ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVAL

The Aspen Ideas Festival is a week of talk at the end of June on the Aspen Institute’s campus at Aspen Meadows, in Colorado: more than a hundred sessions in each of its two halves, in tents and halls among the aspens, with politicians, judges, scientists, writers and musicians on the stage and the audience walking between them. A forum on health runs in the days before it. It is given by the Aspen Institute, which was born on the same meadow in 1949.

It began with a birthday party for Goethe. Two thousand people came to a tent in a half-empty mining town to hear Albert Schweitzer.

The Goethe Festival

Walter Paepcke made boxes in Chicago, and had taken up the Great Books of Mortimer Adler. In 1945 he found Aspen, a silver town that had lost its silver, and brought Herbert Bayer, late of the Bauhaus, to live there. The two of them imagined a place where thinkers, artists and men of affairs could meet.

In 1949 Paepcke held a twenty-day celebration there of the two hundredth birthday of Goethe, in a tent designed by Eero Saarinen. Albert Schweitzer came, and Ortega y Gasset, Thornton Wilder and Artur Rubinstein, and more than two thousand people to hear them. Out of it came the music festival, which has played every summer since, and the next year the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, founded by the Paepckes with Adler and Robert Hutchins of the University of Chicago.

The Institute’s Executive Seminar wanted a room of its own, and in 1953 Bayer and Fritz Benedict built one on the meadow: two hexagonal seminar rooms, for fifty-two thousand dollars, the first building of a campus Bayer laid out over forty acres in the manner of the Bauhaus. His Grass Mound of 1955 is still there.

The Institute is run from Washington now, but its home is the meadow. In 2005 Walter Isaacson and Elliot Gerson began the Ideas Festival on it, with about a hundred speakers in the first year, Jane Goodall, Toni Morrison and Arthur Schlesinger among them, on the pattern of the Goethe festival of 1949. The Atlantic gave it a hand until 2020.

The Week

The health forum comes first, from a Monday to a Thursday. Then the festival proper, in two halves of four days that share the Sunday between them, with a pass for one or the other and a patron’s pass for the whole ten days.

Each half has more than a hundred sessions: interviews, debates, seminars and workshops in the Benedict Music Tent and the halls and pavilions across the campus, with breakfast, lunch and dinner laid on, walks and yoga in the mornings, and something every evening.

Ideas are meant to leave with the audience. In 2012 Stanley McChrystal was asked on stage whether he believed in the draft, and answered that every young American should serve; a national campaign for a year of service grew from the conversation.

In 2026 it ran from 25 June to 1 July on the theme of independence, for the two hundred and fiftieth year of the Declaration, with Fareed Zakaria as guest curator.

What to Know

It runs from 25 June to 1 July, or near it, in two halves that meet on the middle day. The health forum fills the four days before.

A pass for one half costs about five thousand dollars and includes the meals; the patron’s pass, for all ten days, fifteen thousand. Passes are cheaper until the end of the year before.

A lounge suit, without a tie by day; the campus is under-dressed, and the Court is not.

Aspen has its own airport. Stay at the Meadows itself, which is a hotel, or in the town, a shuttle ride away. It stands at nearly eight thousand feet: drink water, and go easy on the wine the first night.

The mistake is to sit in the tent all day. The sessions are recorded and can be heard afterwards; the walk between them, along the river and past the sculptures, cannot.

The Court

The Aspen Ideas Festival is not the Court’s own. Passes for the second half, which closes it, are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay at the Meadows or in the town, and the table afterward. The Court is in Aspen the week before for the Food and Wine Classic.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.