Kaiserslautern Students Screw Together a Reversible Festival Pavilion on a Former Innsbruck Landfill

The Gabonsa Pavilion is a small structure: 16 square metres of timber, foil and netting on a hill at the Rossau Recreation Centre in Innsbruck. Students from the Interior Architecture department at Hochschule Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences designed and built it during a construction course. They worked with the Innsbruck collectives Gans Anders and Bonanza, who stage the Gabonsa Music Festival on the site. The ground underneath was once a municipal landfill. The collectives want to turn it back into public space through cultural events, and the pavilion is one of the tools for doing that.

Temporary pavilions built from reused materials are common, and you can find a dozen every summer. What makes this one worth your attention is its discipline. It uses no adhesives and no permanent fixings, and every connection is a screw that can be backed out. The materials come from the ordinary supply chain of a building site: 4 metre timber beams, reflective construction foil, aluminium vapour barrier and an orange safety net. The team takes the vocabulary of a construction site and makes it read as architecture. We think that works because the students let each material keep its identity. Nothing is disguised.

A Landmark on a Hill of Old Waste

Viewed across the dry meadow, the pavilion acts mainly as a marker. It sits on a small rise between the festival's main stage and the workshop area, so it works as a connector between the two. Festival-goers can find it from almost anywhere on the grounds. A 16 square metre object rarely gets to do that much, and here the choice of site is doing as much work as the design.

The setting adds a quiet irony. Behind the pavilion rise forested slopes and peaks wrapped in low cloud. Underneath it is a landfill. The pavilion does not try to settle that contrast. It occupies the high point, catches the mountain view and asks people to sit on ground the city once wrote off.

Red Bracing That Explains the Structure

Every structural member here is plain timber except the bracing, which is painted red. With that single decision, the pavilion becomes a lesson in how a frame stands up. The diagonals hold the stepped stack of beams steady, and the paint makes sure you notice them.

For a teaching project, this approach is honest. Structural engineer Prof. Dr.-Ing. Larissa Krieger worked with the students, and the finished frame shows that collaboration openly. The diagonals and posts are not hidden behind cladding. The result has a scaffolding quality, and the red keeps it from looking unfinished.

Foil, Vapour Barrier and Safety Net

The material palette is what stays with you. The semicircular backdrop is cut from reflective construction foil, and it mirrors the meadow and the hills, so the pavilion partly dissolves into the view behind it. Aluminium vapour-barrier sheeting is stretched overhead as a canopy for shade. The orange construction safety net, a material normally found on fences at the edge of building sites, is reused as a hammock.

None of these materials is special, and that is the point. They are cheap, easy to buy and normally thrown away once a building is finished. Here they serve as finishes with a job to do: reflecting, shading and holding a body. The translucent orange of the net against green trees also gives the pavilion its warmest moments.

Joints That Can Be Undone

A close look at a joint tells you more about the project than any manifesto. Two beams overlap, and a single screw passes through both. The assembly runs on that simple logic throughout, and it is what lets the team take the pavilion apart after the festival and put the timber back into circulation.

The construction photos show the frame going up at roughly human scale, with a few people fastening beams on white footings. Reversibility here is a practical decision about how many hands, how many tools and how much time the build takes. That makes it more convincing than most claims about circularity.

From Tripod Model to Built Frame

A small model of timber and mirrored sheet, set on a metal tripod in tall grass in front of a weathered concrete wall, shows how the team tested ideas on site rather than only at the desk. According to the project team, the design came out of an ongoing dialogue with the collectives and a close reading of the ground. The model carries that same rough, experimental spirit, and the full-size pavilion kept it.

A Seating Landscape Between Stage and Workshop

The pavilion is terraced, so it offers several ways to occupy it: perched on a step, slouched against a riser or stretched out in the net. Each terrace frames a slightly different view of the surroundings. The pavilion sits somewhere between furniture, installation and architecture, and it does not need to be classified to work.

Its openness matters. The pavilion has no walls and no door, so there is nothing that makes it feel like a private enclosure. At a festival, that means it can serve as a meeting point, a rest stop or a place to wait for a set, without asking anyone to commit to being inside something.

Plans and Drawings

The elevation and axonometric drawings make the terraced platform and the semicircular backdrop easy to read. The detail drawings are more useful for students, because they isolate the crossing diagonals, the posts and the beam overlaps that hold the frame together. Taken as a set, the drawings read like an assembly manual, which suits a pavilion designed to be built and then taken apart again.

Why This Project Matters

Discussions about circular construction often stay abstract: material passports, end-of-life scenarios, lifecycle diagrams. The Gabonsa Pavilion brings the topic down to a scale where you can check every claim with your own eyes. You can count the screws, spot the reused safety net and see that the foil is still recognisable as foil. A student project can make that argument more directly than a large building, and this one does.

It also shows how a modest structure can support a larger civic ambition. Gans Anders and Bonanza are trying to reclaim a former landfill for public life, and that kind of effort depends on events, habits and places people return to. A temporary pavilion cannot clean up the ground, but it can give people a reason to climb the hill, sit down and look back at the mountains. On a site like this, that is a real contribution.

Gabonsa Pavilion by Hochschule Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences, in collaboration with Gans Anders and Bonanza. Rossau Recreation Centre, Innsbruck, Austria. 16 m². Completed 2025. Photography by Susanne Oberhollenzer, Toni Schade, Christoph Schwarz and Fabian Wagner.

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