Burning Man Temple - design for fabrication
Its that time of year again! So, to celebrate the time of Burning Man we’re highlighting the project we helped with last year, The Temple of Togetherness - which was last year’s Temple design.
As highly experienced DFMA specialists, we worked with the Temple Crew to help them realize a complicated design feature for the structure.
Image from the Temple of Together website
The design team had created a sketch of these hands (seen in the image above) that were to be the entry point of the Temple. We were brought in to help define the design with a path to a straightforward fabrication of the piece. Many constraints surround a piece like this: limited budget, materials and build power all had to go into consideration of how this was to be fabricated.
The Temple needs to burn, so it needs to be made of material that will burn cleanly and not create toxins. The budget is limited and the fabrication team is made of volunteers. So this needs to be cheap, easy and beautiful!
So our team realized this design into easy to assemble parts that could be cut on a CNC machine, labeled and assembled like a kit of parts. With an internal waffle like structure and and external cladding.
The assembly team did great - assembling these large parts before going to the dessert so there would be less work to do onsite.
On site, at the event, the assembly went smoothly.
Around the temple were also a ton of lanterns with small LEDs in them to illuminate the structure at night. We used our capable CNC machine - ZUND - with a knife cutting blade to process through all the needed fabric, cutting it into the shapes to become the lanterns…
You can see both the hands and all the lanterns surrounding the structure in this image below. Its a monumental piece to go up in a week by a team of volunteers in the middle of the desert!
Image by Rand Larson
And finally a beautiful sunset shot of the hands entry and temple. Again you can see all the lanterns surrounding and adorning the structure. The end result was a beautiful piece of art and architecture created for the event.
For more detailed information about the DFMA process, see our project page on the Temple.
Image by Chayna Girling