Cake Architecture "exposes the guts" of Rally festival with demountable fibreglass stage

Panels of translucent fibreglass envelop this multi-level stage designed by Cake Architecture for London arts and music festival Rally, revealing the reusable scaffolding structure at its heart.

Named Agnes after American abstract painter Agnes Martin, the stage was designed to resemble a giant canvas and is surrounded by 40-metre-long, seven-metre-high walls on two sides.

As part of the day-long festival, these walls helped to create a long, narrow enclosure much like a mini-nightclub in London's Southwark Park, with an elevated DJ booth and stage in the centre.

Using a rentable, demountable scaffolding system, the walls were elevated three metres off the ground, allowing the audience to flow freely into and around the stage.

Two raised platforms on either end also allowed festivalgoers to climb up into the structure, effectively surrounding the performer on all sides.

"It's quite different to just a big stage that faces outwards," said Cake Architecture director Hugh Scott Moncrieff, who describes the stage as a two-storey building complete with a small roof. "It feels like you're somehow inside a club."

The narrow architecture of the stage, which is just eight meters wide, was informed both by its compact site in Southwark Park and by the layout of the nearby Dilston Gallery – a former church that at the time of its construction in 1911 was England's first poured-concrete building.

"It's just one big, long space with a raised pulpit up at one side," Scott Moncrieff told Dezeen. "So it seemed interesting to start testing something long and linear, that felt a little bit like a church for a congregation of music fans."

To save costs for the grassroots festival and ensure the stage could be reused year after year, Cake Architecture designed Agnes to be fully demountable using a modular scaffolding system rented from a stage production company in Germany.

"The material we're cladding it in is called GRP, glass-reinforced plastic, which is obviously not necessarily a renewable product," he said. "But, the idea is that it gets packed up every year and the stage still exists in five years or more."

"So it's not being trashed and thrown in the bin, which happens a lot with temporary builds."

Typically, this modular scaffolding would be hidden layers of painted plywood. But Cake Architecture used translucent plastic cladding to allow the structure to shine through and illustrate the DIY ethos of Rally, which spotlights local London venues and artists.

"It's about exposing the guts of what these structures are made of," Scott Moncrieff said.

Sections of the fibreglass were covered in red and blue vinyl, creating a sequence of colour across the facade that references the repetitive grids found in the work of Martin.

"The whole point is that observing her work is kind of a meditation," Scott Moncrieff said. "I think that translates in an interesting way to what we're trying to do with this stage."

"I'm hoping it will feel like a very large artwork," he added.

Rows of colourful baton lights were installed along the length of the stage, illuminating the translucent facade like a lantern and sparkling off the minuscule glass fibres suspended in the plastic.

The Cake Architecture team built Agnes alongside a "ragtag group of makers and fabricators who become festival builders for the weekend", Scott Moncrieff said.

"It's not our typical day-to-day wheelhouse at all, but it's been fun," he explained.

Cake Architecture previously created a smaller stage for the inaugural Rally festival last year – a kind of "dance music bandstand" called Visionnaire, which also returned for the 2024 edition.

Elsewhere across London, the studio has worked on a number of buzzy nightlife projects including A Bar with Shapes for a Name in Hoxton and Soho cocktail bar SOMA, as well as spearheading the upcoming refurbishment and extension of east London club The Pickle Factory.

The photography is by Angelina Nikolayeva, Rory Gaylor and Jake Davis.

Rally took place at London's Southwark Park in London on 24 August 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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