With Coachella now over, Aaron Betsky questions the value of the festival's temporary sets and large-scale installations, and if the strain that their construction and destruction places on the planet is worth it.

The Coachella Festival is a great place for experimentation, both in music and architecture. The question is whether it means anything.
This year's edition, which featured Kanye West's Easter Sunday marriage of street-born hip hop and gospel traditions, Christine and the Queens channelling her inner Twyla Tharp (badly), Childish Gambino recalling MTV and using the latest computer-mapping technology to make it 3D, and a raft of other old-time riffs combined into dub tracks, also recalled the 1980s moment in architecture carried out not so much with new technology, as with an even more thoughtless insouciance. Architecture, in other words, is still lagging behind music in trying to figure out how to make the familiar new and the new familiar.
Coachella is nothing if not about showing your network you are there
Coachella has set itself apart in recent years by commissioning young firms and artists to create site-specific installations for the two consecutive weekends in April it occupies the former Polo Club grounds in the Indio ? halfway between the resurging mid-century resort of Palm Springs and the grittier agricultural and retirement communities further to the east.
Although there were some holdovers from last year's edition, including most notably Newsubstan...