Mary J. Blige Sings, and VIP Guests Imbibe, at the Foot of the Statue of Liberty
The Budweiser Made in America Festival, presented in Philadelphia over Labor Day weekend, is sponsored by Anheuser–Busch and produced in partnership with Live Nation. This year, the pre-festival kicked off the with the first ever event in Budweiser’s Monument Series, which was a free, private concert on Liberty Island by nine-time Grammy Award winner, Mary J. Blige.
The Monument Series is a result of a partnership between Budweiser and the National Parks Foundation. By bringing seminal performances to iconic American locations, the partnership raises awareness about national parks and the centennial milestone of the National Park Service in 2016.
Guests for the event were chosen by lottery. While only 1,000 people could be accommodated on Liberty Island, another 5,000 enjoyed a simulcast on Governors Island, also in New York Harbor. While traveling by ferry back to Manhattan after the concert, all of the guests were treated to a fireworks show over the statue.
The Design Challenge
Footage from within, around, and above (by helicopter) both events was going to be cut into a series of commercials for the web and national television. Live Nation does not allow branding on or around the stages where artists are performing, so Budweiser needed a way to keep their image front and center and get their message out in a way that did not visually impact the stage.
How It Came Together
Kathleen McDonough and Kevin Allen of KLAD (Kevin Lee Allen Design) were commissioned to create The Beechwood House as a premium experience for the brand’s VIP guests at the concert. This design firm has a long history of working with Big Shoulders Digital Video Productions and Quench Event Production, supporting the Budweiser brands. For many years, KLAD has created various structures that have served as staging and/or sets for parties, events and subsequent commercial productions. The goal has always been portability, flexibility and ease of assembly.
The Beechwood House is a portable, temporary, two-story, 2,000 square foot structure that showcases and reinforces the brand, while providing photo and social media opportunities for the guests and VIPs.
Modular, Flexible, Portable
The design evolved over the winter of 2014 through this past spring. There were many course changes as the brand team changed and the brand message was refined. Ultimately, construction began with no time to spare.
The footprint of the structure is modular, based on a 20-by-40-foot grid. That way, with additional pieces, the same look can expand to 40 by 40 feet, or 40 by 80 feet, for the largest of events. Similarly, for street fairs or smaller events, The Beechwood House could be reduced to an 8-by-20-fort size or a 20-by-20-foot square. In each case, the staircase to the upper level is built inside an 8-by-20-foot shipping container. That piece is in addition to the basic footprints mentioned. It adds a level of on trend cool, and some additional structural stability.
Doodles to Precise Drawings
While we generally start by doodling with pen or pencil on paper, we design and refine using the Vectorworks CAD program. Part of the beauty of the software package is that it’s simple and easy to ‘sketch’ loosely and refine the loose work into precise drawings.
Initially, a truss structure was suggested. That had been a preferred look for previous projects. Vectorworks ships with a number of commercially available libraries, and more are available to Vectorworks Service Select members, including the Tomcat Truss readily available. KLAD used those Vectorworks symbols to quickly lay out possibilities, including a suggestion of wrapping the truss with printed graphics to look like beechwood.
That idea was a step in the right direction, but to appeal to the audience, the job needed real wood. In the end, the shop used Beechwood and Beechwood Plywood to skin both box truss and square steel tube. The model, and then all of the drawings included the construction details.
Design Details Take Shape
In the design studio, Vectorworks was used to model that cladding as close as possible to the truss in order to have the thinnest and most elegant posts. Since each post is a symbol, the design staff could look at many different renderings, with different detail to select the final solution.
The Vectorworks Designer package with Renderworks allowed the team to switch between wireframe views to fully rendered views in minutes. Similarly, as pieces were detailed, and then evolved, the detail elections were automatically updated and published to PDF using Vectorworks Cloud Services.
Lighting for the renderings was a combination of Vectorworks Spotlight theatrical/broadcast fixtures, the realistic exterior lighting options in Vectorworks Architect, and the artistic touches made by the design team.
Woodworking and Prefab
Once the client approved the renderings, the next step was the shop work, followed by the erection of the structure. The woodworking and prefabrication of materials was done at Global Scenic Services in Bridgeport, CT. Jay Reichgott was the structural engineer. Given the scale of The Beechwood House, it goes up with relative ease. KLAD has created staging and event structures for Budweiser in the past that could be assembled in a day or less with minimal labor. But this larger-scale project required the many talents of men and women from IATSE Local 1, two shop supervisors, and two forklifts to make the steel for the second story possible.
Standard lengths of 12-inch box truss, encased in beechwood, support a steel square tube superstructure and decking. The simple post and beam style structure provides an elegant frame for the beechwood surround. The structure is triangulated with steel frame wall segments that attach to the hidden vertical truss elements.
The first floor of The Beechwood House provides a generous, warm and intimate serving area right off the performance space. KLAD designed custom bars built to travel as part of the structure, to serve limited edition bottles of Bud featuring the iconic silhouette of The Statue of Liberty to celebrate the statue’s centennial. They also designed spaces to accommodate special taps required for Budweiser’s Signature Draft.
The second floor, accessed through a re-purposed shipping container, provides an elevated view of the concert and surrounding event. There is a long bar where guests can rest their beers as they watch the concert through the retro industrial Beechwood House sign and, of course, bottle service is available on the upper level at a freestanding bar.
Logistics of Liberty Island
Working at a National Monument presented a myriad of challenges. The event must be set up in an active public area, while allowing the park staff to stay focused and achieve their mission of showcasing the statue and educating their guests.
Delivery to the island was by shared barges limited to 24-foot trucks, with an internal center aisle cleared for dogs and security personnel. Only four trucks could fit on each barge, and KLAD had to share the barge trips with other vendors. Since trucks could not be driven directly from the dock to the setup location known as Flag Pole Circle, gear had to be off-loaded at the dock and carried, rolled, or forklifted to the site. The path from the dock to the location was not, of course, a straight line. Moving gear from the dock to the site had to happen when the island was not open to guests, which meant small windows of time early in the morning or just before dusk.
On Liberty Island, there was no room for external support, and the area outside of The Beechwood House was either support for the concert (front of house, follow spot towers, etc.) or landscaping that needed to be secured. The solution was to enclose the lower level space. That created a warm, cozy, inviting area downstairs, and an open and expansive second story.
Designed by the KLAD team including; Cris Dopher, Martin Fahrer, and Sam Gordon, with entertainment engineer Jay Reichgott, and architect Andrew Fethes consulting, the Beechwood House was built by Global Scenic Services where the project was overseen by owner Warren Katz and Project Manager Douglas Meeson.
Kevin Lee Allen is a principal in KLAD (Kevin Lee Allen Design). More info at www.klad.com.
