LA-based design studio Do Lab has created a series of fabric “mushrooms” to cover the audience and performers for one of the stages at this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
The installation consisted of nine, oversized satellite-shaped sculptures distributed across a field, under which festival-goers could get some shade, rest and dance.
Do Lab, founded by brothers Jesse, Josh and Dede Flemming, has created installations and stages for Coachella since 2004.
“In the early years, we used to do sculptures and make kind of beautiful gardens that got bigger and bigger,” said Jesse Flemming in a video about the design. “The last three structures, we started to get away from sculptural elements towards building giant tent-like structures.”
“But this year, we’re going back to our roots. It’s gonna feel like you’re dancing in this really trippy forest instead of under a tent,” he continued.
Do Lab’s 2024 stage installation, under which artists like Billie Eilish and Marc Rebillet performed, consisted of nine fabric “mushroom-like” pods made up of 12 metallic arms with strips of fabric between them.
Some “pods” – the largest spanning 100 feet wide (30 metres), rested on tripod bases, while smaller versions were suspended over the crowd with translucent netting.
The fabric strips, which rippled with the wind, consisted of a rotating pattern alternating between deep magenta, aqua blue and bright orange.
Two to three miles (3-5 kilometres) of fabric were used for each pod, as well as 20 miles (32 kilometres) of thread in total.
“The end result is a 360-degree fully immersive environment complete with lights, lasers, and fog machines hidden within the colourful structures themselves,” said the team.
Do Lab also produces its own music festival, Lighting in a Bottle, which will take place in May.
Other installations at this year’s Coachella consisted of spikey towers made of plywood strips and 3D-printed bases, a kinetic “settlement” by British artist Morag Myerscough and a monolithic stack of geometric volumes by London-based design studio Nebbia.
The festival has a history of large-scale installations, including giant robots informed by South Asian temples and colourful steel-framed towers by architecture studio Architensions in previous years.
The photography is by Jamal Eid mages are courtesy of Do Lab.
The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival took place over two weekends from 12 to 14 April and 19 to 21 April in California. For more events, exhibitions and talks in architecture and design visit the Dezeen Events Guide.
