Tangential Dreams @ Burning Man 2016
Temple @ Burning Man 2018
Fundraising & build-team for Tangential Dreams at Burning Man 2016 which won the prestigious Architizer A+ Award and was featured globally in publications like Dezeen, Vice, and Forbes.
Tangential Dreams — an undulant timber tower designed by French architect Arthur Mamou-Mani—was a celebration of mathematics, teamwork, and free spirit. The climbable 20-foot-high structure comprised a helicoid framework and 1,000 plywood “tangents,” and was designed using a set of algorithmic rules, which Mamou-Mani tested with 3-D models in his London digital-fabrication lab. To realize the project—a winner of one of the festival’s annual arts grants—the architect enlisted students and faculty from his graduate architecture studio at London’s University of Westminster. The crew constructed three modules in a Reno art space before transporting them to the arid site, where they joined the pieces with wooden screws. “The toughest part was assembling in the middle of the desert—we couldn’t go to Walmart for supplies,” says Mamou-Mani. Strong winds and sandstorms posed more obstacles for the team, which worked in shifts to build the 70-mile-per-hour-wind-resistant structure. At night, the tower “became a huge party” as LEDs transformed it into a multicolor beacon of light. In line with Burning Man’s climactic pyrotechnic tradition, the piece became engulfed in a spiraling blaze—“like a 3-D flame”—at the festival’s close.
The 10 Principles of Burning Man
Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey wrote the 10 Principles in 2004 as guidelines for the newly-formed Regional Network. They were crafted not as a dictate of how people should be and act, but as a reflection of the community’s ethos and culture as it had organically developed since the event’s inception.
Radical Inclusion
Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.
Gifting
Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
Decommodification
In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.
Radical Self-reliance
Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on their inner resources. Join the conversation in the 10 Principles blog series. Join the conversation in the 10 Principles blog series.
Radical Self-expression
Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.
Communal Effort
Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.
Civic Responsibility
We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.
Leaving No Trace
Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.
Participation
Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.
Immediacy
Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.