In 2026 Foo Fighters toured the biggest stage the band has ever used: 197 feet wide and 65 feet high. Production manager Eric “Ski” Piontkowski brought in Wonder Works to lead technical design and coordination, turning Dan Hadley and Paul “Arlo” Guthrie’s creative vision into a repeatable touring system.
The defining element is nine custom curved aluminium lighting ribs, fabricated by Atlanta Rigging Services. Each begins offstage and sweeps behind the band in a wide arc.
And they sit permanently in front of the iMag and upstage LED screens.
Blocking your own video wall is the interesting decision
Stadium production has spent twenty years making LED screens bigger, flatter and less interrupted. Putting nine structural beams across the front of one inverts that, and Jeremy Lloyd, Director at Wonder Works, is clear that this is the point:
“The lighting ribs are unlike anything we’ve done before – nine curved beams wrapping the stage, sitting in front of the screen and breaking up the video wall. That’s what gives the show its unique identity and layered look.”
The phrase to notice is “breaking up.” An unbroken video wall is a flat image plane — it reads as a screen, and a screen has no depth regardless of what is on it. Put physical structure in front of it and the screen becomes a background in a three-dimensional space: the ribs occlude it, cast shadows on it, catch its light, and establish a near plane for the eye to measure the far one against.
That is the same reason a theatre set has depth and a projection does not, and it is a straightforwardly sculptural argument applied at 197 feet. It also costs you screen area, which is why almost nobody does it.
The factory aesthetic, and the deliberate downshift
The stage roof header carries a band of factory windows with distressed metalwork and rusted, smashed-glass detailing. At key moments, matching floor window pieces are rolled in and PAR Can trusses lowered, stripping the show back to a harder, more vintage rock look.
Building a stadium show that can deliberately become smaller is a real design choice rather than a saving. The intended contrast is stadium-scale production that can still feel raw — and the mechanism is honest: PAR cans are a 1970s fixture, they do essentially one thing, and lowering a truss of them in front of everything else is a visible renunciation of the rig you just spent two hours demonstrating.
Nine custom lighting pods, also fabricated by ARS, hang above the stage, each carrying moving lights, LED strobes and fascia panels finished to match the set. After the stripped-back PAR Can section, the pods introduce movement and transform the architecture inside the performance area for the remainder of the show.
The identity extends into the audience: matching pods on the delay towers, fabricated by PRG, wrapping the top of each tower and hinging together for protection in transit.
The hard part is that the roof keeps changing
Here is the engineering story underneath the design story.
Across the European and North American legs the tour moves between Stageco and G2 Structures roofs — different dimensions, which change the length of the lighting ribs and the position of the PA wings. Wonder Works managed the design modifications for each configuration so the visual identity survived venues with different structural footprints. Custom wind bracing for the video screens, lighting ribs and PA, designed and supplied by WowAxis, keeps the structure safe and consistent.
This is the constraint that distinguishes touring design from installation design, and it is almost never visible in the result. A gallery piece is built once for one room. A stadium show is built repeatedly, in different rooms, under different roofs, by different local crews, on a schedule — and the signature element here is a nine-piece curved assembly whose dimensions change between legs. Keeping a shape recognisable while its measurements move is a harder problem than designing the shape.
TPi’s summary is the right one: a production that feels bespoke despite operating inside shared infrastructure.