PSU architecture students help make music a little sweeter at this year’s Pickathon

The annual Pickathon Music Festival, which takes place at Pendarvis Farm in Happy Valley just southeast of Portland, has always prided itself on its diverse and unique musical collaborations.

This year, however, Pickathon founder Zale Schoenborn wanted to set a more magical tone.

Schoenborn decided to collaborate with faculty and students at Portland State’s School of Architecture to create a 600-square-foot bamboo structure at the main entrance of the festival.

Nearly every Pickathon attendee entered through the architectural piece designed and built by PSU students under the guidance of assistant professor Travis Bell.

“Watching people walk into the festival through these graceful structures, I definitely saw lots of positive reactions and heard plenty of comments from festival attendees,” said Karen O’Donnell Stein, the communications and student services coordinator for the School of Architecture. “The structures really mark that moment when you walk into this magical gathering.”

Though the project was the brainchild of Schoenborn and School of Architecture’s Director Clive Knights, it was Bell who was tasked with seeing it through to completion.

“It was a design that everyone had a hand [in] and everyone had ownership of,” Bell said. “And because of that they were able to put a lot of energy into seeing the design through to the end.”

The design phase started in Bell’s winter term “Architectural Design Studio” class, where students came up with a proposal for the project. Once it was given the go-ahead, students were offered the opportunity to enroll in Bell’s summer “Design-Build” class.

For some students, like recent PSU Master of Architecture program graduate Joel Dickson, enrolling in the class “was a pretty easy decision to make.”

Students are rarely afforded the opportunity to create full-scale versions of their designs.

“One of the best things was getting to see an idea come to life,” second-year graduate student Heidi Crespi said.

“There’s no better way to understand how materials go together to make an architectural space than to build it full size,” Knights said.

Students created the structure with an eye to Pickathon’s dedication to sustainability and environmental responsibility.

The festival is said to be first of its kind to be completely plastic-free, which played a significant part in the students’ choice to build the architectural piece from recycled and sustainable materials, including salvaged bicycle inner tubes and 700 bamboo canes.

The bamboo was harvested by students and generously donated by a festival sponsor, the Bamboo Garden Nursery in North Plains, Ore.