BuildFest: Art & Architecture Festival
BuildFest: Acts of Construction
Act One: Staging
September 9-13, 2026
Bethel Woods Art & Architecture Festival
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. These shared meanings will allow for multiple interpretations and outcomes.
Call for proposals will be downloadable from this page February 2026.
FESTIVAL ARCHIVE
BuildFest 2: Peace Rises
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.
BuildFest 2024
Bethel Woods Art & Architecture Festival
September 11-15, 2024
This year marked the beginning of a multi-year project to merge digital and analog fabrication pedagogies with creative notions of function and play, focusing on flexibility and adaptation.
BuildFest 2022
Bethel Woods Art & Architecture Festival 2022
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.