Design for a temporary stadium for the Winegrowers' Festival organized once every 22 years in the Swiss town of Vevey.

Fugue presents a new concept for the Winegrowers' Festival or 'Fête des Vignerons'. Its organizers, La Confrérie des Vignerons de Vevey, are a brotherhood of landowners who grow wine along the north side of Lake Geneva. They have been holding this festival since 1740. What began as a street parade has since swelled into an event requiring 5000 volunteers and an arena for 16,000 spectators. In the past, music and dance was used to express the seasons and the work in the vineyards whereas now there are more contemporary themes.
This final-year project is for a temporary stadium for the forthcoming festival of 2019. For two weeks this is to be the focal point of activities in Place du Marché in the centre of the town. The stadiums erected for the four previous editions were introverted structures that denied the distinctive distant prospects and elevations around the square. Those stadiums had a hermetic quality and obstructed the square, even though the festivities take place throughout the city as a whole with the square providing a potential climax to the proceedings. Fugue steps off from an inversion of the traditional stadium and signifies a radical renewal of the concept 'theatre'. By rotating the tiers of seating 180 degrees, city and landscape are drawn back into the performance. Place du Marché is replenished with air, the city can breathe again. Visitors experience the festival and the city differently, with a respect for tradition. The streets become the stage and the square's elevations stage sets, and there is space for the entire theatre entourage beneath the stadium's skin. This skin is of wood and rests atop a fine-meshed construction in which steel trusses create open spaces. After the show, visitors can take a look behind the scenes by entering the grandstand on one of the platforms. You are also at liberty to enjoy the fine prospects to be had from one of the broad sitting-rings.
The design provides four distinct stages on which elements of the show can be enacted individually, simultaneously or in sequence. Just how the stage is used derives from the Fugue, a 17th-century compositional technique in which a motif with a particular theme is repeated and developed in all sorts of ways. It is this combination of element and stage that allows for variation in the show and in the story lines. The design challenges the creative project team of the Winegrowers' Festival to accommodate composition and choreography to the fugue theme and to the inversion of the traditional stadium. The urban sitting-sculpture signifies not just advantages for a cutting-edge Fête des Vignerons full of surprises, it gives visitors the opportunity to regard city and surroundings from a unique angle.

Place of education: AvB Arnhem | Specialization: architecture | Tutors: Ton Salman, Wim Korvinus, Ralph Brodrück, Annemariken Hilberink