10 Thoughts on Designing and Building at Burning Man
5 min readSep 11, 2018
- ‘Black Rock City’ is ten times more interesting than ‘Burning Man’. Call it a semantic difference, but it makes all the difference. Burning Man is the festival you attend to take selfies with elegant Etsy costumes, trip acid and get your ass spanked. Black Rock City is the more complicated, much harder to explain, physical urban reality of Burning Man. Every camp and project is a new contribution to a new city each year. If Burning Man captures the popular headlines, its Black Rock City — the actual temporary city in the desert — that keeps an ounce of profundity in the whole experience.
- The desert will defeat you, so don’t be too precious with design. If you start by imagining how good the project might look on a design blog, you’re doing it wrong. Delicate projects will either blow away in the first dust storm or be lost forever in the maelstrom of swirling lights. If wind and dust don’t thwart your ideal plans, other things you can’t anticipate probably will. And this is good too. One of the best things about BRC is how the desert conditions have a way of leveling the playing field. Everyone must submit to forces of nature that are beyond their control and this opens up space for experimentation.
- Never muse. In other words, why design things that might also work in the context of an art gallery? The best projects…
