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Kristy Edmunds, founder and artistic director of PICA, served as curator. Also collaborating on the project were R & H Construction, Interface Flooring, RA Reed, and Home Depot. "The spirit of the process was about community, which is the spirit of PICA," said Tingley. "It's about building relationships and pushing ourselves to see what we can create together. In working together we discover we can do more than we ever imagined."

Theater Construction

To overcome the vastness of the warehouse, the volunteer design team used one bay of the building's structural system to frame the stage, in a space defined by the bay's four steel columns. Volunteers used an overhead crane that had been left in the space to rig the theatrical lighting.

Within the structural bays immediately surrounding the performance bay, the designers constructed seating for 200. They separated the remaining space within the warehouse by a long "media wall," within which was housed technical equipment, transformers, cabling, and an elevated control room.

With the goal of making as much of the Machineworks Theater as possible reuseable and recyclable, they sought construction techniques that would allow much of the material to be installed undamaged. In addition, they simplified systems so that construction could be executed largely by untrained volunteer labor.

The framework for the media wall enclosing the theater and the seating platforms was structured with a standard scaffold system installed by a rental company and R & H Construction. The volunteers attached wood blocks to the scaffolding using plastic zip ties.

To this blocking, they then stapled fire-treated visqueen on one face of the media wall and screwed pegboard to the other side. These screws were applied through the holes in the pegboard so as not to damage the board material. For illumination, the volunteer builders hung standard four-foot (122-centimeter) fluorescent lights inside the media wall cavity. The two cladding materials thus created differing levels of translucency and qualities of luminance.

Bucket Seats

The audience seating was particularly ingenious. On the standard plywood decking of the scaffold system, the designers developed a series of long benches supported by 200 orange five-gallon (19-liter) plastic buckets purchased from Home Depot with the understanding that they would be returned undamaged after the festival. These were an ideal choice for seating because the dimension of the buckets matched the desired seating height.

The buckets were placed upside down on the plywood deck and held in place by thin wood runners front and back that were screwed to the deck. Surfaces in contact with the body were crafted from 70 sheets of half-inch (12.7-millimeter) medium-density fiberboard (MDF), donated by PARR Lumber. Each 4- by 8-foot (122- by 244-centimeter) sheet was cut into two long planks: a 20-inch- (51-centimeter-) wide plank for the seat and a 28-inch- (71-centimeter-) wide one for the back.

The piece for the back was braced against the rear runner on the bottom deck and screwed to a runner on the front edge of the deck above. This created a slight angle that was ideal for back support. Then a wood strip was attached to this back at same height as the top of the buckets. This provided a shelf for attaching the seating plank to, thereby securing the bench without requiring any attachment to the buckets.

Finally, the seating surface was covered by 200 20-inch- (51-centimeter-) square recycled carpet tile samples that were donated for temporary use by Interface Flooring.

After the festival was over, disassembly was simple, and virtually all the materials, except small amounts of scrap, were returned undamaged to the original suppliers or were available for reuse. The existing building was virtually unchanged, and the "before" and "after" photos of the warehouse look practically identical, revealing nothing of the theater's brief existence.

But the memory of the experience has not been lost. "The Machineworks Theater was a wonderful opportunity for us to showcase Portland's creative gems, like BOORA," said Erin Boberg, PICA's assistant curator for performing arts, who compares the collaborative space creation to Portland itself: "innovative, unique, ambitious, and part of an international dialog."

BOORA Architects has a long resume of theater and cultural facilities design experience, most recently the Mondavi Center for the Arts in California and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. The firm's work on the modest venue for PICA has received a Juror's Choice Award from the International Interior Design Association.

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At the temporary arts festival performance space for the Portland (Oregon) Institute for Contemporary Arts, designed by BOORA Architects, visqueen cladding on the theater side of the "media wall" reveals the skeletal scaffold structure within. Photo: Sally Schoolmaster The before and after images of the existing warehouse are identical. No vestige of the theater’s presence remains. Photo: BOORA Architects Looking from the theater space through the portal into the entry/gathering area. Photo: Sally Schoolmaster Plan of the Machineworks building with the theater insertion. Image: BOORA Architects The media wall construction. Image: BOORA Architects An elevated control room was housed within the media wall, which was clad in pegboard and visqueen. Photo: Sally Schoolmaster The bench seating assembly. Image: BOORA Architects Plastic buckets, medium-density fiberboard, and borrowed carpet tiles create comfortable bench seating with a raked backrest. Photo: Sally Schoolmaster   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.