Forging the central bar: reclaimed scaffolding at Pallas

Inside the cavernous brick shell of Berlin's former E-Werk power station, Pallas unfolds as a temporary electronic music universe. Multiple stages cascade across the floor, neon rigging slings over catwalks, and at the gravitational centre of it all stands the bar, a long, skeletal counter built entirely from reclaimed scaffolding. The bar is more than a place to queue for drinks; it functions as a social spine, the place where strangers trade stories between sets and where the festival's environmental ethos becomes tangible in steel and joint.

The decision to build the central bar from scaffolding was driven by the festival's commitment to CO2-neutral operations and a rejection of the throwaway logic that often dominates large-scale events. Organisers wanted a structure that could be assembled, enjoyed and disassembled, with every component returning to a second life. Scaffolding, by its very nature, is modular and designed to be erected and dismantled many times over. That made it an obvious muse for a festival that runs for a limited window before the venue returns to its dormant industrial state.

Australian readers will recognise a kindred spirit in projects back home. Melbourne's Collingwood and Fitzroy have long been laboratories for recycled-material architecture, and the city's hospitality scene often borrows from the same playbook the Pallas team adopted. Brisbane's growing festival circuit, anchored by events like Laneway and Field Day's Brisbane editions, has also pushed for low-impact builds in recent years. The Pallas bar sits comfortably within that global conversation, even though its steel was sourced an ocean away.

What makes this particular build fascinating is the lineage of the materials. The scaffolding frames once braced facades during Berlin's constant cycle of renovation and renewal. Stripped from those sites with permission, the steel travelled to a workshop where artists, welders and fabricators reimagined it as furniture for an electronic gathering. By the time visitors lean against the counter, the metal has already lived at least one other life.

Sourcing the steel

The journey began with a network of construction contacts across Berlin and Brandenburg. Scaffolding firms routinely retire system frames after a set number of cycles to comply with European safety standards, and what might otherwise head to scrap was instead diverted to the Pallas build. Each piece was catalogued, photographed and tagged before it left the original site, creating a paper trail that mirrors the kind of material passports now emerging in Australian sustainable building codes, where similar frameworks are being trialled in Sydney and Perth.

Australian deconstruction yards offered a parallel reference point. In Sydney's inner west, outfits specialising in residential strip-outs recover steel framing that would historically have been landfilled, while in Wollongong the legacy of the steelworks era still informs how local tradespeople approach reclaimed metal. The Pallas team leaned into that same ethic of careful triage, choosing tubes, clamps and base jacks with enough structural memory to support a festival crowd without compromising safety.

Transport was deliberately kept short. Rather than shipping scaffolding across Germany from distant industrial zones, organisers concentrated on sites within a 60-kilometre radius of Berlin. That decision cut the embedded emissions of the material enormously, a calculation that mirrors how Australian festivals increasingly measure the carbon footprint of stage builds, sound rigs and even bar furniture.

Designing with modular limbs

Designing the bar meant confronting the peculiar geometry of scaffolding. Standard tubes are 48 millimetres in diameter and come in fixed lengths, so the design team had to work within that rhythm rather than against it. Drafters mapped out a counter that ran the length of a central plaza, with vertical posts doubling as structural columns and serving as mounts for pendant lighting and signage. The result feels architectural rather than improvised, even though every element began life as a generic construction component.

Holding the structure together was a layered brief. Beyond stability, the bar needed to channel foot traffic, accommodate point-of-sale systems and provide enough under-counter storage for kegs and mixers. Designers used the scaffolding's grid to integrate cable trays and service runs, a trick familiar to anyone who has watched the recent wave of Brisbane warehouse conversions where exposed services become part of the décor.

The acoustic properties of the metal also became a feature. Unlike a timber bar that absorbs sound, scaffolding radiates the low frequencies from the nearby main stage back into the dance floor. That feedback shaped the bar's location on the festival map, placed just far enough from the subs that conversation remained possible, yet close enough that the bar felt plugged into the music.

From yard to workshop

Once sourcing was complete, frames moved to a workshop on the outskirts of the city, where a small team of fabricators spent weeks transforming raw stock into finished furniture. Tubes were cut, ground, degreased and sanded before being repainted in matte black with high-visibility yellow accents that echo traditional scaffolding markings. New connectors were fabricated only where the originals had fatigued, and even those replacements were designed to be reversible, allowing the bar to return to circulation after the festival closed.

The fabrication process owed a debt to Australian steelworker traditions. In Adelaide and Whyalla, generations of tradespeople have built reputations on the ability to coax new life from old materials, and that culture of careful repair shaped the workshop rhythm in Berlin. Each clamp was inspected, each weld tested, and any component that failed inspection was either refurbished or recycled into the broader material stream rather than discarded.

The finished bar was then broken down into transportable modules and loaded onto a fleet of low-emission trucks for the short drive back into central Berlin. By keeping assembly modular, the team ensured that installation at the venue would be quick, quiet and largely free of the diesel generators that typically accompany festival builds.

Living inside E-Werk

Installation at E-Werk was choreographed like a stage production. Crews worked overnight to position the central spine, anchoring it to the historic floor using a combination of base plates and ballast that avoided drilling into the protected brickwork. Lighting designers threaded programmable LED filaments through the scaffolding cells, turning the bar into a softly glowing artery during the dark hours of the festival. By daylight, the structure read almost like an industrial sculpture against the soaring ceilings of the former turbine hall.

The adaptive reuse of E-Werk itself frames the project. Comparable venues in Australia, such as Sydney's Carriageworks and Melbourne's The Forum, have demonstrated how heritage industrial spaces can host contemporary culture without erasing their history. The Pallas bar sits inside that lineage, but it pushes the idea further by being temporary and fully demountable. When the festival ends, the scaffolding returns to storage, ready for its next assignment.

Festivalgoers experience the bar as a navigational landmark. The long counter orients the crowd between stages and provides a clear reference point when phones run out of battery and maps lose relevance. It also functions as a distribution node for water stations, cloakrooms and information desks, knitting together the operational fabric of the festival. Visitors can explore more about the festival's broader programme and digital extensions through the NFT exhibition details, which ties the bar's physical materiality to the festival's online presence.

A social spine for the dance floor

The cultural significance of the bar reaches well beyond the practical. Across the world, bars serve as the social hinge of any gathering, from neighbourhood pubs in Carlton to late-night clubs in Kreuzberg. Pallas leaned into that truth by treating the central bar as a destination in its own right. Programmers scheduled bartender residencies, small label showcases and poetry readings along the counter, turning drink service into a quieter counterpoint to the main-stage intensity.

That focus on intimate exchange mirrors a broader shift in Australian club culture, where venues from Adelaide to Perth have experimented with hosting everything from book launches to community dance workshops in their bar spaces. Some of those grassroots initiatives, like the wedding dance lessons gaining traction in regional communities, show how the same social rituals of celebration keep reshaping what bars mean to the people who use them.

The central bar at Pallas ultimately embodies a quiet argument: that festival infrastructure does not have to be wasteful, that industrial materials can be borrowed rather than bought new, and that the most basic amenities, a place to stand, to order a drink, to wait for a friend, deserve the same design care as the headline acts. Visitors walk away carrying a stubborn memory of steel tubes that once braced a Berlin facade and now brace a night of music instead.