Dezeen Magazine

Block9's NYC Downlow club at Glastonbury. Image is courtesy of Block9

Architecture and design highlights from Glastonbury 2023 captured in Dezeen video

This exclusive video shot by Dezeen features some of the best installations featured at this year's Glastonbury festival, including outlandish stages and a mushroom mycelium pavilion.

Glastonbury represents a huge exercise in production design and temporary architecture structures from across different disciplines, with over 100 stages, installations and sculptures for visitors to discover.

 

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Top image: Block9's NYC Downlow club at Glastonbury. Photo by Block9. Above: Glastonbury was packed with installations

This year, many installations were themed around sustainability, including a spiralling pavilion made from salvaged timber and mycelium in the Silver Hayes district.

Created by set designer Simon Carroll, the structure demonstrated how mushroom mycelium could challenge wider industry practices by replacing harmful materials often used in stage design such as polystyrene.

At the Block9 field, which is built at each instalment of Glastonbury by the London-based creative partnership of the same name, many immersive stages hosted the festival's nighttime partygoers.

Visitors could see the return of Block9's monolithic IICON stage, a giant head bisected by a visitor-like DJ booth, as well as the NYC Downlow, a raucous queer club referencing a 1980s meatpacking district warehouse.

IICON stage at Glastonbury by Block9
Block9's monolithic IICON stage at Glastonbury. Photo by Block9

Other designs at this year's festival included an outdoor club called The Levels, a canopy formed by tensegrity structures used at Extinction Rebellion's protests, and the iconic Pyramid Stage.

Glastonbury is the UK's largest music festival, equivalent to the size of a city with a population of over 210,000 people.

Glastonbury took place from 21 to 25 June in Somerset, UK. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.