When Goldenvoice came to Keith Greco with a folder of images of houses intended to define the “main street” of the campground, asking if he would be willing to build one or two of the houses, Greco said that he in fact wanted to build them all.
“We twisted and bent a few of them, but they're kind of expected, so that's why I named it archetypes,” he says. “They're almost an alphabet of house types.” That list includes midcentury modern, bayou shack, popsicle stick, Lincoln log and gingerbread.
“The proximity to each other, and the diversity of them, it kind of reminds me of some small gold rush town,” Greco adds. “They came in, they put in a general store, they put in a saloon, and then everything filled in between a little temporary city. And for myself, my whole world is about nomadic structures.”
Since this was the first year for this sort of “main street” construction at Coachella, organizers weren't sure what to expect. “We kind of looked at it as an ant farm experiment, just, let's just see what people do with them,” says Greco.
What many people did, in fact, was graffiti, litter, dismantle, steal furniture, and punch holes in the walls. So some adjustments were made. For example, all stairs and ramps were removed, for the benefit of the self-regulation impaired. But Greco was in no way surprised or dismayed. He just saw the abuse of the houses as a fairly typical example of human nature.
“They don't know why it's there, they don't know what it is, so they want to beat it up in some capacity,” he says. “They were like monkeys throwing bones at a monolith.”
