In an effort to replace noisy, polluting diesel generators, Pvilion has created solar-powered fabric kits that can be used to provide event spaces with self-sustaining, environmentally friendly power. The kits are lightweight, flexible, easily folded up, and designed for ease of transport. The solar-powered fabric can be quickly set-up on any surface that receives sunlight and used to power silent, clean-energy battery kits. They are modular and can be scaled to meet different power output needs for event venues.
Pvilion’s Quad Pole Solar Sail wins a 2023 BLT Built Design Award in Landscape Architecture.
October 2023
This project included the design and installation of eight outdoor solar powered canopies at the New York Botanical Garden. These large, sturdy canopies were designed to provide the garden with plenty of sheltered outdoor space where visitors can relax in the shade on sunny days, charge their devices, and eat lunch provided by the nearby food trucks. They are strategically placed near the entrance by the food truck area of the garden, where they easy for visitors to find and enjoy.
The fabric used for the canopies is integrated with specialty solar technology that is lightweight, flexible, and easily integrated into unique and beautiful designs. The canopies are also waterproof, fire-retardant, UV-resistant, and built to withstand extreme weather conditions. The outlets beneath the canopy are completely powered by the batteries connected to solar fabric system. These sustainable and carefully designed canopies were added to the park as an effort to solve the garden’s need for easily accessible outdoor seating and off-grid power supply.
About the BLT Built Design Awards:
The BLT Built Design Awards recognize the expertise of all professionals involved in the realization of outstanding projects, on a global basis — from architecture firms and interior design experts, to construction products and landscape architects.
Our objective is to become the world’s most inclusive awards platform for the building industry, identifying and promoting outstanding projects annually. We want to raise awareness and shine a well-deserved spotlight on all the professions involved in the realization of new infrastructure.
We focus on celebrating projects, people, and their passion for the industry, and through our rigorous judging process, we recognize those that have gone above and beyond normal, expected standards in the last five years. Selected by our esteemed jury of architects, designers, manufacturers, and leaders in construction and architectural fields, the annual winners will receive the BLT Awards trophy, extensive publicity showcasing their designs and project to an international audience, and more. To continue reading this excerpt from their website, click here.
Pvilion Walks Away Victorious in the 2023 MUSE Design Awards: Season 2
Brooklyn, NY – The MUSE Creative and Design Awards, leading competitions that honor creative and design professionals, have released the list of winners for its second competitive season of 2023. The awards saw as many as 6,500 entries submitted from across the world, all vying for a chance to be honored as a MUSE.
For this competitive season, Pvilion walks away victorious with the Gold award to their name.
The MUSE Awards is made up of a series of competitions organized to honor excellence in various fields and industries. In order to guarantee recognition only goes to those who truly deserve it regardless of class or background, IAA ensures that these competitions are kept accessible and fair.
“This season’s works took the team by surprise with the level of quality they were at. The entrants certainly deserve the recognition for all the efforts they had put in,” Thomas Brandt, spokesperson of IAA elaborated. He continued, “these professionals and creatives demonstrate how those who pursue excellence will always thrive, regardless of the changes their industries go through.”
Judging was done by a jury panel which was composed of industry professionals. Thanks to their efforts, IAA was successful in upholding impartiality and implementing industry-relevant assessment criteria. The jury was tasked with identifying companies or individuals whose works exemplified excellence and that had pushed their respective industries forward.
Grand Jury Panel
The awards received jury nominations from 17 countries and ended up with 60 jurors. These professionals are held in high regard in their respective industries and are tied to renowned organizations in the creative and design industries. For example, Lead Consultant at Coldharbour Communications – Jon Meakin, Founder/CCO of Cutwater – Chuck McBride, VP, Brand & Creative Services of PubMatic, Inc. – Imelda Suriato, Associate Creative Director at McCann NY – Alexandre Kazuo Kubo, Group Creative Director at Ogilvy NY – Mohamed DiaaEldin Osman, Principal Architect and Landscape Architect at Studio Arth LLC – Rituparna Simlai, Senior Architect at Tiago do Vale Architects – Tiago do Vale, Director of DesignAware – Takbir Fatima, Founder, hcreates interior design – Hannah Churchill, Founder and Creative Director of IN.X Design – Wu Wei, to name a few.
On top of having industry-relevant standards in the judging process, impartiality was further enforced by using the blind judging method. Effectively, each entry was evaluated by multiple judges without being compared to other submissions. In this scenario, every work could only win based on their own merits.
Participation of International Brands
Thanks to IAA’s global presence, the MUSE Creative and Design Awards received entries that included names of globally prominent organizations. Some submissions were made directly by said companies, while others were submitted by entrants who had produced work for them. For direct submissions, familiar names such as Paramount Global, Mastercard, Explainly, Savannah College of Art and Design, T Brand Studio/New York Times Advertising, United Nations Peacekeeping, International Monetary Fund, NORC at the University of Chicago, VICE Media Group, Leroy & Rose, Leo Burnett Malaysia, The Narrative Group, Vanpin Design, Guangzhou S.P.I Design, Archer Aviation, Natuzzi Italia, Kao (China) Research & Development Center Co., Ltd., Hugo Eccles, China University of Technology/ShiuanYuan Group, M&A Creative Agency, and Zippo (China) Outdoor Products Co., Ltd. were present; whereas indirect submissions included The Walt Disney Company (Southeast Asia), Uber Eats, KFC Canada, Funcom, Unilever, SIEMENS Mobility GmbH, General Motors, AstraZeneca, AT&T, Mars Wrigley, McDonald’s (China), Hartness Holdings, CHAGEE, vivo, Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, Da Long Yi, and China Railway Engineering Corporation.
“The winners of this season are undoubtedly some of the best talents the industries have to offer and it makes us proud to be able to honor these people for all their hard work,” Thomas said. “As they continue to express themselves in their works and push forward in excellence, we will certainly remain here to be a platform to spotlight their talents.”
Pvilion’s Solar Fabric Kits for Coldplay World Tour
As Awarded by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design.
Designers: Todd Dalland, Pvilion, Brooklyn, New York, USA Client: Coldplay, United Kingdom
This product was designed and provided to Coldplay for their 2022-2023 world tour. The product includes flexible, travel-friendly solar fabric panels and fully functional battery kits to help power key elements of each concert. Pvilion provided the band with 70, 10 ft x 3.5 ft clip-on solar fabric panels.
These solar fabric products are lightweight, flexible, can be folded up, and are easy to travel with. At each stop that the tour makes, the fabric panels can quickly be set-up and attached to most surfaces that receive sunlight and are fully operational by showtime.
The goal of the Coldplay: Music of The Spheres Tour is to be as sustainable and low-carbon as possible, and diesel generators are incredibly harmful to the environment and those that work around them at concert venues.
The addition of these solar fabric kits reduces the harmful fumes that would otherwise be emitted using diesel generators at each concert and is an essential component to the band’s sustainability efforts.
About the Green Good Design Sustainability Awards:
“For 2023, Green GOOD DESIGN received hundreds of submissions from around the world. Members of The European Center’s International Advisory Committee—worldwide leaders in the design industry—served as the jury and selected over 180 new products, programs, people, environmental planning, and architecture as outstanding examples of Green Design.
The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design have joined forces on two continents to present an innovative and challenging new public program: GREEN GOOD DESIGN SUSTAINABILITY AWARDS.
GOOD DESIGN™ was founded in Chicago in 1950 by Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, and Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. to promote and foster a greater public understanding and acceptance for Modern Design.
Now in turn and in 2023, GREEN GOOD DESIGN‘s goal is to bestow international recognition to those outstanding individuals, companies, organizations, governments, and institutions – together with their products, services, programs, ideas, and concepts-that have forwarded exceptional thinking and inspired greater progress toward a more healthier and more sustainable universe.” (This is an excerpt from their website. Click here to read more on the original site.)
As Awarded by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design.
Designers: Todd Dalland, Pvilion, Brooklyn, New York, USA Manufacturer: Anchor Industries Inc., Evansville, Indiana, USA
This project was designed and created by Pvilion with the intent to integrate solar power to event tents as an alternative to diesel generators. These solar fabric event tent clip-on attachment kits are made with Pvilion’s photovoltaic fabric, and are specifically designed to attach to the top of large event tents to incorporate the use of solar power.
For those in the event industry that already own large event tents but want to implement solar power, Pvilion has created a clip-on attachment, made with photovoltaic fabric, specifically designed to attach to the top of large event tents.
The use of these solar fabric attachment kits allows event tent users to have access to power anywhere that they are set up, without needing access to the local power grid. Not only does it allow for this independence, but it also reduces harmful fumes that would otherwise be emitted using diesel generators in these settings.
About the Green Good Design Sustainability Awards:
“For 2023, Green GOOD DESIGN received hundreds of submissions from around the world. Members of The European Center’s International Advisory Committee—worldwide leaders in the design industry—served as the jury and selected over 180 new products, programs, people, environmental planning, and architecture as outstanding examples of Green Design.
The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design have joined forces on two continents to present an innovative and challenging new public program: GREEN GOOD DESIGN SUSTAINABILITY AWARDS.
GOOD DESIGN™ was founded in Chicago in 1950 by Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, and Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. to promote and foster a greater public understanding and acceptance for Modern Design.
Now in turn and in 2023, GREEN GOOD DESIGN‘s goal is to bestow international recognition to those outstanding individuals, companies, organizations, governments, and institutions – together with their products, services, programs, ideas, and concepts-that have forwarded exceptional thinking and inspired greater progress toward a more healthier and more sustainable universe.” (This is an excerpt from their website. Click here to read more on the original site.)
Access All Areas | April 11, 2022 | Christopher Barrett
Live from Mexico in the people-powered Energy Zone of Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres World Tour, Tim Benson, Chair of Powerful Thinking and Energy Consultant on Coldplay’s current tour, updates us on the tech and innovation which allows energy from fans to be converted, via kinetic dance floors and pedal bikes, into power for the show. As well as spotlighting the remarkable clean tech solutions, and the expertise required to maximize system outputs for this stadium-ready portable mini-micro-grid, Tim also celebrates the innovation of the band themselves, who have pushed the boundaries to engage fans in a hitherto untried way.
It’s 16.30 hours at the Foro Sol stadium, Mexico City, as the blistering sun mercifully begins to descend. Suddenly, some 26,000 fans, old and young, sprint into view, vying for the best vantage points to take in the sensory delights of Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres World Tour (MOTS) spectacular. Strangely, though, there’s also a hive of activity downstage midway between the final delay towers, where fans are furiously pedalling on bikes and leaping around on raised platforms.
‘Is he mad?’ I hear you ask. Definitely not, in fact I’m privileged to say that I’m part of creating this unlikely melee of activities.
This is MOTS Energy Zone, an area dedicated to people-power, where the electrical team, under the guidance of Head Electrician Paul Traynor, cunningly harvest energy from the movement of Coldplay fans. The two raised platforms are, in fact, kinetic dancefloors courtesy of Dutch firm Energy Floors. As fans bounce around to the bass lines of House of Pain’s Jump Around, their movement produces energy, which then charges a series of Wattsun battery packs. Similarly, the 12 bikes are fitted to Kinetic Effects’ PedGen bike stands, incorporating DC motors, which can produce hundreds of watts each. The energy generated by the bikes is stored in a SMART Power 50kWh battery system, which in turn inverts and distributes AC power to the ‘C-Stage’, a circular structure where the band play an intimate set surrounded by adoring fans.
If you look closely at the risers surrounding the delay towers and behind the stage, you’ll also see solar canvasses provided by US company Pvilion. These rapid-deploy PV panels charge batteries that feed an inverter providing energy to the LX in the stage underworld. Back of house, you will also find a mini-solar farm that provides a 100% renewable charge station for the Wattsun battery packs & docks. These portable battery solutions are being used for a range of applications, including stage backline, LED lights, video control racks & DMX buffers.
However, the most remarkable thing about the Energy Zone is how it all dovetails: These aren’t plug and play solutions that naturally knit together, they have to be constantly optimised and tweaked to maximise system outputs. Energy and power data has to be captured, relayed to the venue screens and reported back to the band’s sustainability director and team. In many ways, it’s the ultimate renewable energy mix, a portable mini-micro-grid incorporated into a stadium touring set up – no mean feat I would say.
The innovation of Coldplay themselves, and the willingness of their production and touring crews to push the boundaries like they have never been pushed before, is clearly paying off. Not only are they championing remarkable clean tech solutions, but they are also engaging fans in a hitherto untried way – more of this please touring industry!
The Carol Roberts Field House, design by KG&D Architects, is the locker room, training room, coach’s office, meeting space and observation deck for the women’s field hockey and softball teams. Pvilion provided design assist services to KG&D Architects for the Canopy and was the Contractor for the fabrication and installation of the Canopy.
Imagine erecting a 5,000 square foot, elegant, and grand building for events in just a few hours. Using Pvilion’s high pressure air beam technology and design, this event product is the first of its kind, combining architectural design and high tech fabric work.
The Gala Event Structure has already hit the market in 2014, and will be sure to turn heads in the temporary event space. Set it up on a rooftop, in a field, or anywhere you can imagine, and this Gala Event Structure will blow your mind.
