Bonnaroo: A Mesh of Practicality and Folly

Bonnaroo is 700 acres and flat. Outside of Centeroo, the hub with the stages and the merchant tents and educational booths, the place is a seemingly endless plain of tents and cars and port-o-johns, gravel dirt roads with golf carts trundling past, folks hocking lemonade and tacos. Everything is hot, everything is grubby, and everything is public. Maps are little help. Everything looks the same.

Except for the pods. If Bonnaroo had neighborhoods—and one day it just might—pods would be the local community centers. You need a medic or a shower or want to buy ice?  Wind your way around the camping chairs and tents’ guy ropes toward one of the huge balloons that float in hazy Crayola colors high above. Beneath each, you’ll find the answers to those pedestrian needs, as well as an art installation designed to turn you back off-center, which is what living at Bonnaroo is all about.

The architects at Sanders Pace Architecture, in nearby Knoxville, TN, created the projects for Pods Six and Seven. One of them has attended the festival nine out of the past ten years. When his cohorts asked him what life in Bonnaroo City is like, he told them it is scorching hot and baldly exposed. You want privacy? Crawl into your tent and zip closed the door. Baking in that oven? Crawl back out into the ruckus and dust.

The material ended up being bamboo, and the name of the project ended up The Thicket. There are two Thickets, about a five-minute walk apart, and each is a 30 x 30 foot grid of one-inch diameter bamboo poles sunk one foot into the ground, spaced sixteen inches apart, and standing ten feet high. Within the poles, small glens have been left open for Bonnaroo’ers to retreat into dappled shade and a respite from the masses. The effect, even on this relatively small scale, is of total escape. Wide open acres and a looming sky are shrunk to narrow paths and the towering, leafy green of bamboo. That seemingly endless plain of tents and people is erased. The air is cooler. The branches rustle in the breeze.

Bonnaroo is already a meshing of practicality and folly. There might be a big mushroom-shaped fountain to run under and a huge inflatable water slide, but there is also heat stroke to be avoided and strategizing to get close enough to the What Stage that your favorite band is more than dust mites on a horizon. The Thicket reflects both characters. What would otherwise by just another anonymous stretch of tents and tarps is now defined as something unique, a landmark that can help you find your way home or contribute to a real sense of place. And it is a source of play, too. I ask a group of 12 college-age people sitting in a circle in the largest of the glens where they are from, and they tell me they met only a minute before when they all independently slipped into the Thicket. I ask them what they think. “It’s a good way to meet people,” one of the men says. “It’s so happyyyyyy,” a girl says. “Hey, did somebody pocket my Allman Brothers lighter?” a second man asks. Everyone starts laughing.

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