PSU architecture students create new Pickathon Cherry Hill stage from cast-off fishing nets

Pickathon Music Festival 2026, opening this weekend, continues its 12-year partnership with Portland State University School of Architecture, featuring an original Cherry Hill stage designed and built by PSU Architecture students and faculty. This year's stage is made from worn-out industrial fishing nets from the Oregon coast. The Cherry Hill stage is one of 10 architectural performance venues at the festival and will host 18 of the weekend's performers. Once the festival is over, the entire stage will be dismantled, and the fishing nets will be shipped to Ukraine, where they will be used to protect civilians and soldiers from attacks by drones.

Designed and built by a crew of more than 60 students, faculty, alumni and volunteers, the Cherry Hill stage design inspires the audience to consider the poetic interplay of the powerful ocean waves that once supported the fishing nets and the sound waves that carry the musical notes from the stage out to the audience. Set in a staggered footprint of about 60 by 60 feet, 9 rectangular frames made from about 225 pieces of 2x6 dimensional lumber rise vertically from the meadow floor, with spires reaching 44 feet up into the sky. Cylindrical columns made of disused fishing nets drape and float within the frames, swaying in the breeze, channeling the sounds of the bands performing on stage. Despite their physical weight, the net sculptures create a billowing, cloudlike effect that causes the viewer to gaze upward.

Ocean waves and sound waves

"A net is made through connection," the students wrote in their designers' statement. "Each individual strand depends on the others, creating a larger system of support, interdependence, and collective strength. In this way, the material reflects the values of community and gathering at the heart of the festival." Further, "the nets do not simply enclose space. They filter light, sound, views, and movement. They create moments of opacity and transparency, separation and connection, enclosure and openness," all fitting qualities for a music festival that brings together thousands of people through the uniting force of music.

"A lot of our architectural education at PSU is about respecting the land, and thinking about how architecture should respond to the land," said undergraduate architecture student Timothy Boscacci, one of the design team members. "With the background of tall trees, and the way the land slopes down, the site really demanded a vertical expression."

Given the massive weight of the fishing nets, the students were challenged to design scaffolding structures that allowed that verticality to emerge while securely supporting the nets and allowing them to appear weightless. They responded to this challenge by using a pinwheel configuration to join the 2x6 lumber pieces together and creating a double rail system at the top of the structures.

During the day, sunbeams pass through the porous netting, and at night, brilliant, glowing electric lighting effects shine through and reflect off the undulating textures. Lighting includes wash lights and graze lighting with an oblong field, clone blinders adorning the pillars, and moving wash lights that dance and change color throughout the performances.

The Cherry Hill venue will be the site of performances by musicians in a variety of genres, ranging from hip-hop legend Lyrics Born to bluegrass heroes The Travelin' McCourys and indie-rock veterans Built to Spill. The stage structure forms an evocative backdrop for the performance venue, which also includes beverage and food vendors and a lounge area.

Following the Diversion Design-Build tradition

Portland State University architecture students have designed and built temporary, zero-waste stages for the Pickathon music festival since 2014, using materials ranging from shipping pallets to giant cardboard tubes to apple harvesting bins. In 2017, the materials for the stage were transformed into sleeping pods for homeless veterans at the Clackamas County Veterans Village. In every case, the materials used for the stages have been diverted from their usual industrial use for the duration of the festival and then put back into service or converted to a new use. This practice is known as "Diversion Design-Build." In keeping with this tradition of reuse, this year's material will be given yet another, radically different purpose as they become protection against drone attacks. The dimensional lumber will also be reused by the Creative Neighborhoods nonprofit in community development projects.

Fishing nets used by commercial fishermen are made from plastic and nylon. Typically, disused nets are discarded and wind up in landfills, where they degrade over time, forming microplastic particles that seep into the soil and groundwater. Seeking a new material for this year's Cherry Hill stage, the PSU Architecture team connected with Nicole Baker, executive director of Net Your Problem, a nonprofit whose mission is to "keep maritime plastics out of landfills and find another home for them that includes recycling or reuse options," said Baker. Net Your Problem's usual operations include sorting the nets according to their plastic type, and then shipping them to the appropriate recycling facility, where they are shredded, melted, and turned into beads of plastic that can be used to manufacture a variety of products, from kayaks to toothbrushes to bathing suits. Since they started the operation in 2017, they have collected 2.3 million pounds of disused nets from the fishing industries on the West Coast, Eastern seaboard, and in Alaska, Baker said.

"We are also huge proponents of reusing materials for new purposes, such as the Pickathon stage project," said Baker. "This is even better because it's giving it a second life without expending the energy required to make virgin plastic or shred and melt down the old plastic."

From catching fish to saving lives

For the Cherry Hill stage, ___ pounds of fishing nets were trucked from the Newport facility to Pendarvis Farm, where the students fashioned them into an evocative performance space. Once the festival concludes and the stage is dismantled, the nets will be trucked back to Net Your Problem's Newport facility. They will then await transportation to Ukraine, thanks to the efforts of another organization seeking to meet an urgent environment and social need - one that directly affects the lives of civilians and soldiers in the conflict.

Brian Shaw, operations manager for the impact-first investment group Ground Squirrel Ventures, says their founder first learned of the defensive use for fishing nets when he traveled to Ukraine as part of a graduate school program. In Ukraine, he connected with governmental and military personnel, including frontline soldiers, who shared that one of their most-needed items was fishing nets.

There are a number of protective uses for fishing nets, said Shaw. "Soldiers will hang larger nets over roadways - they sew them together and drape them across telephone poles to allow the roadway to become a safe, logistical road," he said. "They also stretch them across the top of trenches, hang them from trees in forests, basically anywhere a drone would go that could put people at risk."

Additionally, "drones can't see gill netting, and so individual soldiers will cut pieces from gill netting and carry them in their backpack. When they enter a building, they will hang the netting in doorways and windows, and when a drone is coming in to infiltrate or attack the building, the drone will get caught," saving the lives of those inside.

Post-festival, the nets will join a collection of gill netting, trawl netting and seine nets, all bound for Ukraine on a container that will likely depart in the fall of 2026 - the fourth such shipment that Ground Squirrel Ventures has coordinated. When the container arrives in Ukraine, the word will go out to military units, who quickly collect as much of the netting material as possible.

Ground Squirrel's contacts in Ukraine say that there is an insatiable demand for the netting material. When containers arrive carrying many tons of netting, their cargo is claimed in a matter of three or four days, said a director of the Ukraine nonprofit that Ground Squirrel Ventures works with. There are "literally waiting lists, people contacting us all the time, asking when you're getting more nets," he said in a voice memo sent to Ground Squirrel staff.

He went on to share a report from the Rubizh Brigade artillery unit, saying "there was a massive attack on a couple of their positions the other day and a lot of drones launched, and they were pretty much unsuccessful because of the netting that we've provided them. Netting contributed toward saving lives and saving equipment for this unit."

"At its heart, architecture is creative problem solving," said Russ Golubev, an architecture student who helped design the stage. "For me, the human ingenuity at work here - using a material for such a different purpose than it was originally intended for, and using it for good in the world - shows what architectural thinking can do. From using the nets for fishing, and then for a stage, and then in a war, it makes you think about what else is possible when we come up with unconventional methods of solving a problem."

Catena Consulting Engineers was the structural engineer for the project.