A home for house shows | Team 5 nomadic performance stage

Work by: Honour Colby, Payton Narancic, Connor Rich and Ted Stephenson

Our stage is located in Eugene Oregon as a performance space for local student bands. As Oregon university students, we have attended house shows that result in trashed front yards and angry neighbors. This transportable timber structure provides a safe and organized way to move these local concerts to different parks around Eugene. This led to a design that invokes welcoming, energetic and youthful feelings that reflects the nature of the performances and students of the community.

The 160 sq foot structure relies on a series of angled glulam arches pinned at the top and bottom. This makes the whole structure work like a truss all while limiting the amount of members needed. The exterior of the structure is wrapped with a ETFE membrane that mimics the form of the arches with alternating white and transparent fabric. 

One of the main challenges of this project was brainstorming and developing working connection details. There were a lot of factors driving the design like deconstructability, weight, size, material, etc. We needed members that could be easily transported to site, built, stay up, and be taken down repeatedly. The final solution we decided on was a three pinned arch with knife plates inserted into the end of the arches. Assisted by an lvl wedge to keep the members flush against each other, the two systems bring stability to the structure.

Above is a step by step assembly diagram that maps the construction process from raw lumber to completion. Tracking the different stages of fabrication helped us find weaknesses in the project that eventually improved the design. Below is a small table top model and a larger connection model, these also helped find flaws throughout different iterations, as well as made us consider different construction solutions.

This term we learned Karamba, this helpful grasshopper plugin allowed us to test different parametric variations quickly and compare their structural stability. Although our OSU student oversaw the final karamba analysis, we all got to learn and experiment with the software throughout the term.