Temporary structures break through limitations

Eventstar Structures creates extraordinary temporary structures.

Alain Perez, founder and president of Eventstar Structures in Medley, Fla., thrives on imagining what the next project will be for his company, which designs and manufactures large-scale projects that push the limits of what’s been done before.

Alain, who founded the company with partners Jose Gonzalez and sister Belkys Perez, quite possibly inherited a propensity for ingenuity and entrepreneurship from his father, Ignacio Perez. As inventor of a patented special support system for temporary floors, Alain’s father started Fortrex structures, a company specializing in pool covers. Soon after, Alain and his partners launched their tent structures business, Eventstar.

Two years into the venture, in 1999, Eventstar was contracted to install a 12,000-square-foot two-story tent structure for the Super Bowl in Miami, and was given only one month from planning to installation. “The short timeline forced us to fabricate our own structure,” Perez says. “We were ready and willing for the challenge.” Months before, Perez had hired an architect, Ramiro Gonzalez, who designed the structure, and has since been responsible for many of the company’s award-winning designs.

Eventstar became known for its ability to turn around innovative, complex projects within a tight timeline. The company purchases between 500,000 and 800,000 square feet of fabric a year, which is used for tent structures, awnings and specialty fabric structures. Despite the economic challenges of the last few years, Eventstar has been successful, a fact Perez credits to their quality of design and manufacturing and planning practices. “There’s still a demand for specialty projects like the ones we do, but if we didn’t control the entire process ourselves we couldn’t excel,” he says. “It’s the guarantee of the turnaround time that makes the difference for us. When you have an extended chain of vendors, you can’t guarantee that.”

In 2009, the company again expanded its products to include “on-demand” buildings, which are engineered to be temporary or permanent structures with removable hard walls and roofs. They are completely modular, allowing for maximum customizability. The company was asked to design, engineer, manufacture and install a temporary building of this kind for the worldwide launch of Audi A8. The building needed to be capable of holding enormous production weight. The hybrid nature of the structure prompted city officials to require adherence to not only the temporary structure codes but also to permanent structure codes. Ultimately all of this was achieved, and the client was beyond satisfied with the finished product.

That product expansion has led to international growth as well. Besides the United States, Eventstar Structures works in the Caribbean, South America and Central America.