007Selected project

Sketch Fest – Paredes de Coura

Sketch Zone

A proposal to put a week of drawing workshops inside a music festival campsite: an open pavilion of tensioned sails, for forty people, in a field. It has not been built.

Role: Concept and design
Status: Proposal, unrealised
Proposed for: Vodafone Paredes de Coura, 2027
Disciplines: Spatial design, Experience design, Visual identity, Print, 3D modelling

The Sketch Zone pavilion in a field: timber posts carrying tensioned fabric sails over low seating

Vodafone Paredes de Coura is a music festival in a valley, known for its community and its liveliness. That community lives next to the concert site, in the campsite where people spend the week. The proposal was to put a week of drawing workshops in there: somewhere you can wander into, sit down in the shade, and draw what is going on around you.

It has not happened yet. This is a proposal, taken as far as a spatial brief, a set of renders and the printed material that would go with it. The earliest it could run is 2027.

An open pavilion

Roughly ten metres square and three and a half high, covered by tensioned fabric sails on timber posts. Being that open is the point: it barely touches the ground, it does not block the view, and it settles into the festival site instead of being parked on it.

It works in two directions at once. Turn inward and it is a workshop room for forty people sitting down. Turn outward and it is somewhere shaded to sit and draw the moments and the landscape that make Paredes de Coura what it is.

The pavilion seen across the grass, sails catching the light — Ten by ten, and the plan that gets you there

Plan view of the pavilion: the sail canopy, the central table and scattered poufs — Ten by ten, and the plan that gets you there

Furniture that lets the room change its mind

A central table with drawers holds the workshop materials and doubles as the demonstration surface. It is the thing the space is arranged around. Benches sit in the four corners, and ten loose poufs go wherever people put them.

That is the whole trick: the fixed pieces give the space a centre, and the loose ones let it reconfigure between a workshop everyone is concentrating on and an afternoon where people have drifted to the edges to look out.

The pavilion with a printed totem standing at its edge — The totem marks the entrance without needing signage on the pavilion itself

The structure carries the identity

The timber frames that hold the sails can take printed panels, which is where the Sketch Fest identity goes, and, usefully, where the workshop schedule goes too. The information becomes part of the structure rather than something taped to it.

Freestanding totems carrying printed panels in the festival’s colours — The panels, standing and flat

The printed panels flat: workshop titles and times in red and burgundy — The panels, standing and flat

The same line runs through everything people take away with them: the notebooks handed out at the workshops, the pencil kits, the stickers. “Desenhar é, acima de tudo, uma forma de estar presente”: drawing is, above all, a way of being present. At a festival, that reads less like a slogan and more like advice.

Workshop notebooks in four colourways, carrying the festival’s line — What people leave with

Stickers combining the Sketch Fest and Paredes de Coura marks — What people leave with

Where it stands

Everything on this page is a proposal. The pavilion has not been built, the workshops have not run, and Sketch Fest has never held an event at Paredes de Coura. What exists is the design: the spatial brief, the 3D development, the totems and the print.

It is the kind of project worth keeping visible anyway. Working out how forty people sit, draw and look outward from the same ten metres is the same problem whether it gets built or not.

Credits

Proposal by Sketch Fest, co-founded with Isabel Seixas, developed for Vodafone Paredes de Coura. Unrealised.