Festivalization of Architecture

In the Baroque feasts, ephemeral architecture, art, literature, and ritual transformed the city into
scenographies of celebration—liturgical, civic, and profane. Whether commissioned by the establishment for the people, by the establishment for itself, from the people to the people, or as a moment when “the people” address the establishment through homage, inversion, or protest — these celebrations used temporary structures to script spaces, make narratives visible and enable communities to rehearse shared values and forms of assembly ¹ . In this way, ephemeral architecture did not simply animate the city—it proposed versions of it, sometimes later built in permanent form ² .

Today, ephemeral architecture is shifting from representation toward architecture in action. Festivalization—introduced by the urban sociologists Hartmut Häußermann and Walter Siebel (1993) ³ —describes cities’ growing reliance on events as a mode of governance: urban change is packaged into concentrated, time-limited episodes, easier to narrate, publicize, and convert into funding and investment. The term is often critical as it can privilege visibility over durability. Yet in contexts of rapid growth, mobility, and increasingly diverse publics, the event can also function as a tool of public-making: a repeatable format where co-presence is produced, differences are negotiated, and shared space is learned in practice ⁴ .

As urban policy becomes festivalized, architecture is increasingly festivalized too — reformatted for time-bound delivery, mixed audiences, and high-visibility use. Against this background, ephemeral architecture reads less as a generational taste for impermanence than as a consequence of how cities increasingly produce civic life. This shift is visible in commissioning: festival architecture has moved from an entry point for emerging practitioners to work that increasingly attracts established offices, not as a detour from “buildings,” but as a concentrated act of public address, operational clarity, and cultural consequence ⁵ . Accordingly, the field advances not only through its canonical “field-configuring events” (biennales, exhibitions, conferences) but across a widening circuit—music festivals, civic celebrations, and cultural programming—where ephemeral architecture is often commissioned to confront the city’s challenges, for example by adapting public space to climate, and making plural heritage visible ⁶ .

The open question is whether the discipline is willing to treat this as architectural practice in full.

If festivalization is a driving force of the contemporary city, then its architectures increasingly carry a political and spatial weight, even when they are temporary. Practicing well in this project-form requires funding and procurement literacy, governance fluency, and an ability to read the “one hand” of delivery: who controls planning, finance, construction, marketing, and management—and to what ends. It also demands a temporal design logic (setup, peak, decay, disassembly, afterlife) and the ecological accounting it entails (materials, transport, waste, reuse). From there follows the audience choreography: how publics are gathered, routed, and positioned; what access regimes it installs (ticketed or open, affordable or exclusive); and a clear reckoning with who benefits, and who bears the costs, when public space is edited into celebration sites.

If festivalization has become a durable urban logic, it is also—quietly or explicitly—one of the principal sites where architectural agency now persists and where the field advances. The task is not to romanticize ephemerality, but to describe its conditions accurately and to build the competencies to practice it deliberately.