Structure (E) / Expression (S) / Culture (G)

What is a festival today?
Why urbanization, ecologization, and digitalization in architecture?
Where should urban transformation be activated?

“The carnival is the only time of the year when people take off their masks.”
Popular proverb from the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Carnival in Barranquilla, 2024

“Organizing a … festival in Salzburg means reviving ancient living traditions in a new way; it means doing things in a new way in ancient, meaningful … places […].”
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Festspiele in Salzburg, 1921

The power of architecture is often overlooked when we experience both traditional high culture and emerging popular culture. Events such as the festivals in Salzburg, the carnival in the Caribbean, Burning Man, or popular street markets are as important as the rise of disruptive urban youth cultures such as Reggaeton, Skateistan, parkour, and breakdance performance spaces. Our aim is to discover and transform potential places for spectacles of all scales that can radically reshape today’s urban culture, fostering participatory placemaking for communal spaces of coexistence.

Students will map, imagine, and design architecture through the lens of both the exceptional and the everyday culture of existing and new institutions. They will create their own site-specific festival as a spatial, social, and ecological intervention, aiming to propose alternative spaces for work, life, education, housing, dance, music, and digital performances—both in daylight and nightlife.