Synthesis at the 2026 Pickathon Music Festival
Authors
Eric Wenzel
In 2025, Scott Edwards Architecture (SEA) took on the Grove neighborhood with the “Fractal Forest” concept and fostered Pickathon’s core values of placemaking, workforce training, and upcycling with the help of their partnerships. Expanding on the success of last year, SEA along with the same team that built the “Fractal Forest”, will take on the Paddock main stage with an installation centered on revitalizing Portland’s Old Town neighborhood.
Over the past year, SEA has also established a meaningful partnership with P:EAR Mentorship through their previous partnership with Homebuilding Foundation. P:EAR, short for Project: Education Art Recreation is a community space in Old Town that offers a day shelter and mentorship programs for homeless youth. Together, SEA, P:EAR, and the Home Building Foundation are developing an urban flower farm in a prominent Old Town location, creating opportunities for hands-on workforce training where the youth can grow, harvest, and arrange flowers for community distribution.
Although the urban flower farm will be completed ahead of Pickathon 2026, SEA has also turned its attention to another P:EAR managed site: the Q-Side Skatepark. Situated in the heart of Old Town, this pop-up skatepark has taken shape over the past year through a collaboration between P:EAR, professional skateboarders, and local businesses. Once a derelict parking lot, the site has transformed into a community hub where skateboarders gather daily, while also serving as a recreational space for P:EAR’s mentorship program, offering homeless youth the opportunity to learn and practice skateboarding.
Building on this momentum, SEA has begun collaborating with P:EAR and Q-Side partners to explore how the Pickathon main stage can support the skatepark’s ongoing growth. This year’s stage design draws inspiration from the community involvement and skatepark’s evolution and will focus on how the built elements that make up the stage can be thoughtfully repurposed to help reinvigorate and expand the skatepark.
Drawing on the movement and flow of skateboarding, the stage is built from modular elements that reflect the spatial experience of a skatepark. Layered together, they form a complex framework that creates a dynamic visual rhythm for this year’s Pickathon’s main stage. After the event, the modules will be repurposed into new skatepark infrastructure, contributing to the development of a skatepark in the Old Town Neighborhood.
This year’s main stage concept, titled “Synthesis”. Inspired by the concept of uniting multiple community and grassroot initiatives into a cohesive whole, it will serve as a nexus for Pickathon 2026 and afterward will help re-energize the Old Town neighborhood.
SEA is once again partnering with Bremik Construction, Home Building Foundation, Holmes Engineering, and the Building to Scale workforce training program to bring this concept to life. Bremik Construction provides the expertise and horsepower to help build the neighborhood and Home Building Foundation contributes donations and volunteers to make the project possible. Building to Scale adds a proven workforce training and mentorship component, building on last year’s success, and Holmes Engineering offers specialized structural engineering expertise to make these unique structures achievable.
