Fred Hutch Obliteride // Somata

When Fred Hutch asked for a place where Obliteride riders could stop, breathe, and say why they show up year after year, the easy answer would have been a tent.

What the design team built instead was Somata — an arched wooden pod engineered to come apart, flat-pack into a stack of panels, and reassemble somewhere new the following weekend. The hardest design decision wasn’t how the structure went up. It was how it would come down.

Starting with a verb, not a shape

Most pavilions begin with a silhouette. Somata began with a requirement: it had to be reusable. Fred Hutch’s Obliteride raises millions each year for cancer research, and a one-weekend installation that ended up in a dumpster would have quietly contradicted everything the event stands for. So the brief carried a built-in tension — make something sculptural and memorable enough to pull people in off a festival lawn, but make it disposable to no one.

“The team saw an opportunity to test redeploy the structure” is how the project was framed internally, and that single goal shaped every choice that followed. Reusability stopped being a sustainability footnote and became the organizing principle of the form.

For a research institution whose work is about thinking past the obvious, the team wanted a structure that was, almost literally, outside the box. The reference points they landed on were borrowed from biology and from each other: a leaf’s branching veins, the cage of a ribcage, and the image of interlocking hands — the everyday human gesture of holding someone up when they need it.

Engineering the handshake

Translating “interlocking hands” into something that can survive a public lawn, get unbolted by a crew, and stand up just as soundly a week later is a structural problem, not a poetic one. That’s where the collaboration earned its keep. Boulder Associates worked alongside structural engineers at Lund Opsahl and builder GLY to develop a hybrid system that does two jobs at once.

“It’s a hybrid of two structural ideas working together,” explains Owen Bower, the structural engineer at Lund Opsahl who helped solve the form. The arched geometry rests on a portal frame — think of it as the ribs — while trapezoidal, stick-reinforced panels stretch between them like the veins of a leaf. The two-by-two reinforcements do the quiet work, stiffening flat plywood into panels strong enough to hold an arch.

The payoff is in the seams. Because the structure is assembled from discrete panels and frames rather than poured or permanently joined, it can be broken down into pieces small enough to flat-pack, move, and rebuild — not once, but year after year. The geometry that reads as a single sculptural gesture is, on closer inspection, a kit of parts.

From a body to a booth

The name does a lot of work. Somata comes from soma, the Greek word for “body,” and the team used it to name both the object and its purpose. In neuroscience, the soma is the cell body of a neuron — the hub that gathers incoming signals and passes them on. The finished pod borrows that logic. Its panels and frame form the cell body; the people who step inside complete the circuit, sending a message from one person to the next: I am here for you. I will fight for you.

“Somata honors the physical side of being human, where mind and experience take shape, and connection begins,” reads the text painted across the installation. In practice, that meant designing for a single, simple human act. Annette Jannotta, Architect and Design Executive at Boulder Associates, describes the goal as a calm, simple space — somewhere a passerby could enter through one opening, share a story about who and why they ride, and leave through another. A wall painted with a heart filled the booth with the answers, one pinned note at a time.