Chrysalis, Woodfordia, Queensland, 2024

Chrysalis sits at the entry of the Woodford Folk Festival precinct. Designed as a welcoming, cool and shady space, the structure provides a place to meet friends and family before heading into the festival. Made entirely from locally harvested bamboo, the scale of the large woven pavilion offers respite from the day's heat while encouraging visitors to explore and experience an organic structure woven by the Woodford Folk Festival Special Projects volunteers.

Under the artistic direction of Juan Pablo Pinto, the Cave Urban team upskilled a group of volunteers of diverse backgrounds and ages. The team learned to harvest, prepare and build with bamboo using simple splitting and wire-lashing techniques.

Chrysalis was created over four weeks, from bamboo harvest to completion. A narrow time frame considering the scale and craft-based nature of the project. One of the key aspects of the build was the simplicity of the technique that allowed for an inclusive community-building process. One in which people without previous bamboo-building experience could learn and contribute to the process, a symbiotic relationship where effort and time is exchanged for education.

Client: Woodford Folk Federation
Materials: Woven Bamboo
Location: Woodford, Queensland
Cave Urban Team: Juan Pablo Pinto, Nici Long, Jed Long
Engineer: Event Engineering

Chrysalis contains two woven vaulted spaces, a 5.5m high dome merged to a larger 7-metre high toroidal-shaped space. The larger space is characterised by a crown of bundled bamboo arches that unfurl from the ground like the inverted flower of a fig. The random weave pattern that covers the canopy and sides of the pavilion dapples the light, like a bamboo forest, creating shade patterns that shift and change during the day. At night, the woven structure turns into a giant amber lantern, inviting visitors to the night events at the festival.

Festival structures often create a large amount of waste and carbon emissions. The transient nature of festivals should require structures to be disposable or repurposed with minimal environmental impact. Cave Urban has developed a series of bamboo-building techniques in collaboration with international bamboo experts to this end. These techniques facilitate the building process of large-scale temporary structures, using natural materials and involving the local community. In this instance, the bamboo was not treated with chemicals, embracing the ephemeral nature of the material. The structure’s life cycle ranges from 2-5 years and aligns with the bamboo itself, which takes 3-5 years to mature. By the time Chrysalis breaks down and returns to the forest floor, the new poles will be ready to be harvested for the next structure, allowing for constant landscape renewal and regeneration.