Nieuwe gilde scenography

Type | Stage and scenography    Year | 2026    Project site | Fredriksoord, Netherlands

Client | DeProef - Nieuwe Gilde

Most "sustainable" temporary architecture takes one of two roads: industrially prefabricated, with sustainability bolted on as a materials footnote, or deliberately rough and unfinished, as if looking unresolved were proof of ethical virtue. Material recovery in this industry is still underdeveloped. In the UK, the events industry alone generates over 100,000 tonnes of waste a year that ends up burned or in landfill rather than recovered.

We set out to prove there's a third option. For the main stage of Nieuwe Gilde, a newly launched festival on the UNESCO World Heritage site of Fredriksoord, we didn't buy a single new structural element. Instead, we partnered with Borkgroep, a Drenthe-based D&R company, and built the stage from materials still technically employed elsewhere: scaffolding pipes, hollow-core concrete slabs, and steel H-beams already earmarked for a building renovation this October. They aren't being recycled. They're on loan. When the festival ends, the structure comes apart with no glue and no permanent fixings, and the materials go on to become floors and beams in a different building entirely.

That constraint shaped the design as much as the ethics. Referencing the open field as the piazza of a new città ideale, with the stage framed like a small temple at its edge, we treated the material scale swap as the design language itself: components built to be buried in a floor or hidden in a wall become, briefly, the visible frame of a stage.

The build departed from industry standard as deliberately as the materials did. Instead of prefabricated components shipped in ready to assemble, the structure was scouted, cleaned, and hand-assembled on site by a small team and the festival's own community of volunteers, the same group that spent recent years reclaiming the plot itself.