Bethel Woods Center for the Arts serves as an international cultural destination and performing arts center. Set among 2,000 pristine acres, including the original 37-acre Yasgur farm, the site served as the backdrop for the famed 1969 Woodstock Festival.
Designed to attract visitors from around the world, the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts creates an environment that continues the original festival’s welcoming quality, celebrating and complementing the iconic rural landscape and corresponding event that gave a generation its name. The architecture makes use of vernacular forms and natural materials, most native to the region, in a way that feels both timeless and thoroughly new. Eighteen structures make up the complex and include an outdoor amphitheater, an open-air pavilion, and a museum and event center, as well as support facilities and extensive landscape and site interpretation. Sustainable engineering strategies were used to address the lack of infrastructure on the site, making use of geothermal systems in the museum / event center and addressing storm water management to reduce runoff. We provided architecture; electrical, mechanical, and structural engineering; audiovisual; museum planning; sustainability; and theater technical design services.
