PJ Dick Innovation Fund Project Grant: BuildFest: Five Years of Peace and Building at the Historic Site of Woodstock
Bethel Woods Art and Architecture Festival (BuildFest). Image credit: Breyden Anderson.
BuildFest: Five Years of Peace and Building at the Historic Site of Woodstock
Project Lead: Neal Lucas Hitch, Special Faculty, Carnegie Mellon Architecture
Project Team: Kristina Fisher, Special Faculty
“BuildFest: Five Years of Peace and Building” is an edited volume that documents the activities of the first five years of the Bethel Woods Art and Architecture Festival (BuildFest), compiled from photos, essays, and oral histories that explore how the act of architecture (building) can function as a catalyst for civic and environmental peace.
Over the course of five years, BuildFest has grown from a small gathering of like-minded students and colleagues at the historic site of Woodstock to the country’s largest assembly for active design-build education. Since its inception in 2021, the festival has attracted over 300 student and faculty participants from more than 20 diverse institutions — including Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, Cornell, Syracuse, and the University of California, among others — to prototype sustainable and innovative architecture at full scale.
"BuildFest: Five Years of Peace and Building” draws on the vast expertise of festival participants, including industry leaders in the fields of robotic fabrication, circular construction, and equitable design, to showcase a selection of the most innovative practices, methods, and techniques currently being developed in architecture programs across the nation. The book functions twofold, as both a compendium showcasing the results of the first five years of BuildFest, and, by doing so, as a survey of the state of design-build across the country and beyond, and as an argument for the importance of design-build in education and the profession as an incubator for experimentation and innovation in the discipline of architecture.
Image: Bethel Woods Art and Architecture Festival (BuildFest). Image credit: Breyden Anderson.
About the Project Lead
Special Faculty
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Established in 2023 by PJ Dick Trumbull Lindy Group, the Faculty Grants Program will award a total of $400,000 over four years beginning in 2024. The program supports faculty research and teaching innovations that address the School’s three pedagogical challenges of climate change, social justice and artificial intelligence. The proposals were assessed on their impact in furthering a faculty member’s research and teaching, their contribution to interrogating the School’s challenges, and their viability to garner further research support, make an impact on the discipline and expand the pedagogy of the School.