BuildFest: Art & Architecture Festival
BuildFest: Acts of Construction
2026 Bethel Woods Art & Architecture Festival
September 9-13, 2026
For the next three years, the Bethel Woods Art & Architecture Festival (BuildFest) will build upon its previous success by challenging designers and artists to collaborate on an interdisciplinary series of “acts.” Each year will build on the previous one, creating an interconnected set of installations, activations, and performances. Each act is guided by thematic words chosen for their overlapping meanings in performance and design.
STAGING
Act One (2026) “staging,” will examine how construction can be intentionally organized to support unknown future uses and/or the planned disassembly and reuse of component parts for subsequent structures. Accepted proposals will prioritize adaptivity: the ability of art/architecture to act as the foundation, catalyst, and “stage” for future activations and uses.
CHOREOGRAPHY
Act Two (2027) will investigate notions of “choreography:” how can the component parts of existing installations be choreographed to generate new and unique work? How can existing structures be creatively reused, added to, or otherwise altered to generate new spatial conditions? How is labor itself choreographed as a dance between builders and buildings?
PERFORMANCE
Act Three (2028) will focus on “performance” by activating art and architecture through a series of interdisciplinary and interactive activations, pop-ups, performances, and other live events that foreground user participation with the built environment and work to animate art/architecture as a tangible public resources.
BuildFest 2: Peace Rises
2025 Bethel Woods Art & Architecture Festival
September 10-14, 2025
BuildFest 2: Peace Rises saw students and faculty from across the country make the pilgrimage to Bethel Woods, the historic site of the 1969 Woodstock Festival, to participate in an immersive design-build camp. For five days, students and faculty lived and worked on site, camping on the grounds where the counterculture galvanized in 1969.
2022 Bethel Woods Art & Architecture Festival
ADAPT. MITIGATE. DESIGN.
These are the words given to professors and student participants from Cornell University, Illinois Institute of Technology, Kean University, and Rochester Institute of Technology for the inaugural Art & Architecture Festival at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.
These invited teams were asked to engage with architecture’s ability to affect positive social and environmental change—both as functional/aesthetic interventions and also as agents oriented toward public engagement. Rather than creating one-off installations with limited use, each pavilion was designed to accommodate programs at Bethel Woods, such as performances by emerging musicians and pop-up art events. The concept for the festival is an homage to the ground's historic legacy.
