. In this room the public is free to improvise on its use during days that its function is not being fulfilled by a concert.
Other rooms in the park were more or less defined by their form or a feature or both. Their was a formal parisian garden and fountain, a stream with a path, a pond; in most cases the feature conformed to the location, sited according to the landscape or it was an existing part of the landscape itself. Lots of landscape in there.
What I think is happening here is the only rule that is written is that of the landscape, the architecture accepts this because it has to. The site or context is so integral to the program that it cannot be superimposed, the program must be woven into it. In any case I think an amphitheater in a public place ought to be a nice place to be whether there is a performance happening or not.
As the maintenance crew was disassembling this carnival in Grünerløkka. There were a number of interesting relationships revealed between the permanent park infrastructure and the temporary architecture.
A deflated carnival attraction in the park is caught in transition as just a footprint. Full of implication it lay looking used and worn like pile of clothes.
Without any people at the carnival the structures are left as fresh ruins of an event, the life of which still resonates the day after. A statue of a horse is startled by the carnival games.
There was also this odd juxtaposition of a classical pavilion and one of those high speed merry-go-round rides. The video is a formal investigation of the relationships between monuments, buildings and carnival rides.
Fartein Valen Festivalen - This was an ideal case study because it has a very specific program and reason for being; to celebrate the life and work of the Norwegian composer Fartein Valen. The festival takes place in his hometown of Haugesund. On my 4th day in the country I decided to take an overnight bus (8 hours) from Oslo to the festival.
I arrived on Saturday at 0700 and wandered Haugesund looking for clues that would take me to the venue for the first performance at noon. The town was dead asleep. Eventually I found a newspaper in a bakery with an article about the festival and an outline of the upcoming events. A nice woman in a bookstore sold me a pocket dictionary and helped me parse the document.
The afternoon was full of great musical performances. Waiting for the festival to begin I was taking in the sun and breeze while eating my lunch and a parade entered the scene. A speech was made and the group sang a song together. It might have been a 'rights of spring' ceremony, but I'm still checking into it.
I bumped into a marching band on my way to the camping grounds. It reminds me of critical mass the way the band occupies the street with a spectacle of tradition. Not only the music is a part of this tradition, but the body language (dance) of the band members is engrained with the anticipation and historicity of events in Norway.
